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от на 03/10/2019

Approximately ten million Uyghur are concentrated in Xinjiang province, also known as the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR). It spans some 640,000 square miles, representing about one-sixth of the total land area under the control of the People’s Republic of China.

China has long been intent on exploiting Xinjiang’s vast natural resources — increasing oil extraction and refining, along with coal and natural gas production, among other resources. The province has an estimated twenty-one billion tons of oil reserves; its coal resources represent 40% of China’s total. Thus the repression of the Uyghur takes place simultaneously with the plundering of Xinjiang’s natural resources. But Xinjiang is essential for another reason: it is the hub of the most ambitious infrastructure project in modern history. The Belt and Road initiative runs along the old Silk Road and will span three continents and cover almost 60 % of the world’s population. It is the vehicle with which China hopes to become the world’s dominant superpower. Thus it is all the more essential to control this critical geopolitical area with an iron hand. The suppression of the Uyghur also has both a direct and indirect benefit. It represses an entire population, and that repression serves as a threat to any other group that would challenge Chinese hegemony. The construction and maintenance of the concentration camps are meant to “re-educate” the rest of China, and indeed the world, at the same time it tortures the Uyghur and extracts all elements of their independence.
Unlike another large group of Muslims in China, the Hui people, Uyghurs are not ethnically or culturally Chinese, but rather Turkish — this makes them specifically open to persecution on the basis not only of religion but also of race. Their culture and language (an Asian Turkic language similar to Uzbek) have been degraded, and they occupy the lowest rungs of the social and economic hierarchies.
In August 2018, Gay McDougall, a member of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, cited estimates that two million Uighurs and Muslim minorities were forced into “political camps for indoctrination” in the western Xinjiang autonomous region.
Of course, a significant part of “re-education” involves the censoring and imprisonment of Uyghur intellectuals. Their alleged crimes are the standard ones — they are accused of preaching “separatism” and called “two-faced.” “Two-faced” is a term applied by the government to Uyghur cadres who pay lip service to Communist Party rule in the XUAR but secretly push against state policies repressing members of their ethnic group.
Dolkun Isa, president of the exiled World Uighur Congress, has claimed that two million people are detained in “concentration camps” in Xinjiang. The Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) estimates that some 435 intellectuals (mostly students, but also teachers and researchers) have been imprisoned or disappeared. According to the Xinjiang Victims Database, 49 individuals have died in custody or shortly after their release