Kelly’s Eye
SOMETIMES a new book stops you in your tracks. One such for me is called In The Camps, by an American academic Darren Byler, about China’s persecution of Uyghur Muslims and other minorities in its Xinjiang region.
While reports of atrocities have been seeping out from there for years, Byler’s short, dry tome is all the more aweing for its eyewitness accounts, which require no emotive spin.
The aim of China’s communist leaders is to eradicate the Uyghurs’ religion and ethnicity. Over the past two decades a vast prison system, euphemistically called “re-education” camps, has grown up there to brutally enforce the ruling orthodoxy. Linked to them are a network of factories using cheap forced labour.
According to one witness: “The guards ask: ‘Who provides your daily food?’ The answer is ‘Xi Jinping’ [China’s leader]. If you don’t answer this way then you don’t get fed’.” Tens of thousands are believed to have died in the camps.Torture and brutality are commonplace.
Uyghur women are forced to undergo surgical sterilisation and
IUD (intrauterine device) implantation.There are financial rewards for anyone reporting a violation of family planning regulations.
As many as 70 per cent of children aged up to five live in “Kindness Kindergartens” while their parents are held in prison camps and factories.
The region has become a test bed too for the most chilling and highly developed face recognition systems, via smartphone. Everyone must submit their biometric data to access constant neighbourhood checkpoints, monitored by “People’s Convenience Police Stations” – tyranny refined by the latest cutting-edge technology.
Try telling the Uyghurs that hoary old justification for ID cards: “If you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear.”
If nothing else, investigations like that of Byler’s might give universities and big business here perhaps a brief pause while filling their coffers with Chinese money.
And on the other side of the world from this latest genocide, we meanwhile fixate on personal pronouns, 300-year-old statues that offend our sensibilities, and other such burning injustices...