BEIJING — Turkey has called China’s mass repression of its Uighur Muslim ethnic minority a “great shame for humanity” and has urged the Chinese government to close detention camps estimated to hold a million people, a rare rebuke from a majority-Muslim country. In a strongly worded statement on Saturday, the Turkish Foreign Ministry condemned China’s “reintroduction of concentration camps in the 21st century and the policy of systematic assimilation” in its far western region of Xinjiang as a violation of the “fundamental human rights” of Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims. “It is no longer a secret that more than one million Uighur Turks incurring arbitrary arrests are subjected to torture and political brainwashing in internment camps and prisons,” said the statement from Hami Aksoy, the Foreign Ministry spokesman. He called on the international community and the secretary general of the United Nations to take action to end the “human tragedy.”The statement came in response to a question about recent reports that Abdurehim Heyit, a prominent Uighur folk poet and musician, had died in a Chinese internment camp. According to the Foreign Ministry, Mr. Heyit died while serving the second year of an eight-year prison sentence over one of his songs.

Source: New York Times February 10, 2019 08:39 UTC