On Monday the BBC’s flagship investigative programme, Panorama, revealed the full extent of the repression of Uighurs in ‘re-education centres’ in the Xinjiang region of China. The documentary showed children and adults locked up and left to rot behind miles of razor wire, and went on to explain how a million Muslims are currently held in these conditions. What has happened since the broadcast? The UK government has called on the Chinese government to give to UN officials access to the camps and some news organisations have carried story. And that’s it. As a Muslim woman I am disappointed – to say the least – that this revelation has been played down so much that only a few days later it is already falling off the news agenda.
The suffering of the Uighurs is finally being revealed in full because documents known as ‘the China Cables’ were leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, who shared this information with, among others, the BBC. The documents include a memo instructing camp officials to run these ‘re-education centres’ as, in effect, high security prisons – with punishments to match. The memo was written by Zhu Hailun, a high-ranking official in the Xinjiang Communist Party. He makes it clear there must be no escapes.
In response to Panorama, China’s ambassador to the UK said that the programme was ‘fake news’, and sent a message to Western governments not to interfere in China’s internal affairs.
But this affair must be of concern to us all. This isn’t just a problem for Muslims or the people of China; targeting innocent people and torturing them, is a crime against humanity which affects all of us who believe in freedom.
