Rights Experts Warn against Forced Separation of Uyghur Children in China

News:

On the 26th of September 2023, three UN independent human rights experts reported that there are forced separations and language policies for Uyghur and other minority Muslim children at State-run boarding schools in China’s Xinjiang region, which amounts to forced assimilation into Chinese culture. The three experts said they have received information about the large-scale removal of youngsters from their families, including very young children whose parents are in exile or “interned”/detained. The children are treated as “orphans” by State authorities and placed in full-time boarding schools, pre-schools, or orphanages where Mandarin is almost exclusively used, not the native language that they were raised with. The report is quoted below;

“Uyghur and other minority children in highly regulated and controlled boarding institutions may have little interaction with their parents, extended family or communities for much of their youth. This will inevitably lead to a loss of connection with their families and communities and undermine their ties to their cultural, religious and linguistic identities.”

Comment:

The Ummah of Mohammed (saw) has witnessed the intensified persecution of their fellow brothers and sisters in China for the last 6 years. The first detention camps for Muslims were established in 2017 by the administration of CCP general secretary Xi Jinping. Between 2017 and 2021, operations were led by Chen Quanguo, formerly a CCP Politburo member and the committee secretary who led the region's party committee and government. In a Guardian news interview of a former Muslim woman in one of the ‘re-education camps, she had the following to say about her lived experience over two years;

“How to tell my loved ones that I lived at the mercy of police violence….they wished with us, our bodies and souls… Of men and women whose brains had been thoroughly washed – robots stripped of humanity, zealously enforcing orders…Persuaded that we were enemies to be beaten down – traitors and terrorists – they took away our freedom. One day, one of my classmates, a woman in her 60s, shut her eyes, surely from exhaustion or fear. The teacher gave her a brutal slap. “Think I don’t see you praying? You’ll be punished!” The guards dragged her violently from the room. An hour later, she came back with something she had written: her self-criticism. The teacher made her read it out loud to us. She obeyed, ashen-faced, then sat down again. All she’d done was shut her eyes. They locked us up like animals somewhere away from the rest of the world, out of time: in camps…..hand viciously pushed clippers across my skull, and the other hand snatched away the tufts of hair that fell on my shoulders; I shut my eyes, blurred with tears, thinking my end was near, that I was being readied for the scaffold, the electric chair, drowning. Death lurked in every corner. When the nurses grabbed my arm to “vaccinate” me, I thought they were poisoning me. In reality, they were sterilising us. That was when I understood the method of the camps, the strategy being implemented: not to kill us in cold blood, but to make us slowly disappear. So slowly that no one would notice.”

These words are the few that came out of the horror being lived by the thousands of Muslims in the region. The adults and children are not distinguished in terms of how brutally they are treated. The extermination of people may be a goal of the enemies of Islam, but we must revive the ruling that will protect our oppressed Ummah, as the leaders of the Islamic world betray their trust. The Uyghur should not live in fear another day, and it is the duty of this Ummah to raise voice and action to return the Khilafah (Caliphate) that will remove the oppressors once and for all.

[يُرِيدُونَ أَنْ يُطْفِئُوا نُورَ اللَّهِ بِأَفْوَاهِهِمْ وَيَأْبَى اللَّهُ إِلَّا أَنْ يُتِمَّ نُورَهُ وَلَوْ كَرِهَ الْكَافِرُونَ]

“They want to extinguish the light of Allah with their talk, and Allah refuses all but to complete His light even if the rejecters resent it. They want to extinguish Allah's light with their mouths, but Allah will not allow anything except that His light be perfected, even though the unbelievers detest it.” [At-Tawba: 32]

Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by
Imrana Mohammad
Member of the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir