Germany cannot accept China’s camps for Uighur Muslims

Germany cannot accept China’s “re-education” camps for Uighur Muslims, said the country’s Foreign Minister Heiko Maas on Tuesday.

Many refer to China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region -- home to many ethnic minority groups, including Turkic Uighur people -- as East Turkestan.

They believe that the Uighur are among a number of Turkic tribes that inhabit the region, and consider it to be part of Central Asia, not China.

Established under the pretext of “political reeducation” for China’s Muslim population, Beijing has amped up its construction of detention camps in the past three months, expanding them by an additional 700,000 square meters, according to satellite imagery.

China’s Muslim incarceration camps have attracted heavy criticism from the international community as Beijing continually denied their existence and repeatedly rejected allegations of abuses against the country’s Uighur minority for years, opting to call them “vocational camps” instead.

Xinjiang region is home to around 10 million Uighurs. The Turkic Muslim group which makes up around 45 percent of the population of Xinjiang, has long accused China’s authorities for cultural, religious and economic discrimination.