World
Uighur Forced Labour China supplying clothes made by enslaved Uighurs to the world
Dhaka, December 11: The Chinese government is forcing people from the minority Uighur community into labour camps. The products produced by these enslaved Muslim Uighur workers, especially cotton clothes, are being supplied to the world market.
The language of the Uighurs in this Turkish Muslim majority area is also their own. Earlier, the area was called the western part of China or the Uighur minority area, but the Chinese government named it Xinjiang.
The Chinese government is trying to strictly control the birth rate of Uighurs, their religion and language.
Many human rights organisations and organisations around the world have protested against the arrest of more than one million Uighurs every year and forced them to work.
China is one of the largest cotton producing countries in the world.
China accounts for 22 percent of the world's cotton, most of which is grown in Xinjiang.
It is said that the majority of Turkish-speaking Uighurs in Xinjiang are being forced to make clothes. And the handmade garments of these persecuted Uighurs are being sold directly or indirectly to various famous multinational clothing companies.
An investigative report by the Wall Street Journal mentions a number of such famous names, such as H&M, Esprit, Adidas, etc. There are also brands like Gap, C&A, Muji, Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein.
"If you have a business relationship with China in the textile industry, you can't be sure that the product you have been delivered is from forced labour or not," said Nathan Rogers, a researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
What is happening in Xinjiang?
According to UN experts and human rights activists, the Chinese government has detained more than a million Uighurs and other minorities in a huge labor camp. These people, whose mother tongue is a different language, are being taught Mandarin Chinese and are forced to take an oath of allegiance to President Xi Jinping. Not only that, these people are being forced to abandon their own religion.
China, however, claims that these people are being given vocational education, so that they can find work and connect with the larger Chinese society.
Nury Turkel, chairman of the Uyghur Human Rights Project in Washington, D.C., said Xinjiang's Uighurs were being detained and harassed for forced labour, so the chances of the garments being produced in the area in exchange for forced labour were high.
The persecution of Uighurs, their segregation from their families, the forced sterilization of Uighur women - there is growing resentment around the world against such inhumane acts in Xinjiang, China.
A total of 180 human rights groups around the world have called on multinational textile marketing companies to stop using textiles and other cotton products forcibly produced by Uighurs in Xinjiang within the next year.
