security. Among the penalties imposed, there is a penalty of being sent to “re-education in work camps,” an infamous form of punishment. Those who prepared the report indicate that religious control and forced intervention continues to encompass everything. The organization of religious activities, schools, cultural institutions, publishers and even the outlook and personal behavior of the Uyghur people are under control. The central government subjects all imams to a regular evaluation, requests them to carry out “self criticism” sessions, imposing systems of control on the mosques, removing religious teachers and students from schools, controlling literature and poetry to ensure that there are no hostile political signs and seeing every expression of displeasure with Beijing politics as a “separatist tendency”. Such a “tendency” is a capital crime under Chinese law, with the penalty being execution. Muslims who try to carry out their religious lives in a way with which the government and party do not agree are jailed, tortured and sometimes executed. The heaviest penalties are applied to those who are said to be involved in separatist activities.

• Laws regulating how the affairs of ethnic and religious minorities should be managed; these laws are deemed to be state secrets. In this context, the executive director of the Chinese Human Rights Organization, Sharon Hom, has the following to say: “Beijing sees the Uyghur people as a threat to the national and ethnic structure of the Chinese nation”. Details regarding how the two laws, disclosed here for the first time, work are provided in the booklet mentioned above. According to this, even though there is no relation with national security, it is absolutely forbidden to leak any information related to ethnic minorities or religious and political issues, except those that have been specifically permitted.

Below we will give some official quotations and local eyewitness reports that disclose how China acted in the area of religious freedom before September 11, 2001; these have the status of a statutory decree or are disguised as legislation with some technical loopholes:

• Wang Lequan, Regional Communist Party Secretary: “We should increase pressure on religious leaders. We should ensure that they are politically domicile. They should be committed to the homeland with feverish love, support Communist Party leaders and the socialist system, they should be opposed to national separatism and illegal religious activities, they should defend national unity and homeland integrity, and they should be consciously committed to the national laws and policies.

• An Uyghur citizen: “This is a Uyghur school and most of the people working here are Uyghur. However, they are not permitted to talk about religion to their children in their houses nor in their workplaces. Talking about religion in any way is an illegal activity. They won’t even let me talk about religious issues to my own children. How can this be right?”