China is Putting the Minority Muslim Population in Concentration Camps, Accuses US

The United States has accused China of putting more than one million Muslims in ‘concentration camps’, which it has referred to as Beijing’s mass detention of the minority Muslim Uighur and other Muslim groups in China.

The US comment is likely to increase tension with Beijing, which is very sensitive to international criticism, as it has already described the sites as vocational education training centres which run with the aim to stem the threat of Islamic extremism.

On the other hand, detainees have described their experience as horrific, in a Reuters interview some of the detainees said that they are being tortured during interrogation at the camps, had to live in crowded cells and being subjected to a brutal daily regimen of party indoctrination that drove many people to suicide. Some of the facilities are ringed with razor wire and watchtowers.

Randall Schriver, who leads Asia policy at the U.S. Defense Department, has told Pentagon during a broader discussion about China’s military, estimating that the number of detained Muslims could be closer to 3 million citizens, “The (Chinese) Communist Party is using the security forces for mass imprisonment of Chinese Muslims in concentration camps”.

Schriver, who is also an assistant secretary of defence, defended his use of term ‘concentration camps’ normally associated with Nazi Germany as appropriate, under the circumstances. Schriver said, “given what we understand to be the magnitude of the detention, at least a million but likely closer to 3 million citizens out of a population of about 10 million. So a very significant portion of the population, (given) what is happening there, what the goals are of the Chinese government and their own public comments make that a very, I think, appropriate description”.

The US government has weighed sanctions against various senior Chinese officials in Xinjiang, a vast region of China which shares a common border with central Asia and which is home to millions of Uighurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities.

China has warned that it would retaliate in proportion against any US sanctions. The governor of Xinjiang in March directly dismissed comparisons to concentration camps, saying the sites were “same as boarding schools”.

China has made religious practices in Xinjiang as crime, like there is provision for strict punishment for preaching and teaching Muslim texts to children and there is a complete ban on parents who give their children Uighur names. 

Many Journalists and Academics have also documented grid-style police checkpoints across Xinjiang and mass DNA collection centres, which human rights activists have decried martial law type conditions.