China Refused To Air Arsenal Vs Man City Match Over Ozil’s Remark

Chinese state broadcaster CCTV on Sunday pulled from its scheduled Arsenal’s English Premier League match against Manchester City after comments made by Gunners midfielder Mesut Ozil concerning the treatment of Uighur Muslims in China.

Ozil in his post talked about how Muslim brothers are being forced into camps while Chinese men are settled into their families, he talked about how Muslim women are being forced to marry Chinese men and the lack of support for Muslims

He also called out Muslims media that are not broadcasting the events but staying neutral and further went to say they the torture will not be will be remembered but the silence of other Muslims will.

The match was scheduled to be broadcast live on CCTV’s sports channel; however, it was replaced with a prerecorded game between Tottenham and Wolverhampton Wanderers.

Uighurs are a minority group with Turkic in origin, with cultural affiliations to Central and Eastern Asia.

What exactly is happening in China? According to extra. ie, it is believed that more than a million, or one in ten, Uighur people have been interned in Chinese detention camps, although the Chinese government has consistently denied these reports, insisting that the Xinjiang camps conduct voluntary education and training and combat Islamic extremism.

According to the New York Times, the governmental crackdown was sparked in 2014, following an attack carried out by Uighur militants at a train station in Xinjiang, in which over 150 people were stabbed and 31 people sustained fatal injuries.

Classified documents leaked by a leading official within the Chinese Communist Party to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalism in recent days reveal that inmates in the Xinjiang camps are not allowed to leave the detention centers unless they undergo ‘ideological transformation’.

Labeled ‘The China Cables’, the leaked documents include a nine-page memo distributed to those who run the camps two years ago by then deputy-secretary of Xinjiang’s Communist Party and the region’s leading security official Zhu Hailun.

According to the BBC, this memo details instruction to camp managers to run the centers like high-security prisons, enforcing strict discipline and ensuring that detainees do not escape.

The memo orders officials to ‘never allow escapes’; to ‘increase discipline and punishment of behavioral violations’; to ‘promote repentance and confession’; to ‘make remedial Mandarin studies the top priority’; to ‘encourage students to truly transform’; and to ‘ensure full video surveillance coverage of dormitories and classrooms free of blind spots’.

By Kathleen Francisca