CHINA (UCAN): Authorities built a public toilet on the site of the demolished Tokul mosque in Suntagh village, Atush city, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in China, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported on August 13.
The destruction of the mosque was one of many demolished in the region as part of a campaign known as Mosque Rectification that began in 2016 which targets Muslim places of worship en masse, RFA said.
A Uyghur neighbourhood committee chief from Suntagh said that the Tokul mosque was demolished in 2018 and in its place a lavatory was built by “Han *(Chinese) comrades.”
He said, “It’s a public toilet … they haven’t opened it yet, but it’s built.” Another resident of Suntagh told RFA that two mosques in the village were demolished in 2019.
The Azna mosque was replaced by a convenience store that sells alcohol and cigarettes, which are frowned upon in Islam.
An official in Hotan city’s Ilchi township said a mosque site is slated for conversion into a garment factory to produce underwear.
An investigation by RFA into the Mosque Rectification campaign found that authorities had demolished nearly 70 per cent of the mosques in the XUAR region.
The radio service quoted another investigation by Agence France-Presse which revealed that at least 45 cemeteries in XUAR were destroyed between 2014 and October 2019.
The sites were later converted into parks and parking lots.
Last year, the Washington-based Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) published a report, titled, Demolishing Faith: The Destruction and Desecration of Uyghurs Mosques and Shrines, which stated that up to 15,000 mosques and shrines in the region were demolished from 2016 to 2019.
According to Qahar Barat, a Uyghur historian, desecration of sacred places is aimed at “spirit breaking.”
China is home to more than 22 million Muslims, including nearly 11 million Uyghurs.
In August 2018, a United Nations committee was informed that up to one million Uyghur Turkic Muslims had been detained in the Xinjiang region to attend “re-education” programmes.
Human rights groups and western governments have catalogued attacks, including forced sterilisation, on Uyghur Muslims. China has denied the allegations.
