BEIJING – A leading American Muslim scholar has denounced China’s discrimination against Uighur Muslims, amid reports that the communist state is heightening the level of torture and persecution against Uighurs for their faith.

“3 million innocent Muslims are in concentration camps in China. Let that sink in. And now we have reports of this. WE CANNOT BE SILENT. #Uighurs,” Omar Suleiman, the president of Yaqueen institute, wrote on Facebook.

“First they denied having 1 million Muslims in internment camps, now they’re justifying them. A million people have disappeared into torture camps and the nations of the world have said barely anything and done absolutely nothing about it. #Uighurs,” he added in a previous post.

The Muslim scholar was referring to  what the BBC termed “political re-education” camps in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region.

According to the Epoch Times, former surgeon Dr. Enver Tohti revealed that he was forced to carry out organ transplant from a life prisoner for profit in 1995.

Speaking to The Epoch Times about the CCP’s escalation of repressive policies for Xinjiang’s ethnic minorities, Tohti said it is his belief that “this [organ harvesting] is still going on.”

“The CCP is stealing their organs,” he said, referring to the ethnic minorities in Xinjiang—mostly Turkic-speaking Uighurs.

When asked why he believes this is the case, Tohti explained: “China can deliver organs on demand. When someone needs an organ, on that day, somebody will die.”

Dr. Enver Tohti, while working as a surgeon in Xinjiang Province, China, personally carried out organ harvesting of Uyghur prisoners. Those techniques were later applied to the Falun Gong prison population, according to testimony. (Li Zi/The Epoch Times)

For a year or more, the Communist Party has feigned bafflement when asked to comment on evidence that it has detained without trial at least several hundred thousand Muslims.

On October 16th it changed tack, abandoning its denials and loudly defending the internments.

Tohti’s comments came as a former Uighur detainee revealed that the CCP is dividing inmates in the facilities into two groups; those with and those without family members abroad.

The BBC has conducted lengthy interviews with eight Uighurs living overseas. One of them, Ablet Tursun Tohti, said he was detained in a camp in Hotan.

A 2018 satellite image showing a camp in Hotan where Ablet says he was detained (Courtesy of BBC)

CCP officials are doing this so they can “escalate their organ harvesting business, so they will kill those with nobody outside the country, with nobody questioning or asking about them,” a Kazakhstan national aged 54 who was released in September from a camp in Urumqi after being detained for 15 months, said.

She added that detainees without family members overseas are given uniforms “numbered on the backs” and are sent to the hospital for medical check-ups.

“The CCP would know if they touch those with family abroad, their family could tell the world about those details, which would put them in such an awkward position,” Tohti said.

From September 2016, Chinese officials in Xinjiang ran a campaign named the “General People’s Health Examination Project” or the “Physicals for All Project” offering free mandatory health checks for local residents aged between 12 and 65. Patients were forced to undergo examinations of the “heart, DNA, urine, and blood sugar using electrocardiograms, x-rays, and ultrasounds,” Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported.

“I suspect they were doing a tissue match—building an organ database. Nobody was spared, it was compulsory,” Tohti said. Similar health checks were performed on 90 percent of the population in Tibet in 2017, China’s state media Xinhua reported.