“Never again” ;  These are the words the world promised to live up to after the Jewish Holocaust during World War II. Unfortunately, the world is standing idly on the sidelines, watching, as a set of similar events take place. 

China has been detaining Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, China, where according to U.S. government and human rights organizations, 10 percent of the Uighur population is locked up. The purpose of these “Vocational and Education Training Centers”, as the Chinese government labels them, is to target extremism, terror and separatism.  The Chinese Communist Party believes that by brainwashing the Uighur population in the center, they are in turn preventing future terrorism. According to Chinese officials, Muslim detainees are taught Mandarin, Chinese law, vocational skills, professional skills and life skills. In order to be released from these centers, individuals must pass an exam that assesses language skills, de-radicalization,vocational skills and knowledge of Chinese regulations and law. However, Dennis Wilder, former National Security Council Director for China and former CIA Deputy Assistant Director for East Asia and the Pacific, asserts that training centers’ true purpose is to crush “the Muslim culture, the Uighur culture – getting people to feel much more bonded to the Communist Party than to their own religious beliefs [...]  this is a war against separatism [...]and they’re going to use whatever techniques they need to make sure they suppress this”.

 Dennis Wilder is not the only one with this perspective. The director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, an advocacy organization in Washington D.C., has emphasized that the centers are concentration camps with the goal of wiping out Uighurian culture, as they are forcing Muslims to renounce their religion, identity and culture. Moreover, Randall Schriver, the Asia Policy Leader at the U.S. Department of Defense, declared that Muslim concentration camps is an appropriate term for the centers due to their magnitude (1-3 million detained out of a population of 10 million Uighurs). 

 Though the Chinese government claims they are only “educating and training” these Muslims, released detainees and reports of the camps tell a very different, disturbing story. When Omar Bekali was first detained, he was strapped to a tiger chair, lamping his wrists and ankles, and was interrogated for multiple days. He recounts how within the so-called education centers, he was forced to reject his Islamic beliefs, thank the Communist Party with daily chants and criticize himself and his loved ones. When he refused, he faced solitary confinement and food deprivation. This is similar to reports of other detainees, in additon to reports of beatings, torture, and violent interrogations. Many have also been forced to eat pork and drink alcohol as a way of denouncing their religion. These practices take a toll on Muslim detainees. As Bekali states, “the psychological pressure is enormous, when you have to criticize yourself, denounce your thinking—your own ethnic group...I still think about it every night until the sun rises. I can’t sleep. The thoughts are with me all the time”. 

Those who are released are placed on strict surveillance; the whole Xinjiang area in general is under strict surveillance, so that one wrong move could land an Uighur Muslim back in these concentration camps or worse, prison. Like the concentration camps constructed during the Holocaust, some of these centers are surrounded by razor wire and watch towers. These horrific reports are public, yet not one  world leader or organization has taken any major action.

According to Daniel R. Russel, former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, many governments are turning a blind eye to this issue because countries are not willing to risk the economic benefits they receive from their relationship with China. As an economic and military superpower, China is an adversary resistant to leverage from the outside, as it is one of the major trading partners of many developed nations.  Consequently, many nations do not want retaliation from China. However, the U.S. government has recently begun to take action against these chinese atrocities. In the beginning of October, the U.S.placed sanctions on businesses and organizations that played a role in the campaign to eliminate the Uighur Muslim culture in the Xinjiang region. Despite the U.S. blacklisting 28 Chinese organizations from buying American products, China continues to deny any wrongdoing. 

What the Chinese government describes as a re-education  campaign is, in reality, an ethnic cleansing campaign against the UighurMuslim population. The world witnessed the horrors Jewish people  faced in the concentration camps during World War II, and similar camps are now currently arising in China. World leaders and organizations need to step in before these camps take a turn for the worst and force people to suffer horrible atrocities once again. Action needs to be taken now to ensure history does not repeat itself.