The Iranian government has recently released 54,000 prisoners temporarily to protect them from the novel Coronavirus.
This move deserves to be respected in the perspective of medical measures and humanitarian considerations.
China, as a country with closest diplomatic ties with Iran, needs to learn from Iranian’s positive actions and must release more than 3 million Uighurs who are being detained in the camps and prisons. Iranian government took this measure even before the outbreak reached its’ prisons. But China, even after many are diagnosed with the disease in Chinese prisons, did not consider to take some measures. It’s worth to our notices that, the prisoners Iran released are the criminals of civil crimes.but the Uighurs in the camps , as Chinese government claimed , are the people who haven’t commit any crimes but who might offend the law in the future and therefore forced to be re-educated. So why China isn’t willing to free them? The government issued the self-protection manual requires people not to go to crowded places. Why don’t the Chinese authorities worry about the safety of 3 million Uighurs detained in the camps?
Since the Wuhan outbreak, the Chinese government has not informed the world of anything about the safety of the people in the camps. The Chinese government is well aware that those camps are the most vulnerable place for the Wuhan outbreak. But China is attempting to appease any tragedy that happens in the camps without of world’s knowledge.
The international community should call on China to release Uighur prisoners as the Iran government did.
The world must remember that, besides 3 million Uighurs in the camps, there are more than one million Uighurs who are serving in the long term prisons, there are around one million Uighur children separated from their parents and sent to state-run orphanages, there are hundreds of thousands of workers like slaves in Chinese inland factories.
Those are the most vulnerable people of Wuhan Virus.
They are pushed forward to the dangers of the virus by the government because they are considered public enemies.
So I call the international community to put this serious issue on their agenda.
Rebiya Kadeer
The leader of the Uyghur National Movement