de-programming |

According to the communist regime, the repressed Muslims are very happy to be repressed. And the real victim is the government, deceptively insulted by those who defend human rights

Bitter Winter has been among the first to denounce the recent massive wave of repression unleashed against Muslims in the autonomous region of Xinjiang, especially but not solely Uyghurs, which brought more than one million of them (out of a million and a half of prisoners totally) in the nightmare called “re-education” camps. After Bitter Winter, other media began to realize the situation in face of, for example, the ridiculous move by Beijing that – as once more reported by Bitter Winter ‒, having for long time claimed to have closed the forced labor camps, has just admitted of having actually only replaced them with the very worst “re-education” camps, quickly approving a law that authorizes them retrospectively. Among the newspapers that have noticed this scourge are The Guardian in Great Britain, which seems to be taking the Uyghur question serioulsy, and Corriere della Sera in Italy, which on the other hand has managed to find only a slim space for the topic.

Now, though, the regime is trying to sell to the media the idea that those who are very happy with the “re-education” operated in those camps where Muslims are “de-programmed” through psycho-physical violence are the Muslims themselves. The Xinjiang Governor, Shohrat Zakir, said it blatantly during a long interview published on October 16 by Xinhua, the official government press agency. Since the excuse that the regime adopts to justify “de-programming” is the false idea that all Muslim Uyghurs are religious extremists, the line of defense adopted by the Chinese Communist Party insists on this point. Hypocritically calling the prisoners “trained people” because “deprogramming” is often referred to as “training,” perhaps professional, and using an alarming quasi-medical language, Zakir said: “Many trainees have said that they were previously affected by extremist thought […] and now they have realized that life can be so colorful.” In the face of what happens in those camps, the words of Zakir are a cruel joke, but their real purpose is to defend an increasingly unsustainable system internationally. To convince the world, Zakir also refers to the words of an anonymous “trained”, a “repentant”: “I didn’t understand the country’s common language, nor did I know about the laws. I wouldn’t even have known that I had made mistakes. But the government didn’t give me up. It has actively saved and assisted me, giving me free food, accommodation and education. Now I have made great progress in many aspects. I will cherish this opportunity and become a person useful to the country and society.” It seems to read the worst caricatures produced by the most gloomy totalitarianism of the twentieth century: brutally mistreated prisoners who thank their torturers.

An article, truly sarcastic, supporting Zakir, published by the Chinese Communist Party’s newspaper Global Times on October 16th, maintains then that the governor’s is “[…] a positive response to overwhelming Western media reports criticizing China’s policy on Xinjiang,” articles that, according to Shen Guiping, an alleged expert of religions of the Beijing’s Central Institute of Socialism, are made of “thin air” and insolent towards the regional government. In short, the Chinese government that violently tramples human rights every day is the victim and we all should repent.

Marco Respinti

Published, under the same title,
in Bitter Winter: A magazine on religious liberty and human rights in China
(English version), October 18, 2018