SYDNEY, 25 Sept. - (ANA) - China has built almost 400 internment camps in the Xinjiang region, despite claims from Beijing that the regime’s “re-education” system is winding down. 

 

The network of camps in China’s far west, used to detain Uighurs and other minorities, include 14 that are still under construction, according to the latest satellite imaging obtained by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

 

Rights campaigners are calling for a United Nations investigation into China’s treatment of the country’s Uighur Muslims, following reports of forced sterilisations of women.

 

Beijing has also been accused of overseeing oppressive surveillance, brutal internment camps and physical and psychological torture of ethnic Uighurs, but has denied any wrongdoing.

 

In August 2018, a UN committee heard that a million Muslims were being detained in camps in China’s western Xinjiang region. 

 

The claim by human rights groups followed years of allegations about torture, entire families being disappeared, and “a complete surveillance state” in which Uighurs are made to give DNA and biometric samples, the BBC reports. 

 

And recent reports from the country suggest the persecution is worsening.

 

Uighur women are being fitted with intrauterine contraceptives against their will and coerced into undergoing sterilisation surgeries, according to a newly published study by China scholar Adrian Zenz, an independent contractor with the nonprofit Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington D.C.

 

The German academic says that analysis of official regional data and policy documents, and interviews with former internment camp detainees, shows that ethic minority women have also been made to have injections that stop their periods or cause unusual bleeding consistent with the effects of birth-control drugs, reports The Guardian. 

 

“These findings raise serious concerns as to whether Beijing’s policies in Xinjiang represent, in fundamental respects, what might be characterised as a demographic campaign of genocide” under UN definitions, says Zenz in his study report.  - (ANA) -

 

AB/ANA/25 September 2020 - - -