West is ignoring Uyghurs ‘like they did with Hitler’s concentration camps’
THE WEST’S failure to challenge China on its persecution of the Uyghur minority is akin to the way it ignored Hitler’s concentration camps, Britain’s former anti-semitism tsar said last night.
HARROWING: Detainees guarded by police stand in line at the Tekes County Detention Centre, Xinjiang (Image: AFP via Getty Images)
It follows new evidence showing how authorities in China’s Xinjiang province have interned more than 12 per cent of the 12 million-strong Uyghur population – including women, children and the elderly – in high-security “re-education campuses” since 2014.
It follows new evidence showing how authorities in China’s Xinjiang province have interned more than 12 per cent of the 12 million-strong Uyghur population – including women, children and the elderly – in high-security “re-education campuses” since 2014.
The so-called Xinjiang Police Files, a vast dossier of official documents leaked last week, give a precise idea of the repressive nature of the “re-education” of Uyghurs in the “vocational training centres”.
They include more than 2,800 images of detainees, 300,000 personal records, 23,000 detainee records and detailed instructions for police.
A speech attributed to Police Minister Zhao Kezhi in 2018 revealed President Xi Jinping ordered the expansion of detention centres, citing claims that at least two million people in southern Xinjiang were “seriously influenced by the infiltration of extremist thought”.
Lord Mann, an ex-Labour MP appointed by former PM Theresa May to be her independent adviser on anti-semitism, said that the West is not doing enough to challenge Beijing over its persecution of Uyghurs.
“The world ignored Hitler’s concentration camps and there is a direct parallel to what is going on in Xinjiang today,” he said.
“There are huge concerns but it has been very difficult to obtain hard facts. This was precisely the excuse people gave themselves in the 1930s and 1940s, when they denied the existence of concentration camps and were shocked when they found them.
“If China has nothing to hide, why not allow proper delegations in to inspect?”
Lord Mann, who headed the all-party parliamentary group against anti-semitism while an MP, added: “The West is certainly not doing enough to find out. In the same way that Europe ignored warnings from people like me on the reliance of Russian gas, we now ignore what China is doing at our peril. If China can do it to Uyghurs, where does it end?”
Sir Iain Duncan Smith, who co-founded the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, said the UK is “lagging behind by its refusal to brand China’s action as genocide”.
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