China’s Uyghur policy is akin to silent genocide: over a million arbitrary detentions, torture, forced labour, cultural vandalism, re-education of children and adults, forced sterilizations. The Xinjiang region, autonomous in name only, is in Beijing’s iron stranglehold. President Xi Jinping laid the foundation for this repression, unprecedented since World War II, in a speech in 2014: It is about an “absolutely merciless, comprehensive fight against terrorism, infiltration and separatism using the means of the dictatorship”. Under the pretext of fighting radical Islamism and poverty, the complete effacement of the Uyghur culture is being promoted. The protests of the international community went unheeded. Using archive material, expert opinions from China and abroad, as well as reports from Uyghurs who managed to escape from the internment camps, the documentation tries to fathom the reasons and historical causes.