Asianimage 6th April 2021

By Muhammad Khan 

A UK based poet and academic has spoken about Chinese atrocities towards the Uyghur people in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of Western China.

Aziz Isa Elkun is a researcher at SOAS University of London and has lived in the UK for the past 20 years. Members of his family are victims of Chinese aggression including his sister who was held in an internment camp for more than a year. He lives in exile in North London.

According to recent reports, Uyghur Muslims in China are being forced to denounce their faith, while China has destroyed 70 percent of mosques in the Uyghur Autonomous Region. The Uyghurs prefer to call their land ‘Uyghuristan.’

Since 2015, it has been estimated that as many as three million Uyghurs have been detained in so called ‘re-education camps’. These are basically internment camps where mainly Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims are brainwashed and indoctrinated in Communist ideology.

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Cultural erasure This report is supported by a companion website, the Xinjiang Data Project. 24 Sep 2020

What’s the problem?

The Chinese Government has embarked on a systematic and intentional campaign to rewrite the cultural heritage of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). It’s seeking to erode and redefine the culture of the Uyghurs and other Turkic-speaking communities—stripping away any Islamic, transnational or autonomous elements—in order to render those indigenous cultural traditions subservient to the ‘Chinese nation’.

Using satellite imagery, we estimate that approximately 16,000 mosques in Xinjiang (65% of the total) have been destroyed or damaged as a result of government policies, mostly since 2017. An estimated 8,500 have been demolished outright, and, for the most part, the land on which those razed mosques once sat remains vacant. A further 30% of important Islamic sacred sites (shrines, cemeteries and pilgrimage routes, including many protected under Chinese law) have been demolished across Xinjiang, mostly since 2017, and an additional 28% have been damaged or altered in some way.

Alongside other coercive efforts to re-engineer Uyghur social and cultural life by transforming or eliminating Uyghurs’ language, music, homes and even diets,¹ the Chinese Government’s policies are actively erasing and altering key elements of their tangible cultural heritage.

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Aziz Isa Elkun

Research Affiliate at SOAS, University of London
aziz.isaa@gmail.com | www.azizisa.org/en

Since 2014, the Chinese government has started building a massive network of internment camps or “modern high-tech surveillance prisons” across the Uyghur Autonomous Region, and media reported that some of the camps could host up to 10 thousand detainees.1 According to various estimated sources, up to three million Uyghurs and other Turkic people of Chinese citizens were kept illegally in these camps, which was claimed by Chinese authority as “Vocational Education Training Centres” with Chinese characteristics. The existence of such internment camps was first revealed by the Western academics, media, and Human Rights organizations in early spring 2017.

There is no dispute about the urgency of the “Uyghur crisis” today in China. It’s arguably one of the most severe crimes that a country has been openly committing a kind of slow-motion “genocide” against a specific ethnicity on a massive scale since the Second World War.

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