On March 15, 2023, the United States Institute of Peace reported that Uyghur Women in China are being sent to concentration camps and are not allowed to speak their mother tongue and are denied the choice of whom they want to marry.
An Uyghur Journalist named Gulchehra Hoja discussed the Human Rights situation for the Uyghur Women in the Xinjiang Region of China.
As per Hoja, many of her colleagues were sent to concentration camps. 24 of her family members including her brother and parents were arrested one night. Even Uyghur Children have been ripped away from their families for Chinese Communist Party (CCP) assimilation.
Radio Free Asia reported that Uyghur Women are easy victims for Chinese authorities. A woman named Ayshem Abdullah has been serving sentence in jail for sending her three children to a local home-based religious school.
The 62-year-old Abdullah thought she was doing the best for her two daughters and one son by ensuring that they received Islamic Religious instruction in keeping their Muslim identity in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region.
A security chief from Qarayagach (her native village) said that Abdullah was jailed in 2017 for a period of 21 years (seven years for each child) in the Baykol Women’s Prison in Ghujila city.
Nurgul Sawut, the chairperson of Uyghur Freedom Forum (Australia) in an interview with Organiser Weekly, dated November 10, 2022, said that, “The moment when someone makes a dialogue and delivers a speech, they are expressing their personal views on a subject related to their social injustice or unfair treatment, they are arrested and put behind bars.”
She further said that “On October 21, 1949, the Peoples Liberation Army invaded their territory and forty thousand were killed in one go. After six decades, the condition remains the same. In 2014, China decided to introduce a second generation called the Ethnic Minority Policy which pretty much took away what it promised for our minorities.”
She continued “The Chinese systematic approach is to destroy our society. First, they made attempts to change our way of living and secondly, then all our intellectuals and elders were targeted.”
“In doing so, Xi Jinping comes up with brilliant ideas such as ‘The final Resolution’ There are thousands of camps in the region and three million people are kept in these camps. There is a clear indication that people are exposed to slave labour, and torture and subjected to biological experiments and organ harvesting” she said.
In addition, she explained that “women in these camps are exposed to sexual abuse and torture. There is a lack of food and they are not receiving any medical support. The Children are hardest hit because they do not have enough nutrition and vegetable-balanced nutrients.”
Further, she mentioned that “We are working in different areas such as human rights, education, cultural revival, and linguistics. If you merge all of them, we have more than 150 organisations and two million people if we focus on Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Europe, North America, and Oceania.”
As far as sovereignty is concerned, she said: “When we talk of sovereignty and freedom of our land, we refer to the territory taken by the CCP since October 21, 1949. We are not referring to the Uyghur Population living in Kazakhstan or former USSR territory,” she said.
She stated that “the 9/11 incident was a turning point. In the anti-terrorism campaign, Uyghurs were recognised as terrorists. The entire Islamic World erupted for one copy of the Quran was burnt in Norway. In our homeland, tens of thousands of Quran copies were burnt. Some were even thrown into toilets. All our praying mats and Islamic Decorations were snatched.”
She further stated that “Xi has got his highest possible power and there are no more challenges in his way for five more years, but that does not mean that we accept defeat and watch our people die. We will support our people from outside China and probably inside too, because their people are speaking up, resisting Xi, his extreme ultra power and controlling attitude.”
In the end, she said that no one can predict what will happen in the next five years, but our five years will be very grim and we will continue to fight for our rights.
