Coronavirus will ravage Uighur detention camps in China, ethnic leader fears

MUNICH — China’s network of detention camps in Xinjiang province could leave hundreds of thousands of Uighur Muslims vulnerable to a mass outbreak of the coronavirus, international leaders of the repressed community say.

“This is a big worry of ours, because if one virus spreads in the camps, it will be a disaster," Dolkun Isa, president of the World Uighur Congress in Munich, told the Washington Examiner.

The scenario Isa described would blend repression with a public health emergency that has defied containment efforts and embarrassed the Chinese Communist Party. The virus has been detected in Xinjiang, Isa said, but he doesn’t know of any cases yet in the “reeducation camps” where Chinese authorities have detained more than 1 million people.

“China's government must release all the people to home to protect themselves,” Isa said. “If only one virus enters and spreads [in a camp], then all the people will be infected very easily, and it will be a catastrophe. The conditions in the camps are very bad." He described poor food and small rooms with 20 to 30 people in close proximity and using one toilet.

Chinese authorities have justified the crackdown on Uighur Muslims, an ethnic and religious minority in Central Asia, as a necessary counterterrorism policy. The measures include mass detentions, live-in communist monitors who ensure that Uighurs do not give their children traditional Muslim names, and sending ethnic Han Chinese men to share beds with Uighur women whose husbands have been taken away in a policy that Uighur activists have decried as “mass rape.”

“The goal is to ‘Sinicize’ and otherwise exert greater party control over Islam and other religions,” Kelley Currie, the U.S. ambassador to international organizations in Geneva, said last year.

The novel coronavirus reportedly has killed 2,000 people and infected roughly 75,000, the vast majority of whom live in mainland China. Beijing responded by quarantining millions of people in the cities where the virus originated.

Isa, a recipient of the Washington-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation Human Rights Award, surmised that in the event that the virus does appear in the camps, the victims would not receive medical care.

“Zero medical treatment in the camps so far,” he said. “So many people [have] died in the camps because of health issues, because of bad conditions. There’s no medical treatment in the camps.”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/coronavirus-will-ravage-uighur-detention-camps-in-china-ethnic-leader-fears