Beijing These are oppressive descriptions that an international media consortium published on Tuesday based on a large data leak. Thousands of previously secret documents show the alleged offenses for which members of the Uyghur Muslim minority in the western Chinese province of Xinjiang are sentenced to long prison terms.
Thousands of photos document who is being held in the detention camps, which the Chinese government calls “training centers” – and how these people are treated there. The youngest inmate is therefore just 15 years old, the oldest 73 years. In addition, the “Xinjiang Police Files” contain information about around 300,000 Chinese registered by the authorities, mostly Uyghurs.
The releases come just as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, is visiting China. It is the first trip by a UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to the People’s Republic since 2005. Bachelet’s plan includes a visit to the cities of Kashgar and Urumchi in Xinjiang. Human rights groups have been accusing the Chinese government of serious human rights violations in the province for years.
Bachelet’s visit is highly controversial. In the past, the authorities massively intimidated the population in the region and especially the Uyghurs. Critics doubt that independent talks with those affected are even possible under these circumstances. For years, journalists have been shadowed and prevented from doing their research in the region.
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The data leak published on Tuesday apparently came from a local Chinese police server. An anonymous hacker, whom the BBC involved in the research said it was able to contact itself, leaked the dataset to the German scientist Adrian Zenz, who has been researching the oppression of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang for years.
An international group of journalists from 14 media houses – including the newspapers “Le Monde” and “El País” – evaluated the data. In Germany, Bayerischer Rundfunk and the news magazine Der Spiegel were involved in the research.
“Nearly endless” internment lists
The data shows how extensive the surveillance of the Uyghurs is. According to the report by the “Spiegel” from the district of Konasheher, “almost all residents of the area” are in the data set. “According to the Xinjiang Police Files, well over 22,000 of them were detained in 2018, more than 12 percent of the adult population, and they were locked away for at least a year,” the Spiegel report said.
The news magazine writes about thousands of prisoner photos, but also about secret speeches, training documents from the security authorities and “almost endless” internment lists. Some of the alleged crimes for which the people are being held are documented in detail. The prisoner Adiljan T. is said to have trained for two weeks in December 2011 as an 18-year-old in a fitness center in Urumchi. As a result, he was arrested on October 28, 2017 and sentenced to twelve years in prison “for preparing a terrorist act”.
According to the BBC, the documents and photos published on Tuesday date from before 2018. The fact that there is no more up-to-date material may be due to a directive issued in early 2019 that tightened encryption standards in Xinjiang.
China denies any allegations of human rights violations. On Monday, Bachelet met Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Guangzhou, southern China, to kick off her trip to the People’s Republic of China. China has made protecting the rights of ethnic minorities an important part of its work and has made people’s safety its long-term goal,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry said in a statement at the meeting.
The Uyghurs are being massively oppressed by the Chinese authorities.
(Photo: AP)
The data published on Tuesday have apparently all never been published and contain some previously unknown details. However, media around the world have published numerous documents in recent years on how brutally the Chinese authorities are treating the Muslim Uyghur minority. For years, satellite images and media research have shown how systematically religious sites are disappearing and where internment camps are set up.
There is also plenty of evidence for monitoring and the system in the camps. For example, a consortium around the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” reported back in 2019 on “a points system that works with punishments and rewards” that guide the inmates of the camps to “the state of mind desired” until a release is considered .
In 2020, the BBC published a detailed account of what goes into detention on the basis of secret documents. According to them, the main reason for the detention of a 38-year-old woman, given the name Helchem, was that she was known to have worn a veil a few years earlier.
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A 28-year-old man named Nurmemet was taken into custody for “clicking on a web link and inadvertently landed on a foreign website,” the documents said. For another man, just having a beard and organizing a religious study group was enough to get him detained.
German companies under criticism
Foreign companies, including German companies, are still active in Xinjiang despite the serious allegations against the Chinese government. For example, the carmaker Volkswagen has a plant in Urumchi, and the German chemical giant BASF has a production facility in the city of Korla. According to a study by the Australian think tank Australian Strategic Policy Institute (Aspi), the Chinese government operates internment camps in the vicinity of both plants, in which Uyghurs are also believed to be held.
BASF and Volkswagen have come under criticism in the past for their activities in the region. Apart from the damage to the reputation of the companies, according to human rights organizations there is a risk of employing forced labourers. In addition, the surveillance of those who are not yet in the detention center is so tight that Xinjiang can already be described as a police state.
The Chinese government justifies the measures with the fight against terrorism. It has long been said behind closed doors in Beijing business circles that no German company would make a decision in favor of this location today.
>>Read here: How German companies do business in China’s oppressed province of Xinjiang
The documents are also likely to put pressure on the German government. This had resolved to take a more critical stance towards China. The coalition agreement states: “We are clearly addressing China’s human rights violations, especially in Xinjiang.”
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