The Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP), a Washington-based human rights organization, has released a report stating that the Chinese Communist government has imprisoned thousands of Imams and other Uyghur religious figures in recent years in an attempt to further weaken the influence of Islam in the region. Our correspondent Jia Ao interviewed the report’s author, Peter Irwin, senior administrator of the Uyghur Human Rights Project’s advocacy and communication program, on Monday to ask him to introduce the main contents of the report.
Reporter: The core of this report is a database of thousands of Muslim religious figures such as Turkic imams (imam, meaning a person who leads a congregation in Muslim collective worship) who have been imprisoned since 2014. Can you tell us about the main findings of that?
Erwin: We have compiled a database of thousands of arrested or imprisoned Imams of Turkic origin, mostly Uighurs, some of whom are now under house arrest, a few of whom have been released, and 18 of whom have died while in detention.
Of the thousands of imams, about 40% were sent to prison, and about 30% contain information on the length of their sentences. Of these, 96 percent received sentences of five years or more, while a quarter of them received sentences of 20 years or more.
Reporter: You detail the sources of these data in your report. Can you briefly tell us where they came from and what we need to pay particular attention to?
Erwin: There are four main sources for these data. One is the Xinjiang Victims Database, one is the Uyghur Transitional Justice Database, and one is an overseas Uyghur named Abduweli Ayup, who conducted thousands of interviews with local Uighurs in Turkey to compile a list, and other publicly available information from the Internet, including reports from Radio Free Asia and the U.S. Congress and the Administration’s China Committee (CECC) database of political prisoners.
We are also very careful in our report to remind readers that because access to reliable information in Xinjiang is very difficult and we have had difficulty finding any supporting information or independently corroborated data, this database is a best guess, and there are likely far more imams in custody than that, we just don’t know about them.
“Chart accompanying the Uyghur Human Rights Project report on the occupations of detainees in Xinjiang (Uyghur Human Rights Project)
Reporter: You mentioned that many imams have been put in detention camps or prisons simply for participating in internationally protected daily religious activities. Can you give a few examples of more egregious cases?
Erwin: In most cases, a number of people were imprisoned simply for preaching to minors, practicing Islam, worshiping at home, etc.
There are some more egregious examples cited in this database, such as a cleric who was sentenced to 17 years in prison just for teaching others to worship and listen to a memory card with preaching on it, and another who was sentenced to 25 years in prison just for refusing to hand over the Quran so it could be burned.
Reporter: You talk in your report about how all people of Turkic origin in Xinjiang have come under stricter government control in recent years, so what is so special about the persecution of Muslim clerics by the authorities?
Erwin: First of all, I would like to emphasize that the persecution of Muslims by the authorities has increased significantly in recent years. But for Muslim clerics, who have been experiencing persecution for about three decades, Imams of Turkic origin have long been forced into government-run training institutions to participate in training. If you look at the data, you will see that the authorities’ detention of these clerics began as early as 2014, long before the mass detentions against the general public.
As a result, these clerics were generally persecuted earlier than others, while their sentences were much longer than in previous years. However, they are not terribly surprised by this, as many of them have been under surveillance and control by authorities since as early as the 1990s, and their families have been imprisoned, threatened and harassed.
Imam and others walk out of a mosque in Kashgar, Xinjiang, equipped with surveillance cameras
Reporter: You interviewed some former Xinjiang imams who fled China in previous years. Can you tell us, in the context of their testimonies, how the persecution of Muslim religious figures in Xinjiang in the last decade differs from what happened to them after the 1990s?
Erwin: I think you can look at these persecutions as the Chinese Communist government has been trying to restrict people’s religious freedom. Starting in the 1990s, all imams were required to register with government departments, and such regulations laid the groundwork for later ethnic policies, such as forcing imams to attend training courses where they had to travel to Urumqi or their state capitals for mandatory training. These trainings were not intended to train clerics, but to ensure that they conveyed the voice of the CCP.
You can find this trend starting since the 1990s. At one point the authorities were frustrated by the imams’ non-compliance, and things got worse after the July 5 incident in Urumqi in 2009. By 2014, the government felt so chagrined and intolerant that it began arresting these clerics and sentencing them to prison.
Reporter: How has the persecution of Muslim clerics by the Chinese Communist Party helped us understand the authorities’ attempts to change the social landscape in Xinjiang?
Erwin: The authorities’ persecution of clerics has the same essence as their persecution of intellectuals. As far as I can tell, and from what we’ve concluded through this study, the Communist government is trying to end the intergenerational transmission of religious knowledge among the Uighurs. They are actually trying to end all religious practice among the Uighurs in just one generation. The authorities have their eyes on Uyghur culture and on the objects of Uyghur admiration. Putting them in prison is one of the ways the authorities are further assimilating the Uighurs, which has been a primary goal of the Chinese Communist government in recent years.
Reporter: Thank you for giving me this interview.
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