China Forcing Muslims To Eat Pork, Drink Alcohol As Punishment In Its ‘Re-Education’ Camps

Former inmates in China’s ‘re-education’ camps for Muslims have revealed shocking details of the methods employed by Chinese agencies to make Muslims in the Xinjiang region align with communist ideals and give up their Islamic beliefs, Daily Mail has reported.

According to former inmates, Muslims in the camps are made to eat pork and drink alcohol among other punishments when they refuse to follow orders from the camp authorities. Upto a million Muslims, mainly from the Xinjiang region, are reportedly detained in such camps in China. The Uyghur Muslim population of Xinjiang is about nine million.

The ‘re-education’ camps are the latest measure being employed by the Chinese state to check Islamic extremism and separatist movements in the Muslim dominated Xinjiang province of China.

Eating pork and consuming alcohol are expressly forbidden in Islam and the methods are aimed towards making the inmates give up their religious beliefs. The former inmates have detailed physical and mental torture meted out to the detainees by the authorities to affect ideological changes in them.

China grapples with Islamic terrorism in the Xinjiang province bordering Pakistan and is infamous for employing brutal methods to quell the movements in the area. Radical Uyghur Muslims, native to the Xinjiang, have been known for their sporadic knife attacks in the region.

The detention campaign has reportedly spread across the region with Chinese authorities accused of having ensnared hundreds of thousands of Muslims, and even some foreign nationals, to the camps.

A US commission on China had last month described the program as 'the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today'.

The camps are operated extra-judicially with almost no legal paperwork and aim to reshape the very identities of the Muslim inmates to turn them into compliant citizens.