A Secret Revealed

The findings of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists signal the biggest mass incarceration of a minority since the Holocaust

Uighur Muslims, China Uighur Muslims, Uighur Muslims China, Opinion, Indian Express

A muezzin sounds the call to prayer from the roof of a mosque in Kashgar, in China’s far western province of Xinjiang. (File Photo)

Xinjiang is believed to be the setting of many of the stories of the One Thousand and One Nights, like that of Aladdin, who married the princess of China in the end. But a thousand years after Scheherazade, relations between the Uighur autonomous region and Beijing have turned bitter. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (icij.org), which The Indian Express worked with on the Panama Papers (the book by Express investigative journalists Ritu Sarin, P Vaidyanathan Iyer and Jay Mazoomdaar was released this week), has published its report on what is being described as the biggest mass incarceration of a minority since the Holocaust. The ‘China Cables’ explores a story that has made headlines repeatedly since 2017 — the crackdown on over a million Muslim Uighurs in China, mostly in Xinjiang — using leaked documents that reveal a systematic programme to enforce a change of identity on a minority.