The rare rebuke of the Chinese crackdown by a majority-Muslim country came after reports that a prominent Uighur folk poet had died in detention.
BEIJING — Turkey has called China’s mass repression of its Uighur Muslim ethnic minority a “great shame for humanity” and has urged the Chinese government to close detention camps estimated to hold a million people, a rare rebuke from a majority-Muslim country.
In a strongly worded statement on Saturday, the Turkish Foreign Ministry condemned China’s “reintroduction of concentration camps in the 21st century and the policy of systematic assimilation” in its far western region of Xinjiang as a violation of the “fundamental human rights” of Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims.
“It is no longer a secret that more than one million Uighur Turks incurring arbitrary arrests are subjected to torture and political brainwashing in internment camps and prisons,” said the statement from Hami Aksoy, the Foreign Ministry spokesman. He called on the international community and the secretary general of the United Nations to take action to end the “human tragedy.”
The statement came in response to a question about recent reports that Abdurehim Heyit, a prominent Uighur folk poet and musician, had died in a Chinese internment camp. According to the Foreign Ministry, Mr. Heyit died while serving the second year of an eight-year prison sentence over one of his songs.
In a statement on Sunday, the Chinese Embassy in Turkey called the Turkish Foreign Ministry’s statement a “serious violation of the facts,” defending its actions in Xinjiang as necessary to combat terrorism and extremist ideology.
“Since the 1990s, ‘three forces’ inside and outside China (ethnic separatist forces, religious extremist forces, violent terrorist forces) have planned and organized thousands of violent terrorist incidents in Xinjiang, China, resulting in the injuries and deaths of a large number of innocent people of all ethnic groups,” the statement said.
