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It’s one of those stories that has only slowly crept into the political and public consciousness - the reported detention of over a million Uighur Muslims in camps in China’s Xinjiang province. The Uighurs, are an ethnically Turkic Muslim group and China sees them as a separatist people whose loyalty to the state and the communist party is always suspect - harbouring and supporting terrorist factions. They have made the Uighur undergo an indoctrination programme of assimilation designed to eradicate their cultural identity. The Chinese government defends this internment as re-education camps for vocational training but activists say those arrested must speak in Mandarin Chinese and sing praises for the Communist Party. The camps are shrouded in secrecy but reports have been gradually emerging of the extent of brutality, families separated or people simply disappearing. It’s been called the largest incarceration of a people since the Holocaust and although there’s now growing awareness, it seems that much of the world is simply watching from the sides. It’s perhaps not surprising that China’s spectacular economic ascent has overshadowed its human rights record. In awe of the rapid success of the world’s second largest economy, most political leaders have remained silent including many Muslim governments who actively support China’s right to do this, so indebted are they to China’s current plans for its Belt and Road initiative, its 21st century silk road. But for me, economics is not a value neutral science – even with all the connected complexities of globalisation we make moral and civilizational choices in how we trade and what we are willing to sacrifice at the altar of the market economy. The Chinese defence is that whether it’s control of various forms of Christian worship or surveillance of Muslims, they want peace and coexistence. China, like every nation has a right to want social harmony for its citizens. But it matters how that is achieved. Because controlled peace is not peace by any government towards any people and never leads to social harmony. It simply pauses the inevitable cry for justice. Justice however difficult to realise, is in Islam, the closest thing to God consciousness, the pricking of conscience and the command to speak out. It takes courage to speak for those in faraway place, whose lives may be nothing like our own, but human rights means little if we don’t speak for human rights for all. We say the words `never again’ to prevent future atrocities but `never again’ rings hollow if economics eclipses everything and we continue to say little about thousands of people who are living their entire lives behind walls.