Featured Image: Foreign Policy

In the past week, a video of a little Uyghur boy being beaten has been circulating around social media. In the video, the boy is being kicked and hit, and in the end, a man is seen putting a lit cigarette in his shirt. This video, as well as many hundreds, are going around while the governments in power remain silent. The crackdown on Uyghurs has been going on since 2014, as they are trying to fight the “war on terror”.

In June of 2019, twenty-two nations submitted a letter criticizing China and its mass incarceration of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. A second letter resurfaced in support of China and its policy, including many Muslim-majority nations such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Qatar, and many more. Quite interestingly, these countries rely heavily on China, but yet dismiss the violations of human rights happening.

China chooses to defend itself and calls these camps “re-education centers” aimed at providing job skills. Outside the camps, Xinjiang is heavily regulated by the government and local officials monitoring their every move. Police checkpoints check for identification while taking photographs and fingerprints that are secured in a database program. Mosques are shut down, men are refrained from keeping beards, and women are forced to take off their hijabs.

So, how severe is this situation? The Chinese Communist Party has reportedly detained between one-million and three-million people and uses torture methods to brainwash them into becoming loyal to the Communist state.

But it doesn’t just stop there: many Uyghurs are reportedly being used as cheap labor for large scale companies. There have been numerous reports of sexual abuse against women, and many more harsh conditions. Detainees in these camps have no contact with the outside world, and a lucky few have been able to escape. According to Vox, this is the largest mass internment of an ethnoreligious minority group since World War II.

The immoral acts committed during the Holocaust still linger and haunt the world. There cannot be another one. 

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 For more information on what is going on in Xinjiang, please visit Human Rights Watch.