According to a US official, China has turned its far-western Xinjiang province into an “open-air jail” for Uigur Muslims, as its Annual Report on the State of Religious Freedoms worldwide was written.
According to Daniel Nadel, Director of the US State Department’s International Religious Freedom Bureau, the Chinese government turned the area into an open-air jail.
China had relied on the incarceration of large numbers of Uighurs in “re-learning” and “forced labour” camps, but its repression has now spread throughout the country, according to Nadel at a press conference in Washington, DC.
“People’s movements are being closely monitored. Minders were assigned to live with Uighurs in order to keep an eye on them, “Nadel said.
The State Department’s annual Religious Freedom Report, which covers religious freedom conditions in hundreds of countries around the world, is mandated by a US Congress Act passed in 1998. In this year’s 2,300-page report, the United States condemned religious discrimination in Iran, Myanmar, Russia, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia.
Nadel said that the US “can not turn a blind eye to the Chinese government’s ongoing crimes against humanity and genocide against Muslim Uighurs and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang.” Nadel said.
In its annual human rights report, the US Department of State concluded that China committed “genocide” against the Uighur people.
At an April meeting, President Joe Biden discussed this issue with other members of the Seven Allied Nations Group.
According to the UN, approximately one million Uighurs have been detained in camps in the region, which China claims are important to teach technical skills and combat hard-line groups.
In February, Foreign Minister Wang Yi described the accusations of abuse as “slanderous assaults” at the United Nations Human Rights Council.
He said that there are 24,000 mosques in the western region and that “simple facts show that genocide, forced labor, or religious persecution have never existed in Xinjiang.”
According to Nadel, Chinese persecution of Muslims is a continuation of previous campaigns against Buddhists in Tibet and elsewhere.
“This can be seen after decades of religious persecution, from Tibetan Buddhists to Christians to Falun Gong practitioners,” he said.
The State Department charged Yu Hui, a senior Communist Party official in China, with “gross human rights abuses” in connection with the unlawful detention of Falun Gong practitioners in connection with the study’s publication.
At a press conference to present the study, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that Iran continues to intimidate, harass, and detain Bahai, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Sunni, and Sufi Muslims.
He claims that Myanmar’s military coup leaders are to blame for ethnic cleansing and other massacres against the Rohingya, the majority of whom are Muslims.
Authorities in Russia continue to intimidate, arrest, and confiscate Jehovah’s witnesses and representatives of Muslim minority groups under the guise of the alleged abuse.
Nigerian courts convict people of blasphemy and sentence them to lengthy jail terms or even death, but no action was taken in response to the military’s 2015 massacre of hundreds of Shia Muslims.
According to Blinken, Saudi Arabia is the only nation in the world without a Christian church, despite having over one million Christians.
Religious freedom, in reality, goes right to the heart of humanity, as he described it as “thinking freely, obeying one’s conscience, changing one’s beliefs if one’s heart and mind lead one to do so, and voicing those beliefs both publicly and privately.”
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