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.

Three Uighurs who fled from China to Turkey have described forced abortions and torture by Chinese authorities in the far western Xinjiang region, ahead of giving testimony to a people’s tribunal in London that is investigating if Beijing’s actions against the ethnic Uighurs amount to genocide.
The three witnesses include a woman who said she was forced into an abortion at six and a half months pregnant, a former doctor who spoke of draconian birth control policies, and a former detainee who alleged he was “tortured day and night” by Chinese soldiers while he was imprisoned in the remote border region.
The tribunal, which does not have U.K. government backing, will be chaired by prominent human rights lawyer Geoffrey Nice. The tribunal’s judgment is not binding on any government, organisers hope the process of publicly laying out evidence will compel international action to tackle concerns about alleged abuses in Xinjiang against the Uighurs, a largely Muslim ethnic group.
The tribunal is the latest attempt to hold China accountable for alleged rights abuses against the Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim and ethnic Turkic minorities.

Today Current Affairs Upsc Exam Syllabus & Previous Yearpaper.