China Huddling Muslim Uyghurs into Indoctrination Camps
New Delhi Times, 24 September 2018
By NDT Special Bureau – Ensconced in the desert of Western China are the camps set up by the Chinese government. Brand them as ‘transformation’, or ‘concentration’ or ‘indoctrination’ camps as per your political orientation but China projects those as re-education camps. Over past couple of years hundreds of such camps have been built to facilitate the campaign to brainwash hundreds of thousands of Chinese Muslims for weeks or months in what is deemed as the country’s most sweeping internment programs since Mao era.
Here in these camps hundreds of Uighur Muslims are huddled into high-pressure indoctrination program, forced to listen to lectures, learn Chinese, study law, acquire job skills, sing hymns praising the Chinese Communist Party and write “self-criticism” essays to remove the remnants of Islamic thoughts and practices from their psyche. After two months at the camps, trainees are asked to renounce their past lives. Police detention is common for reciting Quranic verses. In addition to mass detentions, intense use of informers and expanded police surveillance through cameras installed in people’s homes make the penetration of everyday life almost really total. China is completely erasing Uyghur identity under the pretext of removing Islamic extremism.
Over decades, China has been restricting Islamic practices in Xinjiang province where more than half of the 2.4 crores population belong to Muslim ethnic minority groups, mostly Uyghurs. Frequent violent anti-government attacks in 2014 propelled President Xi to undertake the drive to turn ethnic Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities into loyal citizens and keen supporters of the party. China is trying to maintain iron-grip on them.
There was international furore over human rights abuses in Xinjiang, but China denied any arbitrary detentions, clarifying to UN panel in Geneva in August that the facilities are not re-education camps but mild corrective institutions that provide job training. When China’s clampdown extended to churches, Trump complained of flagrant human rights violations in China.
China has erroneously set reckless quantitative goals for transformation through education. To meet numerical quotas, officials are indiscriminately sending Uyghurs to the camps. Islam is not banned but narrow limits are dictated for its practice. To quote a party document, “Anyone infected with an ideological ‘virus’ must be swiftly sent for the ‘residential care’ of transformation- through – education classes before illness arises.”
China continues to torment India by supporting Pak terrorists like Masood Azhar. Chinese duplicity is such that when faced with similar terror problem back home, it contrived to lay out in the most elaborate, pre-emptive, and preventive fashion, the largest indoctrination programmes in human history to trample on religious freedom behind the impervious bamboo curtain.
Islam is at crossroads of history. Stuck to 14-century-old outdated doctrines, it is yet to devise ways to live peacefully with other religions. The fundamentalist Muslim nations from Arab land unceasingly propel intense indoctrination ideology that obstructs Muslims integration into the lands of their living. Their rapidly expanding population poses further demographic problem. As some Muslim countries pedal political Islam, peace-loving Muslim faithful are unsettled to live peacefully in secular (India), irreligious (China) political systems or with other religions like Buddhists in Myanmar. When Muslims get uprooted due to social upheaval caused by political Islam, affluent Muslim countries refuse asylum leaving the burden entirely to perpetually accommodative non-Muslim nations.
Blissfully unaware of the dangers from Islamists, Trudeau’s idyllic Canada is unwittingly sitting on the back of the proverbial crocodile that’s slowly and gradually dragging it to the middle of the river. Australia’s PM Julia Gillard showed more smartness and intelligence by putting clear choices before Islamists.
Those seeking Sharia law must leave Australia for other shores within a week because the country regards Islamic fundamentalists as terrorists. Each Mosque will be investigated, outsiders should reorient to Australian ways and not the other way round, learn English not Arabic, believe in Jesus as God and Christian religion, not any other religion and that won’t be communal.
Shorn of its duplicity, Chinese actions appear more pragmatic that India should emulate. India allowed Muslim fundamentalism to spread unchallenged in Kashmir from late 1980s, backed by Arab funding to propagate the most virulent form of Wahabi Islam. It’s never too late to correct our historical blunders.