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Olsi Jazexhi admits now he was hopelessly naïve.

The Albanian-Canadian historian doubted reports that China systematically repressed its Uyghur Muslim minority, believing the West had concocted the allegations to whip up jihadi fervour against Beijing.

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tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Canadian went to China to debunk reports of anti-Muslim repression, but was 'shocked' by treatment of Uyghurs Back to video

So this August he joined a stage-managed tour for foreign journalists of Xinjiang province, where the minority group is concentrated.

The excursion didn’t quite work out as planned.

Olsi expected to debunk the narrative of widespread human-rights abuses. But in a strange tale of propaganda gone wrong, he instead found himself stunned by “concentration camps” where Muslims were banned from praying, forced to speak Mandarin and held for a year or more of Communist indoctrination.

The whole idea of this visit, from the Chinese authorities’ viewpoint, was for us to sell a fake story to the world

Party officials assumed he would report that nothing was amiss in Xinjiang, but now Olsi is describing what he considers to be a large-scale campaign to wipe out the Uyghurs’ culture, language and religion.