Uyghurs: internal China of children in "camps for orphans", denounces Amnesty
Uyghur children, sometimes as young as five, are separated from their parents and locked up in camps by the Chinese government, Amnesty International accuses.
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A new report from Amnesty International denounces the violations suffered by Uyghur families in exile and separated from their children who remained in Xinjiang.
The NGO collected testimonies from six Uyghur families who fled to Australia, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey.
All tell of the suffering of separation from their children, sometimes barely five years old and interned in "
camps for orphans
".
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In
a new report published on March 18
, the NGO Amnesty International calls on China to release all Uyghur children held in public orphanages without the consent of their families.
Due to the difficulties for aid workers in gaining access to the Xinjiang region, Amnesty was only able to come into contact with members of the Uyghur community who were forced to leave custody of their children to their relatives after fleeing the country when the Repression began to intensify against this Turkish-speaking and Muslim minority from 2017.
The NGO thus evokes the case of Mihriban Kader and Ablikim Memtinin, forced to flee to Italy in 2016 to escape police harassment.
They left their four children with their parents, but the grandmother was sent to a detention camp while her husband was questioned by the police.
“
Our other relatives did not dare to take care of our children after what had happened to my parents,”
says Mirhiban Kader
in a testimony taken on the BBC website.
They were afraid of being sent to camps in their turn
”.
In November 2019, she and her husband received permission from the Italian government for their children to join them, but the latter were picked up by the police on the way and sent to an orphanage.
"
Forcing China to come out of denial
"
This is an inadmissible violation of children's rights, underlines Cécile Coudriou, president of Amnesty International France at the microphone of
RFI
.
“
The parents find themselves caught in an absolutely terrible dilemma, exiled because they are victims of persecution in Xinjiang as Uyghurs
,” she laments.
They had given their children to relatives, but unfortunately these parents are also in the detention center.
Children should be able to join them.
However, this is not the case
”.
“We haven't heard our daughters' voices for 1,594 days,” Omer, an exiled Uyghur parent, told us.
“My wife and I only cry at night, to try to hide our grief from our other children who are there with us.
»
➡️ https://t.co/jV8YkBUKq1 pic.twitter.com/JNWoRgMBPl
- Amnesty France (@amnestyfrance) March 19, 2021
"
What this report highlights is a particular type of human rights violation which consists in voluntarily preventing families from being reunited, which is contrary to the International Convention on the Rights of the Child
," continues Cécile Coudriou. .
They are forcibly sent to orphanages which are again re-education camps where we try to make them forget their Uyghur culture.
All the conditions are met for
the international community to speak out against China
and force it to come out of this strategy of denial.
This additional violation that we highlight in our report concerning children is unacceptable so the international community must at all costs put maximum pressure on China to allow an impartial and independent investigation to take place in this country.
"
Parents are caught in an absolutely terrible dilemma
Separation of Uyghur families in China: the reaction of Cécile Coudriou, Amnesty International France
According to a
study published in the United States last December
, more than 500,000 people from Chinese ethnic minorities, including Uyghurs, are forcibly employed in the cotton fields, and more than a million are locked in recovery camps. .
China denies these accusations and for its part refers to “
re-education
”
camps
intended to fight terrorism.
► (Re) listen: Repression of the Uyghurs in China: what can the international community do?
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