Merdan Ghappar, a Uighur Model Lost in China's "Training Centres"

By Admin | 02 September 2020 15:04:29 | 291 | 0

Merdan Ghappar (31) was a model for a fashion brand in China. In December 2019, he has been taken away from his hometown by the officers, as said in order to attend an education centre. The education centre term here is of course quite questionable, since he was a famous skilled model who was doing a professional job. After him being forced to go to the "training centre", more than a month later, somehow he managed to access his phone and send a 4 minutes 38 seconds video of him sitting silently on the bed with his hand being handcuffed to a bed, followed by texts he sent to his family. The messages sent through Chinese chatting application, WeChat, were describing the squalid and unsanitary condition there in the place he was in, and also his experience since the day he was "arrested" until the day he typed those messages.

The families were in touch with him for a few days, until the messages stopped arriving. Nothing has been heard from him ever since. The authorities never provided formal notification of his whereabouts nor the reasons for his continued detention. His family believe that "education and training" is a euphemism for the highly secure re-education camps where more than one million Muslim Uighurs have been detained in recent years, in which China insists are voluntary schools for anti-extremism training. Thousands of Muslim Uighur children have also been separated from their parents, and women have been forcibly subjected to methods of birth control.

This is of course not a training nor voluntary vocational centre.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-53650246

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