Just look at the pain in that woman's face. It is a look that says, "I am scared. So scared. Scared and alone. Why are they taking a picture of me? What have I done wrong?"
She belongs, or perhaps belonged, to the Uyghur ethnic group, residing in the province of Xinjiang in western China. Her name is Hawagul Tewekkul and she is fifty years old if indeed she is still alive. She was forced to reside in a re-education centre (aka prison) along with thousands of other Uyghurs. By the way there are some 12.8 million Uyghurs in China.
It seems that the idea of these state re-education camps is to teach the inmates to become more Chinese, to reject Islam and to embrace all that is truly Chinese - including Mandarin and modern communism.
Methods employed include bullying, forced sterilisation, physical beatings, rape, sleep-deprivation, electrocution and chanting. Naturally the all-powerful Chinese government downplays the re-education programme, sometimes even denying that these centres exist but that is one big, fat lie.
Records of thousands of Uyghur people consigned to these re-education centres were compiled by the Xinjiang police force. These politically sensitive records should have remained entirely secret but they have successfully been hacked into and this morning the BBC published a well-researched and thorough online exposé - cleverly utilising the hacker's harvest.
Such a brilliant journalistic achievement. It must surely heap extra pressure on the Chinese to come clean about what they are doing to the Uyghur people and to stop repeating their tiresome lies.
Here in Sheffield our universities accommodate a few thousand Chinese students. Undoubtedly, they hail from wealthy families that have benefited hugely from China's economic miracle. But when I consider what their country has done and continues to do to the Uyghur minority, I wonder should those plane loads of students be here at all? Somehow it does not seem right - in spite of the money they obviously bring in.
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/0K94myY
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