The persecution of the Uyghurs is a crime against humanity and the gravest example of a worldwide attack on human rights, according to The Economist.
It is impossible to verify individual accounts of the horrors that have been unfolding over the past three years in Xinjiang as a result of incarcerations, or what the government calls job training and “deradicalization”, it adds:
Foreign journalists who visit the region are kept under intense surveillance, which makes interviews potentially perilous for those they try to talk to. Yet government documents and the accounts of witnesses provide damning evidence that …. the attempt to erase Uyghurs’ distinctive cultural identity and crush their Islamic faith has not only caused immense suffering for the more than one-in-ten Uyghurs who have been sent to the camps, but has also blighted the lives of their hundreds of thousands of children.
As German scholar Adrian Zenz notes in a paper published as The Economist went to press, 880,500 children had been placed in boarding facilities by the end of 2019, an increase of nearly 383,000 since 2017.
Orphaned by the state – How Xinjiang’s gulag tears families apart https://t.co/IrIncwjYgu
— Democracy Digest (@demdigest) October 15, 2020
