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Details of an ongoing mass destruction of religious buildings and sites are published by the New York Times, which has commissioned the Australian Institute for Strategic Policy to analyze thousands of satellite images taken several years apart. The photos were taken in northwest China’s Xinjiang province. The province borders Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, and India.
The result is clear. Numerous buildings and religious sites belonging to the Muslim Uighur minority, a Muslim minority in China, have been destroyed.
Reports of retraining camps, where hundreds of thousands of people from different minorities have been placed, as well as forced sterilizations, have caused Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde to express her concern about what is happening in the province and then said that the Swedish government continually discusses developments in Xinjiang with China.
British Chancellor Dominik Raab has gone even further, saying the country could consider imposing sanctions, either through the United Nations or on its own.
https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1309605480067723266
The human rights organization Amnesty estimates that around one million people are separated from their families and locked up in these camps.
China has denied all accusations and claims that Uighurs are treated well and in the same way as other ethnic groups in China.
According to the New York Times, the new images show that around 8,500 mosques in Xinjiang have been demolished since 2017. This means that more than a third of the mosques in the province have been destroyed.
– The images show a campaign of demolition and extinction unparalleled since the Cultural Revolution, says Nathan Ruser, the researcher who led the analysis work.
Another researcher who has studied the destruction, Rian Thum from the University of Nottingham, tells the New York Times that the destruction of the religious sites appears to be part of a planned operation:
– What we see is a real attempt, and as it seems conscious, to destroy places that are important to the Uighurs, and they do it precisely because they are important to the Uighurs, says Rian Thum.
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