24 Nov
2019
24 Nov
'19
2:22 p.m.
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> Expert Says 1.8 Million Uyghurs, Muslim Minorities Held in Xinjiang’s Internment
Camps
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> Nov. 24, 2019 - Authorities in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region
(XUAR) have detained up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in as many as
1,300 to 1,400 internment camps, one of the world’s foremost experts on mass
incarcerations in the region said in a paper released Sunday.
>
> Adrian Zenz, senior fellow in China Studies at the Washington-based Victims of
Communism Memorial Foundation, obtained a cache of more than 25,000 files from different
government departments in the XUAR to inform his latest estimate of the number of Uyghurs
and other Muslim minorities being held in a vast network of camps in the region since
April 2017.
>
> Zenz had initially estimated that some 1.1 million people are or have been detained
in the camps, which he refers to as Vocational Training Internment Camps (VTICs), but in
March this year revised his assessment to 1.5 million. Camp inmates have been accused of
harboring “strong religious views” and “politically incorrect” ideas.
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> “Adding 177,000 to the current internment estimate of 1.6 million results in a
combined figure of 1.777 million, or approximately 1.8 million,” he said in the report,
which also cited members of the Hui Muslim minority as being among those detained.
>
> “This means that 15.4 percent of the adult Turkic and Hui minority population are or
have been interned. This is equivalent to just below one in six members of that
population, with the difference to the author's previous estimate from July 2019 of
1.5 million being explained by using updated population figures, including the Hui
population in the sample.”
>
> Zenz said that his new estimate was based on information obtained mostly from rural
minority regions in the XUAR’s Hotan (in Chinese, Hetian), Kashgar (Kashi), and Kizilsu
Kirghiz (Kezileisu Keerkezi) Autonomous prefectures.
>
> Camps in the region number up to 1,400, Zenz said in Sunday’s report, providing more
specific details following an interview with RFA’s Uyghur Service earlier this month, in
which he said that he had obtained convincing evidence to suggest that his “original
estimate of at least one camp per administrative unit between township and prefecture
levels, which adds up to 1,200, was accurate.”
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> “Xinjiang has at least 119 detention centers, one per administrative unit above
township level,” the report said.
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> “Likely, there are more than that. That means that the region has probably somewhere
between 1,300 and 1,400 extrajudicial internment facilities (excluding prisons).”
>
> In one tranche of data included in Sunday’s report, Zenz posted a spreadsheet
containing detailed information on nearly 1,500 persons detained from just one village in
Kashgar’s Yarkand (Shache) county, with the last six digits of their identification
numbers redacted for privacy reasons.
>
> The report more generally includes lists of detainees including “young persons with
their status of study or work, lists of children with both parents in some form of
detention and how they are being cared for, lists of couples of mixed ethnicity and
whether they still live together, lists of families and their
> fulfillment of family planning requirements.”
>
> It also details “lists of persons below the poverty line or who are currently (or no
longer) receiving minimum welfare payments, or lists of persons who have failed or are
unable to repay their government-issued debt.”
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> ‘Coercive and abusive’
>
> While Beijing once denied the existence of the camps, China this year changed tack
and began describing the facilities as “boarding schools” that provide vocational training
for Uyghurs, discourage radicalization, and help protect the country from terrorism.
>
> Reporting by RFA’s Uyghur Service and other media organizations, however, has shown
that those in the camps are detained against their will and subjected to political
indoctrination, routinely face rough treatment at the hands of their overseers, and endure
poor diets and unhygienic conditions in the often overcrowded facilities.
>
> According to Zenz’s report, official government documentation “repeatedly and
unambiguously testifies to the fact that Xinjiang’s VTICs engage in known and pre-existing
forms of coercive and abusive political
> re-education.”
>
> He cites at least five different XUAR government or educational institution websites
as stating that the VTICs “are dedicated brain-washing institutions” that claim to “wash
clean the brains of people
> who became bewitched by the extreme religious ideologies of the ‘three forces,’” or
the terrorism, separatism, and religious extremism China says are threatening Xinjiang.
>
> Zenz’s report also bolsters reports that internment camp detainees are “in
involuntary internment” and that the camps are “heavily guarded, prison-like facilities.”
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> Shifting strategy
>
> Speaking with RFA earlier this month, Zenz said that China significantly increased
its internment and internment capacity in the XUAR in 2018, but gradually shifted from
“vocational training” into what he called “involuntary or coercive forms of labor” in the
second half of last year.
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> Zenz said that while it is difficult to confirm such trends, as there is limited
evidence to work from and China’s government doesn’t provide statistics, he believes that
“in 2019 Xinjiang has been moving from internment into forced labor.”
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> Last month, at a hearing in Washington held by the Congressional-Executive Commission
on China (CECC), witnesses including Zenz highlighted reports of a widespread system of
forced labor in the XUAR, which requires Uyghurs and other ethnic minority Muslims to work
in the production of textiles, food, and light manufacturing.
>
> Zenz detailed a forced labor system he called even “more shocking” than that of the
internment camps, which he said involved coerced military, political, and vocational
training for the purpose of working in officially subsidized companies as part of a
“business of oppression.”
>
> China is the world’s largest cotton producer and Zenz noted that some 84 percent of
China’s cotton is produced in the XUAR, meaning that between the textile industry and
other forms of work—including on components that are sent to eastern China and
incorporated into finished products—it is extremely difficult for customs officials in the
U.S. to determine whether imported goods are linked to forced labor in the region.
>
> He said at the time that “the situation in Xinjiang is so serious, that it is
necessary and warranted to call for an ethical boycott of any products made in whole or in
part in Xinjiang.”
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> Mass incarcerations
>
> Mass incarcerations in the XUAR, as well as other policies seen to violate the rights
of Uyghurs and other Muslims, have led to increasing calls by the international community
to hold Beijing accountable for its actions in the region.
>
> U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last month singled out China as one of the worst
perpetrators of abuse against people of faith, particularly in the XUAR.
>
> In September, at an event on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in
New York, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John J. Sullivan said that the U.N. has failed to
hold China to account over its policies in the XUAR and should demand unfettered access to
the region to investigate reports of the mass incarceration and other rights abuses
against Uyghurs.
>
> On Saturday, The New York Times published a 403-page trove of documents it said were
released by someone within the “Chinese political establishment” that told of how Xi
called for an “all-out ‘struggle against terrorism, infiltration, and separatism’ using
the ‘organs of dictatorship,’” in internal speeches following an attack by Uyghur
militants that killed more than 30 people at a train station in 2014.
>
> While it was unclear how the documents, commonly referred to as the “Xinjiang
Papers,” were selected, the Times said that the leak came from an official who requested
anonymity and expressed hope that their disclosure would hold party leaders, including Xi,
accountable for policies in the region.
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> View this story online at:
https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/detainees-11232019223242.html
>
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>
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