Etnia uigur (Continuación)

Uighur men after prayers at a mosque in the Xinjiang region of China in May. Credit Greg Baker/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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The Chinese government’s campaign of internment in the northwestern region of Xinjiang is extraordinary, by dint of its scale — but also, its contradictions.

Up to 1.5 million people from predominantly Muslim Turkic minorities — Uighurs, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz — have been arbitrarily detained in political re-education camps designed in part to make them renounce their religious beliefs.

At times, the Chinese authorities have portrayed this mass detention campaign as a “strict preventative measure” against violent extremist ideologies. At others, they have called it a benign “vocational training” initiative, comparing detainees to “boarding school students”.

But eyewitnesses — as well as the government’s own documents — reveal that these facilities are prisonlike internment camps that rely on intensive brainwashing procedures and forms of psychological torture.…  Seguir leyendo »

A protester at a rally in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, in support of ethnic Uighur Muslims in China. Uighurs in China are being forced into “re-education” camps for indoctrination. Credit European Pressphoto Agency, via Shutterstock

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One of the darkest episodes of the 20th century was the gulag — the Soviet system of forced labor camps where dissidents were imprisoned in terrible conditions, often to perish. The camps were established by Lenin, expanded by Stalin and finally exposed to the world by the great Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, with his 1973 masterpiece, “The Gulag Archipelago”.

“Thin strands of human lives stretch from island to island of Archipelago”, he wrote, and “it is enough if you don’t freeze in the cold, and if thirst and hunger don’t claw at your insides”.

Today, Russia’s gulags are long gone, as is the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that operated them.…  Seguir leyendo »

La vieja obsesión del Partido Comunista por tener el control absoluto

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China ha creado una amplia red de centros extrajudiciales de confinamiento en la región occidental de Xinjiang, donde se obliga a los uigures y otras minorías musulmanas a renunciar a su cultura y religión, y se les somete a la fuerza a un régimen de reeducación política. Después de mucho tiempo de negar la existencia de este tipo de campos, el gobierno ahora ha decidido referirse a ellos como centros inofensivos de capacitación donde se imparten clases de Derecho, mandarín y destrezas vocacionales, una designación que bien se sabe es un eufemismo falso que emplean con la intención de evitar críticas por los tremendos abusos cometidos en contra de los derechos humanos.…  Seguir leyendo »

Mind Control in China Has a Very Long History

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China has built a vast network of extrajudicial internment camps in the western region of Xinjiang, where Uighurs and other Muslim minorities are made to renounce their culture and religion, and are forcibly subjected to political indoctrination. After long denying the camps’ existence, the government now calls them benign training centers that teach law, Mandarin and vocational skills — a claim that has been exposed as a disingenuous euphemism and an attempt to deflect criticism for gross human rights abuses.

But the camps, especially their ambition to rewire people, reveal a familiar logic that has long defined the Chinese state’s relationship with its public: a paternalistic approach that pathologizes deviant thought and behavior, and then tries to forcefully transform them.…  Seguir leyendo »

An image from undated video footage of Muslims reading from official Chinese language textbooks at a training center in Hotan, in Xinjiang. The Chinese authorities recently acknowledged the existence of a vast network of indoctrination camps. Credit CCTV, via Associated Press Video, via Associated Press

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“Citizens, please remain calm and relax, no one in the re-education camps will starve, be left in the cold, be punished or be forced to work.” With these words, an official from China’s Communist Youth League tried to reassure relatives and friends of members of predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities who had been taken to internment centers. The detainees were “infected by an ideological illness,” the official said, and the camps would “cleanse the virus from their brain.”

When the speech was delivered in October 2017, the camps were unknown even to some of the people they targeted, the roughly 11 million ethnic Uighurs and one million Kazakhs of Xinjiang, a nominally autonomous region in northwestern China.…  Seguir leyendo »