China is secretly building massive prison camps for Muslims where tens of thousands of people are sent for religious ‘re-education’ and forced to consume pork and alcohol
About one million Uighurs, Kazakhs and other minorities have been arbitrarily detained in mass internment camps in China's far west, estimates the UN.
MUSLIMS are being snatched off the street by the Chinese government and forced to eat pork and drink alcohol in "brainwashing" camps, it's been claimed.
The first reports that China was operating a secret system of religious "re-education" camps in the Xinjiang region began to emerge last year.
Many of those sent to the camps are forced to turn their back on their beliefs while being made the praise the country's ruling Communist Party.
The Chinese authorities even have special quotas they must meet as part of the hard-line state's new religious "freedom" crackdown.
Since Spring 2017, hundreds of thousands of Muslims have reportedly been sent to the camps, including some foreign nationals.
However, some put the figure much higher in what a US commission calls “the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today.”
Former inmate Omir Bekali how he is still haunted by his time at his prison camp.
"The psychological pressure is enormous, when you have to criticise yourself, denounce your thinking - your own ethnic group,” said Mr Bekali.
“I still think about it every night, until the sun rises. I can’t sleep. The thoughts are with me all the time.”
About one million Uighurs, Kazakhs and other minorities have been detained in mass internment camps in China's far west, estimates the UN.
As well being forced to disavow their Islamic beliefs in the camps, their children are taken away and placed in state orphanages.
The key to the state's vision in Xinjiang is the assimilation of the Central Asian ethnic minorities into a "modern" lifestyle, claims a new report.
Xinjiang Goverrnor Shohrat Zakir said the authorities were providing people with lessons on Mandarin, Chinese history and laws.
Such training would steer them away from extremism and onto the path toward a "modern life" in which they would feel "confident about the future," he said.
He said the "trainees" are provided with free vocational training in skills geared toward manufacturing, food and service industries.
They are allegedly paid a basic income during the training, in which free food and accommodations are provided.
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Zakir said the training centers were for people "who are influenced by terrorism and extremism, and those suspected of minor criminal offenses."
However, Human Rights Watch believes the system deprived detainees of basic legal protections such as access to lawyers.
Bekali, a Xinjiang-born Kazakh citizen, said he was kept in a cell with 40 people inside a heavily guarded facility.
Before meals, they were told to chant "Thank the party! Thank the motherland!"
During daily mandatory classes, they were told that their people were backward before being "liberated" by the party in the 1950s.
Amnesty International called the Xinhua report an insult to detainees and the families of people who have gone missing in the crackdown.
"No amount of spin can hide the fact that the Chinese authorities are undertaking a campaign of systematic repression,"it said.