Persecution and Oppression of Uighur Women in China

Persecution and Oppression of Uighur Women in China
by Franca Giansoldati
2 Minutes of Reading
Friday 2 February 2024, 09:39 - Last updated: 09:54

There would be hundreds of thousands of Uighur women in China - the Muslim minority - persecuted, arrested over the past ten years. An oppressive and harassing attitude repeatedly denounced by humanitarian organizations with appeals to the international community and various media, often photographing from afar the so-called recovery camps. Many NGOs cry out for genocide. However, the news has always been denied by the Chinese authorities and the evidence has come out with great difficulty and in a fragmented way. This time, however, it is once again a thorough investigation by the international press (in particular from The Guardian) that has published a series of concrete elements that would prove the oppressive situation for the female population of this religious minority.

Several hundred thousand women, from the youngest to the oldest, from 2014 onwards have been arrested and imprisoned in the Xinjiang region. This time it would be the Chinese police files that prove it. Abusive treatments to curb possible risks of separatism and even sterilizations in some cases. An obvious weapon for population control. The sentences were even inflicted on the Uighur octogenarians because they refused to abandon the traditional religious clothing, others instead for having studied the Koran.

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The Chinese police files appeared two years ago and show as a whole what treatment was reserved for Uighur women. Previously there were testimonies that some of them had been subjected to forced sterilization, abortion, sexual violence and marriage by the Chinese government.

Other charges that have brought Chinese Muslim women into correction camps included participation in "illegal religious gatherings". The longest sentence recorded was given to a young woman, Aytila Rozi, 35, sentenced to 20 years for learning to read the Koran while working. The Beijing government has always responded to the charges that women had to be freed from religious oppression.

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