Newsweek: The arrest of more than a million Chinese Muslims will double the coronavirus problem

Chinese health authorities are facing severe criticism from home and abroad for their slow and secretive response to the Coronavirus, which the World Health Organization has identified as an emergency.

Chinese health authorities are facing severe criticism from home and abroad for their slow and secretive response to the Coronavirus, which the World Health Organization has identified as an emergency.

The Chinese authorities have waited several weeks before acknowledging the problem and starting to mobilize resources to address one of the worst public health crises in recent years, the authorities have censored online discussions about the virus, imposed restrictions on the freedom of movement of people, and failed to address discrimination against people from Wuhan and Hubei.

In an opinion piece published by Newsweek, author Sophie Richardson explains that the authorities imposed quarantine on Wuhan after 5 million of its 11 million residents had left the city, adding that the expansion of the quarantine area to include about 100 million people could be seen. However, it is an attempt to show that the outbreak was taken seriously.

Early authoritarian treatment by the Chinese government of the virus outbreak, including censorship of the press and reliance on quarantine, notes Sophie, is similar to what is happening in Xinjiang, the northwestern region that contains 13 million Uighurs and other Turkish Muslims, as the authorities created horrible conditions that has made it impossible for anyone outside the region to know what is happening.

International organizations have documented many cases of enforced disappearance, fighting religious freedom and human rights violations committed by the Chinese authorities against the Muslim population for more than two decades, but the arbitrary detention of more than a million people is likely to exacerbate the current fear of the coronavirus.