Forced Uighur labour in China: How can companies & shoppers help?

Taking aim at forced labour in China, the United States has enacted a new import ban on products with links to Xinjiang, including cotton, solar panels and tomatoes. The region is a major manufacturing hub that the U.S. says is built on forced labour and the oppression of the Uighur people. According to rights group, this ethnic Muslim minority is experiencing a genocide at the hands of the Chinese government.

China’s Vanishing Muslims: Undercover In The Most Dystopian Place In The World

 

China’s Uighur minority live a dystopian nightmare of constant surveillance and brutal policing. At least one million of them are believed to be living in what the U.N. described as a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy,” while many Uighur children are taken to state-run orphanages where they're indoctrinated into Chinese customs.

Is the world failing the Uighur people?

 

As the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games near, international condemnation of China’s alleged abuses against Uighurs has grown, but human rights groups say it has led to nothing in terms of accountability and change for China’s Muslim minority group.

Last week, a UK-based, independent and unofficial tribunal said human rights abuses against China’s Uighur Muslims amounted to genocide and crimes against humanity. The tribunal’s ruling adds to a long list of previous accusations that include mass internment, forced labour, forced birth control, cultural and religious suppression, and separating children from their families.

EU agrees to sanction China for human rights abuses against Uighurs | DW News

 

The European Union agreed on Monday to sanction China for human rights abuses against the Uighurs, according to press reports from inside the foreign ministers meeting Monday in Brussels.

New evidence of China moving Uighur minority workers in order to uproot communities - BBC News

 

A BBC investigation has found evidence that China’s policy of transferring hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities from north-west Xinjiang to factory jobs far from home is being used to uproot and assimilate the population.

What’s happening with China’s Uighurs? | Start Here

 

Human rights groups say the Chinese are committing horrific crimes against Uighurs.

The United Nations has raised the alarm. The United States and Canada have called it genocide.

But China has repeatedly denied the accusations.

Xinjiang: China's Muslim minorities

 

Beijing has been subjecting the ethnic Uighur minority in the region of Xinjiang to repressions for years. Now, it has grown into a form of cultural warfare that even affects Uighurs in exile. Human rights activists say China is committing genocide.

China reportedly expands Xinjiang Uighur detention camps

Researchers in Australia have identified and mapped more than 380 suspected detention facilities in Xinjiang, that northwestern part of China where the government has interned hundreds of thousands, possibly more than a million, Muslim minorities including the Uighurs.
 

Why more than 1 million Uighurs are being held in camps in China

In Xinjiang province, China, more than 1 million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities are being held in 're-education' camps that the government claims are benign vocational centres teaching useful career skills. But former camp detainees have described them as de facto prisons implementing mass brainwashing and obedience to the Communist party. As more evidence emerges of torture, forced sterilisation of women and other methods of population reduction, should the situation in Xinjiang be termed a genocide? 

New evidence for China's Uighur prison system

China has imprisoned as many as one million Uighurs – a Muslim minority based in the Xinjiang region in the northwest of the country. The Chinese authorities claim that the internment camps are vocational training centers set up to fight extremism and provide Uighurs with valuable skills. But DW and its German media partners NDR, WDR and Süddeutsche Zeitung received a leaked document that contradicts that narrative – and confirms what many have long suspected: that China is imprisoning Uighurs based on little more than their religion and culture.

A Secret Look Inside a Chinese Labor Program for Uighurs | Visual Investigations

China is relocating Uighurs and other Muslim minorities to urban areas as part of a contentious labor program. The Times obtained rare footage taken inside one.

Slovakia accepts three Guantanamo Uighur inmates

In what can be considered a miscarriage of justice the 20 Uighurs imprisoned  at Guantanamo bay Cuba were captured in Afghanistan during the U.S. invasion in October of 2001 none of them were ever accused  or charged with any crime involving terrorism yet they were all held for more than 10 years.  

Three Chinese Muslim Uighurs have been flown to Slovakia from the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, the Slovak interior ministry says.

The three are now in the capital Bratislava, a ministry official told the BBC. None of them are terror suspects, the ministry stressed.

Slovakia - a member of the EU and Nato - also accepted three inmates from Guantanamo in 2010.

The US says all the Uighur prisoners have now been released from Guantanamo.

Since 2001 the prison has housed suspects detained by US forces during operations against al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

"As in the case of the first transport, the persons in this transport have never been suspected nor accused of terrorism. The transport is a follow-up to the agreement of 2009 [with the US]," the Slovak ministry statement said.

The sad reality is that a majority of those still held at Guantanamo bay were captured as part of a bounty offered by the U.S. for any suspected terrorist found in Afghanistan.  80% of them weren't terrorist they were just unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Tiananmen Square Attack Was Jihadi Operation Claims Islamist Group

The Turkestan Islamic Party Saturday released a Uighur-language speech from its leader Abdullah Mansour. He said the Oct. 28 attack, and other jihadi operations by holy warriors, was only the beginning of attacks on Chinese authorities.

An Islamist militant group calling itself the Turkestan Islamic Party said a deadly car crash in Beijing's Tiananmen Square on Oct. 28 was a "jihadi operation" by holy warriors, the SITE monitoring service said.

The service, which tracks Islamist militant statements, said the party had released a Uighur-language audio speech from its leader Abdullah Mansour in which he said such operations by mujahideen, or its holy warriors, were only the beginning of attacks on Chinese authorities.

In the attack, a vehicle ploughed through bystanders on the edge of the capital's Tiananmen Square and burst into flames, killing the three people in the car and two bystanders.

In an eight-minute message, Mansour said Uighur fighters would target even the Great Hall of the People, where the Chinese parliament meets and China's Communist Party holds legislative and ceremonial activities, SITE said.

Given the Chinese Communist governments paranoia about maintaining social stability and cohesion in making this announcement the Turkestan Islamic Party has given the authorities in Beijing another reason to continue its security crackdown on the Uighurs of Xinjiang who are majority Muslim and are related to other ethnic groups in Central Asia rather than the Han Chinese.

China's Uighurs Who are they, and why are they unhappy?

An audacious attack on Beijing's Tiananmen Square has cast attention on the ethnic minority that China often calls terrorists. That label does not apply to most Uighurs.

1: Who are the Uighurs?

The estimated 12 million Uighurs (pronounced "WEE-ghers") are Muslims, living in China's far-western province of Xinjiang. They speak a Turkic language, and feel much greater cultural affinity with nearby Central Asian countries than they do with mainstream China, dominated by ethnically Han people. One of the principal Uighur cities, Kashgar, lies on the historic Silk Road, and for centuries the region earned its livelihood from agriculture and trade. In the early 20th century the Uighurs briefly declared independence, but they have been under full Chinese control since the 1949 revolution. Xinjiang is rich in oil and minerals – resources that have fueled much economic development, though the province remains one of the poorest in China.

2: What are their grievances?

Uighurs complain that the influx of Han settlers over the past 50 years has made them strangers in their own land, where they now make up less than half the population. Most of the good jobs created by economic growth go to Han, not to Uighurs who mainly do menial tasks. Uighurs fear that their culture is being stifled and their Muslim religious practice curtailed as the Chinese government fights to stamp out separatism; young men under age 18 are banned from mosques, for example, and essential school classes are taught in Mandarin, not Uighur. Economic development is all very well, a Uighur trader once told me, but it comes at a price: "They give us bread," he said, "but they take away our hearts."

3: Are further attacks likely?

Angry Uighurs have at times resorted to violence in Xinjiang, though press restrictions make it impossible to verify official accounts. Most incidents appear to involve groups of Uighur men armed with knives, and occasionally explosives, attacking police stations, soldiers, or other symbols of the Chinese state. Dozens have died in some attacks. If police accounts are correct, the Tiananmen incident was the most dramatic attack ever in Beijing. Officials say the eight Uighurs involved were a closely knit group from three families who only started planning their action in September. Such groups are hard to detect and the weapons used – a car, gasoline – cannot be controlled. The success of the attack, and the resulting publicity, may encourage others.