China’s most senior Uighur politician has defended the country’s mass incarceration of Muslims, describing internment camps in the restive Xinjiang region as “education and training centres” that have helped prevent terrorist attacks.
The UN has estimated that about 1m citizens of the Turkic-speaking Uighur ethnicity are being held in concentration camps on China’s central Asian frontier, an internment policy that has been condemned internationally.
But Shohrat Zakir, deputy head of the ruling Communist party in Xinjiang, insisted they were not concentration camps but training centres where students were taught to shun radical Islam, learn Mandarin Chinese, and find work on assembly lines rather than rural farms.
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