Uighurs continue to face atrocities by the “Dragon”

At least 80,000 Uighurs have been transferred from Xinjiang province and subjected to do “forced labour” in factories across China that make goods for dozens of global brands, according to a report from the Canberra-based Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).
The ASPI report identified a network of at least 27 factories in nine Chinese provinces hat have used labourers transferred from re-education centres in Xinjiang.
When confronted, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said, “Those studying in vocational centres have all graduated and are employed with the help of our government. They now live a happy life”.
This is perhaps the next phase of the ongoing crackdown in Xinjiang where more than a million Uighurs have been detained under the guise of “vocational training centres”.
It seems China is not content with oppressing only the living Uighurs. It has been revealed that the Chinese government has also demolished more than 100 Uighur graveyards in what human rights groups described as an escalation of the communist regime’s campaign to destroy the Muslim minority’s culture.
Satellite images show that burial sites in western Xinjiang province have been wiped out with some turned into car parks and playgrounds.
Aziz Isa Elkun, a Uighur poet who fled the region more than 20 years ago and now lives in London, said he had “visited” his father’s grave on Google Earth for nearly two years after he died but one day an updated satellite image showed the cemetery had been replaced with a field.
Sophie Richardson, China Director at Human Rights Watch, said, “Authorities in Beijing and Urumqi don’t seem content tormenting Turkic Muslims alive today; it appears their hostility to that community also extends to the dead”.
Another shocking aspect of the repressive measures in Xinjiang is the harvesting of organs from Uighur Muslims. The China Tribunal, an independent global group initiated by the ‘International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China’ accused China of harvesting organs from prosecuted minority groups.
A lawyer for the Tribunal, Hamid Sabi, claimed that Beijing was taking hearts, kidneys, lungs and skin from minority groups, including Uighur Muslims. He underlined that it involved hundreds of thousands of victims and termed it as one the “worst mass atrocities of the century”.
China has always officially responded by saying that the Xinjiang issue is not about ethnicity, religion or human rights rather it is about fighting violence, terrorism and extremism. However, time and again, reports on human rights violations in the region have validated the contrary. It is high time the suffering of the Uighurs in Xinjiang ended and Chinese leadership was held accountable for injustice.