Tuesday, April 23, 2019

demolishing Uighur culture/history

This is Dilnur.  
She fled Kashgar to Turkey three years ago and has lost touch with her family in Xinjiang.  But she remembers the searches:  “They don’t care if it’s morning or night, they would come in every time they want.” 


  Orphanages have been taking away the children of detainees.  We don’t know how many, but the government says that orphanages like this one held 7,000 children across Kashgar alone last year.  Children are interrogated.  “In the kindergarten they would ask little children ‘Do your parents read the Quran?’”  Dilnur told us.  “My daughter had a classmate who said ‘My mom teaches me the Quran.’  The next day they are gone.”
  The very architecture of Kashgar has been altered to make the city easier to control.  The Old City, a maze-like area of mudbrick homes, has mostly been demolished.  The government said it was for safety and sanitation.  But the rebuilding has also created wider streets that are easier to monitor and patrol.
  This camp is not the only one growing.  These 13 camps in Kashgar have all jumped in size, reaching 1 million square meters last year. https://cn.nytimes.com/china/20190409/xinjiang-china-surveillance-prison/en-us/

No comments:

Post a Comment