China/Uighur news

11-13-18   The Chinese Communist Party wiped out 10,000 accounts over the past three weeks across multiple popular social media services to suppress dissent and enforce the Communist Party line, the South China Morning Post reported on Tuesday....The South China Morning Post quoted a Cyberspace Administration official ominously describing the 10,000 account deletions as just the beginning of “new measures to manage a new industry.”
https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2018/11/13/china-bans-10000-people-social-media-harmful-political-information/
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11-13-18     

-German FM Heiko Maas Photograph: Ayhan Şimşek.  https://www.yenisafak.com/en/news/germany-cannot-accept-chinas-camps-for-uighur-muslims-3466183

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Washington, DC - Uighur activists in the US marked their community's "independence day" with a protest and march in the US capital on Tuesday.  November 12 is the 74th and 85th anniversary of two short-lived Uighur republics, known as East Turkestan, which were established in territory that is now part of China.    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/11/uighurs-marking-independence-day-call-international-181113174136534.html

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-Uighur security personnel patrol near the Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar, a city in northwestern China's Xinjiang region, in 2017.  Xinjiang authorities have detained members of the Uighur ethnic minority, who are largely Muslim, and held them in 

camps the authorities call "education and training centers."

Ng Han Guan/AP

The ethnic Kazakh grew up in the mountains of China's rural Xinjiang region, just miles away from the border with Kazakhstan.  When he was 11 years old his parents died.  A man from his village lured the young orphan to a nearby city with the promise of work and then sold him to a criminal gang of ethnic Uighurs, the predominant ethnic minority in Xinjiang, who managed a network of child thieves throughout China.

"There were a lot of other children who had been kidnapped," Samarkand recalls.  "Most of the others were trained to be pickpockets.  They wanted me to be a beggar, so they injected me with medication that made my legs go numb.  They held me down and broke both of my legs."

Chinese citizen Kayrat Samarkand, pictured in a hotel in Almaty, Kazakhstan, says he was detained in a Chinese re-education camp in his home region of Xinjiang for months. He says he was tortured and finally released after trying to kill himself.

Rob Schmitz/NPR

Samarkand says they took him, newly crippled, to the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou to beg on the streets.  By the time he turned 16, Samarkand says gang leaders had trained him to sell crystal methamphetamine.  That's when police caught him selling drugs, broke up the syndicate and sent him and 40 other kidnapped orphans to a rehabilitation center in the northeastern Chinese city of Tianjin. The police paid for multiple surgeries to help heal Samarkand's legs before sending the boy to a boarding school in Xinjiang.

Now 30, Samarkand walks with a limp and still bears the scars of his youth up and down his legs. He says those Chinese police in Guangzhou were the only people who had helped him after his parents died.

That's why, nearly two decades later, when the police from his home village invited him for a meeting, he went straight to the station to see how he could help.  It was Oct. 19, 2017.

"They sat me down in a tiny room with cameras aimed at me," Samarkand remembers.  "They cuffed me and interrogated me for 72 hours."  https://www.npr.org/2018/11/13/666287509/ex-detainee-describes-torture-in-chinas-xinjiang-re-education-camp