Communist Chinese Government is detaining Uyghur Muslims in Nazi-style concentration camps in Xinjiang region in Central Asia, aiming to assimilate them.
Islamic scholar Mehmet Emincan Yunus Damollam (56), one of the most prominent figures of East Turkistan, was martyred in the concentration camp where he was held.
Damollam, who had been detained several times by Chinese police before, was lastly detained and taken to the concentration camp in February 2016.
The so-called Xinjiang re-education camps, officially called Vocational Education and Training Centers by the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC), are internment camps operated by the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region government and its CPC committee. Human Rights Watch has alleged that they are used to indoctrinate Uyghurs and other Muslims since 2017[2] as part of a "people's war on terror", a policy announced in 2014.
The camps were established under CPC General Secretary Xi Jinping's administration and led by CPC committee secretary, Chen Quanguo. These camps are reportedly operated outside the legal system; many Uyghurs have reportedly been interned without trial and no charges have been levied against them.
Local authorities are reportedly holding hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs in these camps as well as members of other ethnic minority groups, for the stated purpose of countering extremism and terrorism and promoting Sinicization.
As of 2018, it was estimated that Chinese authorities may have detained hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and other ethnic Turkic Muslims, Christians as well as some foreign citizens such as Kazakhstanis, who are being held in these secretive internment camps which are located throughout the region.
In May 2018, US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Randall Schriver said "at least a million but likely closer to three million citizens" were imprisoned in detention centers, which he described as "concentration camps".
In August 2018, a United Nations human rights panel said that it had received many credible reports that 1 million ethnic Uyghurs in China have been held in "re-education camps". There have also been multiple reports by media outlets, politicians and researchers which compared the camps to the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
United Nations ambassadors from 22 nations, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom signed a letter condemning China's mass detention of the Uyghurs and other minority groups, urging the Chinese government to close the camps.
The U.S. President Donald Trump signed in June 2020 the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, which authorizes the imposition of U.S. sanctions against Chinese government officials responsible for re-education camps. (ILKHA)