US envoy calls China’s Muslim internment camps ‘horrific,’ wants probe
TAIPEI, Taiwan — Describing China’s internment of an estimated 1 million Muslims as a “horrific situation,” a U.S. envoy on religion called Tuesday for an independent investigation into the detentions and for the release of those being held.
Sam Brownback, U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, said China has done nothing to assuage concerns from the U.S. and others over the detention of Uighurs, Kazakhs and members of other Muslim minority groups.
“We’ve been putting out very clearly that this is a horrific situation that’s taking place in Xinjiang,” Brownback said in a telephone news conference with reporters, referring to the northwestern region that is home to most Chinese Muslims.
“It is just a very tragic and I think a horrific situation there,” he said.
At the end of a three-day visit to Taiwan, Brownback met with Lee Ching-yu, the wife of Taiwanese pro-democracy activist Lee Ming-che, who is serving a five-year prison sentence in China on charges of subverting state power.
Lee Ming-che’s physical condition has reportedly deteriorated markedly since his 2017 detention and Brownback said the meeting aimed to “try to highlight that and to call on the government of China to release him.”
China last week angrily protested Brownback’s earlier remarks made in Hong Kong that criticized Beijing’s polices toward religious minorities and accused the country of being “at war with faith.”
China’s officially atheist Communist government at first denied the existence of the internment camps in Xinjiang, but now says they are vocational training facilities aimed at countering Muslim radicalism and separatist tendencies.
China says Xinjiang has long been its territory and claims it is bringing prosperity and...