By Jerome A. Cohen

Here's a campaign launched by the Lantos Foundation and Uyghur NGOs. Bravo for their efforts to highlight the stunning, outrageous detention of hundreds of thousands of innocent Uyghurs in Xinjiang. But why is the international academic community largely silent about the current atrocities??? I hope that journalists are silently working to confirm the few reports that are published about what has to be the worst current abuses being committed in China, which says a lot!

Who are the targets of the round-up? What are conditions in the concentration camps like? How long are people being held? What is the content of their “re-education”? What happens to those who are released? How many are transferred to the formal criminal process, either to “residential surveillance at a designated location” or to the regular detention, arrest, indictment, prosecution and punishment after “trials”??? What should be done to alert the world and to mobilize vigorous responses? What are foreign governments doing in public and behind the scenes? I am proud of the U.S. Government’s very recent condemnation of Beijing’s shameful measures. Do the Turkic/Muslim countries feel no special obligation to speak out and act?