UIGHUR MUSLIM BLAME CHINA FOR AIDS EPIDEMIC
Urumqi, China, 1 Dzulqa’dah 1436/15 August 2015 (MINA) – Ringing alarm bells over one of the biggest threats to Chinese Muslims, a former Chinese health official warned of a dramatic increase of the HIV/AIDS epidemic among Uighurs in the far-western region of Xinjiang.
“Now HIV/AIDS is a most dangerous disease in the Uyghur autonomous region, especially among local Uighurs,” Feruk Pidakar [not his real name], a former senior government official at the Office for AIDS Control and Prevention under the Health Department of the Xinjiang, told Radio Free Asia. On Islam quoted by Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA) as reporting.
“It’s a more dangerous and harmful social phenomenon than the ‘unstable elements’ which are caused by so-called ‘terrorism’ and ‘religious extremism,’ according to the Chinese propaganda.”
Pidakar said that the increase of HIV among young Uighur men in the southern part of the Xinjiang region is due to the influx of infected prostitutes who have been transmitting the deadly disease since 2009.
He added that many Han Chinese people had moved to the area, with the government’s support, and hundreds of brothels had opened up “under the guise of beauty salons, massage parlors or bathrooms.”
“Hundreds of prostitution houses opened under the guise of beauty salons, massage parlors or bathrooms in Aksu (in Chinese, Akesu), Kucha (Kuqa), Kashgar (Kashi), Yarkant (Shache) and Hotan (Hetian),” the former Chinese official said.
“AIDS/HIV-infected Han sex workers from China’s inner provinces sell [their services] in predominantly Han red-light districts in southern Xinjiang.”
He went on saying: “When we were in the south, some of the Uyghur parents and farmers complained to us that there were black-windowed minibuses loaded with Han sex workers that provided cheep sex to the young Uyghur farmers.”
According to UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, some 34 million people were living with HIV at the end of 2011.
Deaths from AIDS fell to 1.7 million in 2011, down from a peak of 2.3 million in 2005 and from 1.8 million in 2010.
Worldwide, the number of people newly infected with HIV, which can be transmitted via blood and by semen during sex, is also falling. At 2.5 million, the number of new infections in 2011 was 20 percent lower than in 2001. (T/P007/RO6)
Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA)
