{"id":1297,"date":"2019-12-22T00:05:04","date_gmt":"2019-12-21T15:05:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/?p=1297"},"modified":"2019-12-22T00:05:04","modified_gmt":"2019-12-21T15:05:04","slug":"scholar-visited-xinjiang-told-the-truth-and-lost-his-job-in-albania","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/2019\/12\/22\/scholar-visited-xinjiang-told-the-truth-and-lost-his-job-in-albania\/","title":{"rendered":"Scholar Visited Xinjiang, Told the Truth\u2014and Lost His Job in Albania"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

https:\/\/bitterwinter.org\/told-the-truth-and-lost-his-job-in-albania\/?fbclid=IwAR2BvRhNvMGdHP0aZmr-6p1NvPtHlcEFUdigh52oWbwbeDPRPwAyjCIXR8E<\/a> 12\/18\/2019MASSIMO INTROVIGNE<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr Olzi Jazexhi accepted the CCP\u2019s invitation to visit the transformation through education camps. He concluded they are jails, not schools. The CCP quickly retaliated.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

by Massimo Introvigne<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Dr
Dr Olzi Jazexhi (from YouTube)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Last week, Arsenal\u2019s football star Mesut \u00d6zil denounced the persecution of Uyghur and other Turkic Muslims in the dreaded transformation through education camps<\/a>. The CCP<\/a> not only threatened Arsenal to cancel its lucrative contracts with China, but invited \u00d6zil to visit the camps<\/a>. \u201cWe welcome Mr. Ozil to come to Xinjiang<\/a> if he has the chance, to take a walk and look around, as long as he has a conscience, is able to distinguish right from wrong and uphold the principles of objectivity and fairness, he will see a different Xinjiang,\u201d Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Presumably, the CCP believes that footballers should be extremely na\u00efve. It is true that thousands of foreign guests have been wined and dined by the CCP in Xinjiang, and some have reported that the transformation through education camps are just nice \u201cschools,\u201d but more than once propaganda backfired.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A spectacular case of CCP propaganda gone wrong is the experience of Dr Olsi Jazexhi, a Canadian historian of Albanian origins who used to be a professor at the  Aleksand\u00ebr Moisiu University in Durr\u00ebs, Albania. Jazexhi is an outspoken critic of the Trump administration and of American influence in Albania. For this reason, he was invited by the Chinese to attend a conference in Xinjiang on August 16\u201324, 2019, with all expenses paid and a field trip to some of the transformation through education camps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jazexhi, as he later reported<\/a>, went there harboring \u201cpositive views regarding China and China\u2019s foreign policy,\u201d and \u201creports that China was building internment camps and persecuting the Uyghurs<\/a> seemed unbelievable\u201d to him. When in Xinjiang, however, Jazexhi was exposed to blatant anti-Uyghur and anti-Muslim propaganda, and \u201cvisited the mass detention centers \u2026 that our Chinese friends call vocational training institutes, but which we saw to be a kind of hell,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In interviews<\/a> and videos posted on YouTube<\/a>, Jazexhi reported that he was greeted in    the Onsu (Wensu) County<\/a> \u201cVocational Training School\u201d (i.e. transformation through education camp<\/a>) in Aksu prefecture<\/a> by Uyghur men and women dancing and singing. \u201cWe understood it was a setup and told our Chinese friends that we hadn\u2019t come for a party \u2026 We wanted to investigate what was going on\u2014who were these people, what crimes had they committed, and why were they being held there.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jazexhi was told that interviewing inmates privately was prohibited. However, he managed to ask the CCP \u201cinstructor\u201d why they were being held there against their will.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c[The instructor] was telling me that it was a vocational school, but when I asked whether they were free to go home, he said, \u2018no, they cannot leave.\u2019\u201d \u201cIn a way, it proved to us these are prisons where these kids are brought against their will.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The inmates who were allowed to speak told the scholar they no longer believe in Islam, only \u201cin science and the Communist Party.\u201d They answered his questions in Chinese. \u201cWhat we understood from visiting these mass detention centers is that [the detainees] are totally prohibited from speaking Uyghur and are forced to speak Chinese all the time, as well as to renounce their religion.\u201d If they want to harbor a hope to go home, Jazexhi concluded, the inmates \u201cmust renounce their Uyghur identity, God, their belief in Islam, their Uyghur language, and instead always speak in Mandarin Chinese and acknowledge the supremacy of the Communist Party.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This happened in late August. Jazexhi was told in Xinjiang that he should not report anything negative about his visit, or else. He ignored the warning, and retaliation came. Albania is one of the founding member states of China-CEEC Cooperation (China-Central and Eastern European Countries), which is part of the CCP\u2019s Belt and Road Initiative. China is extremely influential in Albania<\/a>, and is slowly regaining the position of the country\u2019s first political and economic partner it enjoyed during the bloody Communist regime of Enver Hoxha (1908\u20131985). By December, Jazexhi, a well-known and published scholar, has been told<\/a> that he will not be asked to teach any courses in his Albanian university in the coming semester. No reasons were given, but Jazexhi easily understood why. The long arm of the Chinese dragon had reached out to a university in D\u00fcrres, Albania, to teach Jazexhi and the world that those who refuse to spread the CCP\u2019s fake news will be punished. Protests by Canadian media<\/a> were ignored.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am personally impressed by the story, both because I have documented the intolerable interferences of the CCP abroad in a documentary movie<\/a> and I lived a similar experience. I am a scholar of new religious movements and have studied The Church of Almighty God<\/a>, the most persecuted religious movement in China today. I was invited by the Chinese authorities<\/a> in 2017 to two seminars discussing The Church of Almighty God, with field trips where I and other scholars were allowed to interview \u201creformed ex members,\u201d genuine or otherwise, of the heavily persecuted movement. These were either blatant and not very subtle frauds, or terrorized victims of police mistreatment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just like Jazexhi, I went to China with an open mind and prepared to listen to the Chinese version of the story, but came back fully persuaded that the accusations against The Church of Almighty God were fake news created by the CCP propaganda. I do not receive a salary from any public institution, and the CCP was not able to hit me with the \u201cJazexhi method.\u201d However, both I and like-minded scholars are often at the receiving end of obscure campaigns of defamation, the more so since we started publishing Bitter Winter<\/em>. The CCP is not interested in an open debate about religious liberty<\/a> and human rights<\/a>. It prefers to buy, corrupt, or intimidate. By doing so, however, the CCP shows once again its true colors, and confirms its very evil nature the fake news would try to deny.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

https:\/\/bitterwinter.org\/told-the-truth-and-lost-his-job-in-albania\/?fbclid=IwAR2BvRhNvMGdHP0aZmr-6p1NvPtHlcEFUdigh52oWbwbeDPRPwAyjCIXR8E 12\/18\/2019MASSIMO INTROVIGNE Dr Olzi Jazexhi accepted the CCP\u2019s invitation to visit the transformation through education camps. He concluded they are jails, not schools. The … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[4,5],"class_list":["post-1297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-human-rights","tag-mass-detention"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1297"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1297\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1298,"href":"http:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1297\/revisions\/1298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}