China intensifies crackdown on Muslims in Xinjiang

Crackdown on Muslims comes ahead of the Chinese Communist Party conference beginning Oct. 16

China intensifies crackdown on Muslims in Xinjiang

China has intensified a crackdown on Uyghur and Kazakh Muslims with mass arrests and detentions ahead of the national congress of the Chinese Community Party (CCP), says a report.

Over the past few weeks, law enforcers in the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture have carried out a series of arrests of Muslims in preparation for the 20th National Congress of the CCP which begins in Beijing on Oct. 16, reported Bitter Winter, a magazine covering human rights and religious liberty.

Among the dozens of detainees are religious figures and imams who had been arrested and released in the past years.

The crackdown comes as the authorities are implementing a new system of “political re-education.” It involves the detention of inmates for 15 days who are released for a short period and then detained again after 15 days.   

Bitter Winter reported that at first, some Kazakh Muslims found the new system better than the previous one which saw the detainees would disappear for years. However, soon they discovered the new system was more disruptive.

“Farmers cannot normally attend to their fields. Small businesses go bankrupt. Loans are not paid. Periodical separations between husbands and wives lead to tensions and a soaring divorce rate,” the report said.

This situation is now made worse by the Covid-19 lockdowns, which impoverish even the families of those who are not “re-educated” in the detention camps.

Some local Muslims said that as long as people have money, they can escape arrest and detention by bribing police. However, when they don’t have money, they cannot bribe and are forced into “re-education.”

Media reports and rights groups say that the arrests in the Muslim-majority Xinjiang are the government’s response to Muslims who staged widespread protests slamming the detention of their religious leaders.

The authorities arrested several well-known mosque imams and their co-workers in 2018 and handed them lengthy jail terms, from 18-23 years. They have been all members of the Chinese Islamic Association, a state supervisory body for followers of Islam in China.

Uyghur sources told Bitter Winter that since 2014 more than 1,000 imams and other religious figures have been detained in Xinjiang.

The crackdown continues despite China facing global ire for its brutal persecution of the Turkic-origin-Uyghur and other minorities in the region.

Since 2014, the Communist regime has unleashed a systematic, genocidal pogrom to crush Muslim Uyghur and other minorities, a culmination of longstanding Chinese-Uyghur conflict amid an active insurgency, rights groups say.

An estimated one million Muslims, mostly Uyghurs, are detained in secretive detention camps in Xinjiang where they face brutal oppression including forced abortion, forced sterilization, forced birth control, rape, forced labor, torture, internment, brainwashing, and killings.

Western nations including the United States have slammed the persecution of Uyghurs and termed it genocide.

Former UN human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, who visited China this year, released a report on Aug. 30, which accused China of committing “serious human rights violations” against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province, which may amount to “crimes against humanity.”

In his 2020 book Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future, Pope Francis mentioned “poor Uyghurs” as “persecuted people,” triggering a backlash from Chinese authorities.