Report on the humanitarian situation of East Turkestan children

Capital: Urumqi

Area: 1,824,000 square kilometers

Population: 35,000,000

Administration style: Self-administration of China

East Turkestan, which has been under continuous Chinese communist occupation since 1949, is a geographical area where human rights have always been violated and justice has never been achieved. The presence of rich underground and aboveground resources, the location of the most important routes of the historical Silk Road, and being China's gateway to the West, make it important from a geo-economic and geo-strategic perspective. Therefore, East Turkestan has been the center of China's destruction policies for 72 years.

After Mao's Great Leap Forward in 1958-1962 and the Cultural Revolution in 1966-1976, nearly 1,200 concentration camps were opened as of April 2017, and more than 3,000,000 people from East Turkestan have been transferred to these camps without any legal action against them. Considering even having a compass or a tent as sufficient reason to send them to the camps, China disregards human dignity and rights in the camps and commits genocidal crimes such as torture, rape, organ trade, forced labor, etc.

 

As always, women and children are the most affected by this situation. Women have been subjected to systematic abortion and birth control for many years; children are born disabled due to nuclear tests. After two children, all pregnancies are considered “out of quota” and are aborted. The penalty for giving birth outside of quota is either a fine or being sent to a concentration camp. Sometimes both are done. Between 2015 and 2018, fertility dropped by 84%.

In November 2016, the CCP Secretary of East Turkestan, Chen Quanguo, announced that there should be no vacant quotas in existing orphanages and childcare centers, and that the capacity of existing centers should be increased by establishing new centers. The dates of the establishment of the children’s camps coincide with the dates when the opening of the concentration camps for adults in East Turkestan began. In other words, while parents, grandparents and young people in the family were sent to concentration camps, children began to be transferred to children's camps. According to China's Child Protection Law, it is forbidden to forcibly remove children from their relatives to receive state care. In addition, China ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1992, accepting that children should grow up with their families. However, the presence of millions of people transferred to concentration camps and the absence of millions of children from East Turkestan with their families shows that China is not abiding by the said contract.

According to data from the Chinese Ministry of Education, there are a total of 7,778 child-rearing centers in East Turkestan, with 92,200 teachers and 59,400 “special supervisors.” Given the number of employees, it is estimated that there are approximately 2,000,000 children in these centers. The situation in boarding schools is no different. According to 2017 data, 497,800 children, or 40% of all secondary school students in East Turkestan, were placed in boarding schools. The schools and kindergartens, which are not allowed to be visited by independent delegations, are surrounded by barbed wire, fences and cameras, and are under strict police surveillance. Such a practice resembles a concentration camp rather than a children’s center. According to information provided by officials, children in orphanages live like farm animals in an extremely crowded environment, in extremely poor conditions, and behind closed doors. Some children are being transferred to China due to overcrowding, but there is no information about where they will be transferred. Therefore, even if the parents manage to get out of the concentration camp, they never know where their children are.

 

China’s “Being a Family” project, which was launched in 2014 and organized in 2017, is an inhumane method. This project was implemented with more than a million Chinese government employees staying with Muslim families as borders; there have been many cases of harassment and rape, and the same oppression and assimilation applied in the concentration camps has been experienced and continues to occur in the homes of the Muslim people of East Turkestan themselves.

 

According to Article 2 of the UN Convention against Genocide, “forcibly transferring children of any group to another group” is clearly considered a practice of genocide. However, there is almost no child in East Turkestan who has not suffered from this genocide, and the environment in which these children live causes them severe trauma. In addition, changing the identity information of East Turkestan children and putting them up for adoption to Chinese families is China’s assimilation policy. Among the news is that these children are used as subjects in various studies, are killed for organ trade, and are mistreated in various ways.

 

The only and mandatory language in boarding schools and nurseries is Chinese. Children are forbidden to speak their native language, or even try to do so, and are subject to criminal proceedings. Children are taught only Chinese traditions and customs, are served Chinese dishes, including pork, which is forbidden for Muslims to eat, and are tried to make them forget everything about their national and traditional values.

 

Children are also one of the elements of forced labor in East Turkestan. It is reported that children aged 6-7 are forced to work under the scorching sun in cotton fields, vineyards, and even in road works where it is necessary to use pickaxes and shovels. The fact is that the people of East Turkestan have been living under the fragmentation system for many years; they have to send a family member to the interior of China to work as a forced laborer. Under the "labor export program" launched in 2002, young girls and boys aged 14 and above are forcibly sent to work in central and eastern China. There are hundreds of thousands of children like this.

Another threat to children in East Turkestan is that they are being subjected to practices aimed at “extermination,” a crime of genocide recognized by the United Nations. Giving and vaccinating Uyghur, Kazakh and Kyrgyz children from East Turkestan with food and drinks whose nature has not been disclosed is quite suspicious. The fact that these children, who have been raised as “orphans” in China, will never be able to reunite with their real families and will never be able to learn anything about the religion and nationality to which they belong, further illustrates the dire situation. These children are in. China, a member of the UN Human Rights Committee, must fulfill the conditions of membership in the committee to which it belongs and put an end to the cruelty to which children are subjected in the concentration camps as soon as possible.

 

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