UK QUIZ INTO UYGHUR GENOCIDE SAYS 5,567 PEOPLE MISSING IN XINJIANG

Uyghur Muslims are shackled with “tiger chains,” tortured, forcibly sterilized, raped, and live in fear under mass surveillance, an independent London tribunal heard on Friday, as it seeks to assess claims that Beijing is committing genocide in the Xinjiang region, Gabriella Swerling reported for The Telegraph.

The Uyghur Tribunal will hear dozens of testimonies over four days in what campaigners hope will be the most comprehensive public investigation since allegations of abuses against Muslims in China emerged more than three years ago, the evidence includes claims that more than 5,500 people from the Uyghur minority group are currently missing in China.

Beijing has launched an aggressive public relations campaign to counter such accounts and has repeatedly tried to undermine the Uyghur Tribunal, and has recently described the proceedings as a “farce” and a “special machine producing lies.”

The Chinese government has characterized its mass internment of Muslims in the Xinjiang region, where most of the country’s Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minority groups live, as a push to bring destitute people into the “modern, civilized” world.

However, the tribunal is set to hear a range of first-person accounts from alleged victims of forced sterilization and rape, torture, arbitrary detention and arrest, mass surveillance and intimidation, and forced separation of children from their parents.

On the first day of the hearing, the tribunal heard that there are 232 concentration camps, 257 prisons, and 5,567 missing people in Xinjiang, according to the Uyghur Transitional Justice Database (UTJD).

Giving evidence to the hearing, Omir Bekali, one of the first people to speak out publicly about his experience in a re-education camp in China’s Xinjiang region, told how he was tortured and tied up with chains. In his written evidence, he told how a hood was placed over his head and he was taken by a policeman to "a place like a hospital where a full body examination took place while my hood was still on."

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