Uighurs

The Xinjiang province in China’s far west has had a long history of discord between the authorities and the indigenous ethnic Uighur population.
Most Uighurs are Muslim, their language is related to Turkish, and they regard themselves as culturally and ethnically close to Central Asian nations.

Some Uighurs living there refer to the region as East Turkestan and argue that it ought to be independent from China. There have been open calls for separation of Xinjiang from China since the 1990s. Since then, China suppressed any dissent from Uyghur and began placing restrictions on them.
Ethnic tensions caused by economic and cultural factors are considered the root cause of the recent violence. There are complaints of severe restrictions on Islam, with fewer mosques and strict control over religious schools.

Rights activists have said the Xinjiang region is home to a vast network of extrajudicial internment camps that have imprisoned at least one million people, which China has defended as vocational training centres to counter extremism.
Most of the people who have been arbitrarily detained are Uighur.
Human rights organizations, UN officials, and many foreign governments are urging China to stop the crackdown.
But Chinese officials maintain that what they call vocational training centers do not infringe on Uighurs’ human rights. They have refused to share information about the detention centers, and prevented journalists and foreign investigators from examining them.

A report by Washington-based think tank the Center for Global Policy noted that hundreds of thousands of ethnic minority labourers in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region are being forced into picking cotton by hand through a coercive state labour scheme.
According to the report, three majority-Uighur regions within Xinjiang sent at least 5,70,000 people to pick cotton as part of a state-run coercive labour transfer scheme.
Xinjiang is a global hub for the crop, producing over 20% of the world’s cotton.

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