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China has 500+ Uighur camps and prisons and is holding far more than one million, activists say

Xeni Jardin

On Tuesday, advocates for human rights for China’s Uighur minority said they have documented 500 camps and prisons in China run by the government to detain people identified as belonging to that targeted ethnic group.

The activists say that when you add up the number of detention facilities they’ve identified, it means China must be holding a total number of Uighur people that far exceeds the commonly cited figure of one million people.

From AFP via Yahoo News:

The East Turkistan National Awakening Movement, a Washington-based group that seeks independence for the mostly Muslim region known to China as Xinjiang, said it assessed images from Google Earth and found 182 suspected “concentration camps” which it listed by coordinates.

The group, which said it matched its findings with on-the-ground information, said it also spotted 209 suspected prisons and 74 suspected labor camps which it would share later.

“In large part these have not been previously identified, so we could be talking about far greater numbers” of people detained, said Kyle Olbert, the director of operations for the movement.

“If anything, we are concerned that there may be more facilities that we have not been able to identify,” he told a news conference in suburban Washington.

Anders Corr, an analyst who formerly worked in US intelligence and who advised the group, said that around 40 percent of the sites had not been previously reported.

China uses torture and sexual abuse to “forcibly integrate Uighurs into the Han majority, including pressuring Muslims to give up tenets of their faith such as praying and abstaining from pork and alcohol,” the report continues.

Read the full article here.

Follow East Turkistan National Awakening Movement on Twitter.

“Visit NationalAwakening.org/coordinates to download our Google Earth data file detailing China’s Concentration Camps in Occupied East Turkistan (so-called “Xinjiang”).”

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