Uyghur Concentration Camp in Xinjiang

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Xinjiang leak sheds new light on China's 're-education' camps

Beijing (AFP) – A leak of thousands of photos and official documents from China's Xinjiang has shed new light on the violent methods used to enforce mass internment in the region, researchers said Tuesday.



The files, obtained by academic Adrian Zenz, were published as UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet begins a long-awaited and controversial trip to Xinjiang.
Activists say Chinese authorities have detained more than one million Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim minorities in a network of detention centres and prisons in the region, which Beijing has defended as training centres.
But the trove of police photographs and internal documents -- sent to Zenz by an anonymous source who hacked into official databases in Xinjiang -- add to evidence that the mass internments were far from voluntary, with leaked documents showing top leaders in Beijing including President Xi Jinping calling for a forceful crackdown.
The files include a 2017 internal speech by Chen Quanguo, a former Communist Party secretary in Xinjiang, in which he allegedly orders guards to shoot to kill anyone who tries to escape, and calls for officials in the region to "exercise firm control over religious believers".
A 2018 internal speech by public security minister Zhao Kezhi mentions direct orders from Xi to increase the capacity of detention facilities.
After initially denying their existence, Beijing has claimed the facilities are vocational training schools, attended voluntarily and aimed at stamping out religious extremism.
But the leaked documents give an insight into how leaders saw the minority population as a security threat, with Zhao warning that more than two million people in southern Xinjiang alone had been "severely influenced by the infiltration of extremist religious thought".

Mugshots​

More than 2,800 police photos of Xinjiang detainees included minors such as 17-year-old Zeytunigul Ablehet, detained for listening to an illegal speech, and 16-year-old Bilal Qasim, apparently sentenced for being related to other detainees.
The details echo a separate police list leaked earlier to AFP which showed the government crackdown snaring hundreds of people at a time from villages, often many from the same household.
"The sort of paranoid threat perception comes out in these files, and the internal justification for why one has to move against an entire population," said Zenz in video comments published alongside the leaked files.
Zenz works for the US-based non-profit organisation the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
The files, parts of which have been verified by multiple news organisations including the BBC and Le Monde, also provide a window into life in detention facilities.
Photos appear to show officers restraining hooded and shackled inmates with batons, while other guards wearing camouflage stand by with firearms.
UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss on Tuesday called the details of the newly leaked documents "shocking", and urged China to grant Bachelet "full and unfettered access to the region so that she can conduct a thorough assessment of the facts on the ground".
But China's foreign ministry dismissed the leaked documents as "cobbled-together material" by "anti-China forces smearing Xinjiang", with spokesman Wang Wenbin accusing media of "spreading lies and rumours".
 
The faces from China’s Uyghur detention camps
Thousands of photographs from the heart of China’s highly secretive system of mass incarceration in Xinjiang, as well as a shoot-to-kill policy for those who try to escape, are among a huge cache of data hacked from police computer servers in the region.

The Xinjiang Police Files, as they’re being called, were passed to the BBC earlier this year. After a months-long effort to investigate and authenticate them, they can be shown to offer significant new insights into the internment of the region’s Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities.

Their publication coincides with the recent arrival in China of the United Nations Human Rights Commissioner, Michelle Bachelet, for a controversial visit to Xinjiang, with critics concerned that her itinerary will be under the tight control of the government.

The cache reveals, in unprecedented detail, China’s use of “re-education” camps and formal prisons as two separate but related systems of mass detention for Uyghurs - and seriously calls into question its well-honed public narrative about both.

The government’s claim that the re-education camps built across Xinjiang since 2017 are nothing more than “schools” is contradicted by internal police instructions, guarding rosters and the never-before-seen images of detainees.

And its widespread use of terrorism charges, under which many thousands more have been swept into formal prisons, is exposed as a pretext for a parallel method of internment, with police spreadsheets full of arbitrary, draconian sentences.

The documents provide some of the strongest evidence to date for a policy targeting almost any expression of Uyghur identity, culture or Islamic faith - and of a chain of command running all the way up to the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping.

The hacked files contain more than 5,000 police photographs of Uyghurs taken between January and July 2018.
Using other accompanying data, at least 2,884 of them can be shown to have been detained.
And for those listed as being in a re-education camp, there are signs that they are not the willing “students” China has long-claimed them to be.
1653411675457.png


Some of the re-education camp photos show guards standing by, armed with batons.

Yet claims of coercion have been consistently denied by China’s most senior officials.

“The truth is the education and training centres in Xinjiang are schools that help people free themselves from extremism,” Foreign Minister Wang Yi said in 2019

1653411739803.png


Many have been detained just for ordinary, outward signs of their Islamic faith or for visiting countries with majority Muslim populations.

1653411776760.png


With the threat of physical force again visible in the background, this woman’s photo highlights the widespread use of “guilt by association”.

Documents describe her son as having “strong religious leanings” because he doesn’t drink alcohol or smoke. As a result, he was jailed for 10 years on terrorism charges.

But she appears on a list of “relatives of the detained” - among the thousands placed under suspicion because of the “crimes” of their families.

1653411814754.png



This composite image contains 2,884 photographs of detainees from the cache.

The photos provide a unique visual record of the way whole swathes of Uyghur society have been swept up - into both camps and prisons - person by person.
 

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Xinjiang leak sheds new light on China's 're-education' camps

Beijing (AFP) – A leak of thousands of photos and official documents from China's Xinjiang has shed new light on the violent methods used to enforce mass internment in the region, researchers said Tuesday.



The files, obtained by academic Adrian Zenz, were published as UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet begins a long-awaited and controversial trip to Xinjiang.
Activists say Chinese authorities have detained more than one million Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim minorities in a network of detention centres and prisons in the region, which Beijing has defended as training centres.
But the trove of police photographs and internal documents -- sent to Zenz by an anonymous source who hacked into official databases in Xinjiang -- add to evidence that the mass internments were far from voluntary, with leaked documents showing top leaders in Beijing including President Xi Jinping calling for a forceful crackdown.
The files include a 2017 internal speech by Chen Quanguo, a former Communist Party secretary in Xinjiang, in which he allegedly orders guards to shoot to kill anyone who tries to escape, and calls for officials in the region to "exercise firm control over religious believers".
A 2018 internal speech by public security minister Zhao Kezhi mentions direct orders from Xi to increase the capacity of detention facilities.
After initially denying their existence, Beijing has claimed the facilities are vocational training schools, attended voluntarily and aimed at stamping out religious extremism.
But the leaked documents give an insight into how leaders saw the minority population as a security threat, with Zhao warning that more than two million people in southern Xinjiang alone had been "severely influenced by the infiltration of extremist religious thought".

Mugshots​

More than 2,800 police photos of Xinjiang detainees included minors such as 17-year-old Zeytunigul Ablehet, detained for listening to an illegal speech, and 16-year-old Bilal Qasim, apparently sentenced for being related to other detainees.
The details echo a separate police list leaked earlier to AFP which showed the government crackdown snaring hundreds of people at a time from villages, often many from the same household.
"The sort of paranoid threat perception comes out in these files, and the internal justification for why one has to move against an entire population," said Zenz in video comments published alongside the leaked files.
Zenz works for the US-based non-profit organisation the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
The files, parts of which have been verified by multiple news organisations including the BBC and Le Monde, also provide a window into life in detention facilities.
Photos appear to show officers restraining hooded and shackled inmates with batons, while other guards wearing camouflage stand by with firearms.
UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss on Tuesday called the details of the newly leaked documents "shocking", and urged China to grant Bachelet "full and unfettered access to the region so that she can conduct a thorough assessment of the facts on the ground".
But China's foreign ministry dismissed the leaked documents as "cobbled-together material" by "anti-China forces smearing Xinjiang", with spokesman Wang Wenbin accusing media of "spreading lies and rumours".
tell us some thing new man , every one knows this very well. Chinese have perfected this art very well. But its the west we should be wary of who import from china and shed crocodile tears abt human rights.
 
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China May Have Committed "Crimes Against Humanity" In Xinjiang: UN​

Geneva:
The United Nations released a bombshell report into serious human rights abuses in China's Xinjiang region late Wednesday, saying torture allegations were credible and citing possible crimes against humanity.

The report, in the making for around a year, was released in Geneva at 11:47 pm (2147 GMT) on Wednesday -- just 13 minutes before Michelle Bachelet's four-year term as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights expired.

The former Chilean president was determined to ensure the report saw the light of day -- despite intense pressure from an infuriated Beijing.

"I said that I would publish it before my mandate ended and I have," Bachelet said in an email sent to AFP.

"The issues are serious -- and I raised them with high-level national and regional authorities in the country."

China has been accused for years of detaining more than one million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in the far-western Xinjiang region.

Campaigners have accused China of a litany of abuses, while Beijing has vehemently rejected the claims, insisting it is running vocational training centres in Xinjiang designed to counter extremism.

Bachelet eventually decided that a full assessment was needed of the situation inside the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).

- Torture allegations 'credible' -

"Serious human rights violations have been committed in XUAR in the context of the government's application of counter-terrorism and counter-'extremism' strategies," the report said.

The assessment raised concerns about the treatment of people held in China's so-called "Vocational Education and Training Centres".

"Allegations of patterns of torture or ill-treatment, including forced medical treatment and adverse conditions of detention, are credible, as are allegations of individual incidents of sexual and gender-based violence," the report said.

"The extent of arbitrary and discriminatory detention of members of Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim groups, pursuant to law and policy, in context of restrictions and deprivation more generally of fundamental rights enjoyed individually and collectively, may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity," it added.

The report urged Beijing, the UN and the world at large to focus its gaze on the situation described in Xinjiang.

"The human rights situation in XUAR also requires urgent attention by the government, the United Nations intergovernmental bodies and human rights system, as well as the international community more broadly," it said.

The 49-page report made no reference to genocide: one of the key allegations made by China's critics, including the United States and lawmakers in other Western countries.

- 'Firmly opposed' -

Speaking on Wednesday after Bachelet's office had announced it would release the report, Zhang Jun, China's ambassador to the UN in New York, said Beijing had told her that it was "firmly opposed" to the rights assessment.

"The so-called Xinjiang issue is a completely fabricated lie out of political motivations and its purpose is definitely to undermine China's stability and to obstruct China's development," Zhang told reporters.

He said Bachelet should have stayed "independent" and not caved in to "political pressure" from Western countries.

Bachelet and her office have repeatedly explained that one reason the report was delayed was because it had been sent to Beijing first for comments, as is common with such reports.

Zhang however maintained that China had not seen the report, and was "completely opposed" to it.

"It simply undermines the cooperation between the UN and a member state. It completely interferes in China's internal affairs," he said.

Bachelet insisted that dialogue with Beijing did not mean "condoning, overlooking or turning a blind eye".

But she added: "The politicisation of these serious human rights issues by some states did not help. They made the task more difficult, they made the engagement more difficult and they made the trust-building and the ability to really have an impact on the ground more difficult."
 
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