International Courant
Rights teams’ evaluation of official knowledge from 2009 to 2023 exhibits that the names of about 630 villages in Xinjiang have been modified on this method.
China has “systematically” modified the names of a whole lot of villages with spiritual, historic or cultural significance to Uyghurs to names that resonate with the ideology of the Chinese language Communist Social gathering, in response to a brand new report from Human Rights Watch.
The rights group, which works with Norwegian advocacy group Uyghur Hjelp, mentioned it has recognized 630 villages within the far western area of Xinjiang that had their names modified on this method utilizing knowledge from 2009 to 2023 on the Nationwide Bureau of Statistics’ web site to delete. of China. The commonest substitutions have been Happiness, Unity and Concord.
“Chinese language authorities have modified a whole lot of village names in Xinjiang from names with wealthy which means for Uighurs to names that replicate authorities propaganda,” Maya Wang, performing China director at Human Rights Watch, mentioned in an announcement accompanying the report on Wednesday. “These title modifications seem like a part of the Chinese language authorities’s efforts to erase the cultural and non secular expressions of Uighurs.”
China’s insurance policies in Beijing mentioned the camps have been vocational coaching facilities educating Mandarin and different expertise wanted to sort out “extremism” and stop “terrorism.”
Leaks of official authorities paperworkAnalysis by human rights teams and teachers, in addition to testimony from Uighurs themselves, discovered that Uighurs have been additionally targets of different alleged abuses, from compelled sterilization to household separation and assaults on spiritual beliefs and traditions.
Human Rights Watch’s newest report says that the majority village title modifications befell between 2017 and 2019 – the peak of the crackdown – and that references to Uyghur historical past have been assured, together with the names of the kingdoms, republics and native leaders earlier than the Individuals’s Republic of China. was based in 1949, have been eliminated. Village names have been additionally modified in the event that they contained phrases that steered Uyghur cultural practices, reminiscent of mazar (shrine) and dutar (a two-stringed lute).
One of many examples within the report was the village of Qutpidin Mazar in Kashgar, which was initially named after a shrine of the Thirteenth-century Persian polymath and poet Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi, however turned often called the Rose Flower Village in 2018 . The village of Dutar in Karakax County was renamed the Crimson Flag Village in 2022.
Uyghur Hjelp interviewed eleven Uyghurs residing in villages whose names had been modified, and located that the expertise had had a deep affect on them. One villager informed the group that she struggled to get house after being launched from a re-education camp as a result of the village title she knew was not included within the ticket system. One other villager informed Uyghur Hjelp that he had written a poem and commissioned a tune in reminiscence of the now-lost areas the place he had as soon as lived.
Then-UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet requested entry to Xinjiang when particulars of the reeducation camps first emerged.
In 2022, she was lastly allowed to go to and concluded that “critical human rights violations” had been dedicated and that the dimensions of arbitrary and discriminatory detention of Uyghurs and different primarily Muslim teams… “may represent worldwide crimes, particularly crimes in opposition to humanity ”.
Abduweli Ayup, founding father of Uyghur Hjelp, urged worldwide governments to do extra to place strain on China over the state of affairs in Xinjiang, the place he mentioned a whole lot of 1000’s of Uighur individuals are “unjustly imprisoned.”
“Involved governments and the UN Human Rights Workplace ought to intensify their efforts to carry the Chinese language authorities accountable for his or her abuses within the Uyghur area,” he mentioned within the assertion.
China accused of erasing faith and tradition from Uyghur village names | Uyghur information
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