Chinese Officials Force Muslims to Drink, Eat Pork At Festival
February 06, 2019Residents of the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) told RFA that officials had invited them to celebratory dinners marking the Lunar New Year at which pork was served, then threatening to send them to a “re-education” camp if they refused to take part.
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Photos sent to RFA also showed an official from Ili’s Yining city visiting Muslim households and distributing raw pork, in the name of helping the less well-off on Monday, on the eve of the Year of the Pig.
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An ethnic Kazakh resident of Altay’s Qinggil (in Chinese, Qinghe) county told RFA that the attempts to make Muslims eat pork had begun late last year. “Kazakh people in Xinjiang have never [eaten pork],” the resident said. “Starting last year, some people have been forced to eat pork so they can celebrate a festival belonging to the Han Chinese.”
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“Muslims like us, the Uyghurs, the Hui, and the Kazakhs, don’t do that,” Kesay said. “But people have been sticking up New Year poetic couplets at the doors of Uyghur and Kazakh households, and giving them pork.” “If we won’t put up the couplets or hang lanterns, they they say we are two-faced, and they send us to re-education camps,” she said, adding that officials had begun delivering pork to around 80 percent of Kazakh households in Savan (in Chinese, Shawan) county, since the end of 2018.