Chinese authorities built public toilet on demolished mosque site

The attack on Uyghur culture in China has hit a new low as the authorities as reports claim that Chinese authorities have built a public toilet on the site of a demolished mosque.The incident took place in the Atush region of Xinjiang. The mosque in the Suntagh village was demolished in 2018. Two years later, a public toilet stands in its place. The people of Suntagh have toilets at home and the village barely receives tourists, so locals say there is no need for the public toilet.

Through its mouthpiece newspaper Global Times, China last year published that Northwest China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is making efforts to update toilets in the region in order to promote local residents' living standards and to attract more visitors. The toilet construction on the site of Tokul mosque in Atush’s Suntagh village came after authorities had demolished many mosques in the region as part of a campaign known as “Mosque Rectification” that began in 2016 and targeted Muslim places of worship said RFA. 

An investigation by RFA into the Mosque Rectification campaign found that authorities had demolished nearly 70 percent of mosques in the XUAR region. Last year the Washington-based Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) published a report, titled “Demolishing Faith: The Destruction and Desecration of Uyghurs Mosques and Shrines,” which stated that up to 15,000 mosques and shrines in the region were demolished from 2016 to 2019. In August 2018, a UN committee was informed that up to one million Uyghur Turkic Muslims had been detained in the Xinjiang region to attend "re-education" programs.Human rights groups and Western governments have planned attacks, including forced sterilization, on Uyghur Muslims. China has denied the allegations.