Tag Archives: Xinjiang

BBC Exposes Confidential Documents of Concentration Camps in Xinjiang

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Reprinted from the BBC website                         2022-5-28

 

Zhang Jing, founder of WRIC:  When UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet visited Xinjiang and other places in China for 6 days on May 22, the BBC released a detailed account of the Uyghur concentration camps in Xinjiang. It’s a top secret information. The official confidential documents of Xinjiang “education camps” stolen by hackers contained more than 5,000 photos and personal data of Uyghurs taken between January and July 2018. The youngest girl among the detainees is 15 years old, and the oldest is 7 years old. Over the past few years, China has forcibly retained more than a million Uyghurs in a vast network of so-called “education camps” and sentenced hundreds of thousands to prison terms. Women were subjected to rape, gang rape, and forced abortions. sparked strong condemnation from the international community.

 

Original BBC article:

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/85qihtvw6e/the-faces-from-chinas-uyghur-detention-camps

 

(Pictures from BBC website)

 

 

For decades, Xinjiang has experienced cycles of separatism, sporadic violence and tightening government controls. In 2013 and 2014, two deadly attacks on pedestrians and commuters in Beijing and the southern Chinese city of Kunming — which the government blamed on Uighur separatists and radical Islamists — prompted a sea change in policy.

 

The state began to see Uyghur culture itself as a problem, and within a few years, satellite photos began showing hundreds of gigantic re-education camps where Uyghurs were being sent without trial.

 

 

Xinjiang’s formal prison system has also been massively expanded as another means of controlling Uighur identity — especially amid growing international criticism of the lack of legal process in the concentration camps.

 

This method of double incarceration was starkly exposed in a set of 452 spreadsheets containing the names, addresses and ID numbers of more than 250,000 Uyghurs—showing which of them were detained, in which Types of detention facilities and why.

 

 

 

They paint a picture of ruthless internment in concentration camps and prisons, documenting row upon row of biased snooping by Chinese officials sent deep into Uyghur society, backed by big-data surveillance tools, to arbitrarily detain them.

 

There are countless examples of people being retroactively punished for “crimes” that occurred years or even decades ago – in 2017 a man was jailed for “studying Islamic scriptures with his grandmother” for a few days in 2010 10 years.

 

Hundreds of people have been shown to have been targeted because of their mobile phone use – mostly for listening to “illegal lectures” or installing “over the wall” apps.

 

In a June 2018 speech labeled “confidential” by Chinese Public Security Minister Zhao Kezhi during a visit to Xinjiang, he suggested that at least 2 million people in southern Xinjiang alone had been infected with “extremist ideas.”

 

Zhao Kezhi mentioned President Xi Jinping in his speech, and he highly praised the Chinese leader’s “important instructions” to build new facilities and increase prison funding to deal with the influx of detainees necessary to reach the 2 million target.

 

 

If the mass internment of Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in Xinjiang is indeed on the orders of the Chinese leader, there are hints of a timeline in mind.

 

Also in the cache is another secret speech in 2017 by Chen Quanguo — until recently the hardline Communist Party secretary in Xinjiang. “For some people, even five years of re-education may not be enough,” Chen said, telling his senior military and police cadres, in what appeared to be an acknowledgment that as long as any Uyghurs continue to have at least as strong a feeling for identity or belief Loyalty to the party has no end in sight.

 

“Once released, problems will reappear. This is the reality in Xinjiang,” he said.

 

 

Plus, the spreadsheet provides little detail on the fate of the children whose parents were both detained. It is likely that a significant number were placed in permanent long-term care in the state boarding school system that was built across Xinjiang at the same time as the concentration camps.

 

Indeed, the shaved hair in many pictures of children is a sign, with Uyghurs abroad telling the BBC that many are already forced to attend these schools, at least on weekdays, even if still with one or both parents. These shaved-head photos endow a project aimed at deliberately erasing the Uyghur family as identity and cultural identity, which in Chinese terms means “cutting off the root, cutting off the seed, cutting off the blood, and cutting off the connection.”

 

The media received a written response from the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., after contacting the Chinese government for comment on the hacked data and asking detailed questions about the evidence it contained.

 

“Relevant issues in Xinjiang are essentially about combating violent terrorism, radicalization and separatism, rather than human rights or religion,” the Chinese embassy statement said, adding that Chinese authorities had taken “a series of decisive, forceful and effective measures to counteract violent terrorism, radicalization and separatism.” extreme measures”.

 

“The region is now socially stable and harmonious, with economic development,” the statement added, adding that these are “the most powerful response to all kinds of lies and disinformation in Xinjiang.”

 

But there was no response to any concrete evidence in the cached documents.

 

 

 

 

China’s Genocide Starts in the Womb

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By 2019

 

April 5, 2019 marks its 29th anniversary. A horror most Americans have never heard about: the Baren Massacre.

 

It took place just north of Tibet, in Chinese-occupied East Turkistan. It may be the only massacre in human history that began with State-forced mass abortions. In one sense, it’s a massacre that still continues today.

 

As an American Catholic and a Muslim Uyghur, we stand together on this. We commemorate the victims. Pro-life and pro-choice Americans should also come together on at least this common ground. Forced abortion is abhorrent. All should condemn the terror the Chinese government unleashed against these women, and against their families who resisted it.

 

The Baren Massacre

 

Baren Township, near Kashgar, saw sixty days of terror in spring 1990. As part of its deadly One Child Policy of population control, China’s government routinely forced millions of women to abort their babies. But the villagers of Baren finally had enough. They’d just seen 250 local women robbed of their babies. So they did something people rarely risk in Communist countries. They went to confront the Party. These rural people walked into Party headquarters and complained to its officials.

Wikipedia: Detainees listening to speeches in a re-education camp in Lop County, Xinjiang, April 2017.

 

 

Chinese officials answered their concerns. By sending in the People’s Liberation Army. It stormed in and occupied the region. Some locals — devout, God-fearing people — decided to take up arms. To defend their families, their pre-born children, and their dignity.

 

Chinese authorities were enraged. They poured even more troops into Baren Township — more than 4,000 according to some sources — with artillery and helicopter gunships. All aimed at parents, who wanted their babies to live.

 

The army used heavy weapons and indiscriminately slaughtered villagers. By the dozens and the hundreds. People of every ethnic group in East Turkistan suffered: Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, and Tatars.

 

The massacre was emblematic of China’s wider policies of genocide. It should have woken up the West to the nature of that regime.The Massacre Never Ended.

 

The lesson of the Baren Massacre? If any nation would forcibly kill large groups of defenseless people in the womb it will also, sooner or later, go on to kill them outside the womb. And 29 years later, that is exactly what’s happening in East Turkistan.

 

Don’t take it from us. Listen to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. It estimates that the Chinese government currently holds at least 1 million (mostly Uyghur) citizens in so-called “counter-extremism centers.” And another 2 million in so-called “re-education camps.”

 

Some people survive these camps. They report what goes on in them:

  • Brainwashing.
  • Beatings.
  • Torture.
  • Rape.
  • Involuntary medication.
  • Forced abortions.
  • Forced sterilizations. And even
  • Summary executions.

We’ve Known About This for a Decade

Back in 2009, Radio Free Asia told the world:

China’s official Tianshan Net reported that population control policies in Occupied East Turkistan (“Xinjiang,” as the Chinese Communist Party calls it) have prevented the births of some 3.7 million people over the last 30 years…. The one-child policy is enforced more strictly in cities, but penalties for exceeding a family’s quota can be severe, including job loss, demotion, or expulsion from the Party, experts say.

 

That was ten years ago. But for these afflicted people, nothing has changed.

 

A Policy of Extermination

Sometimes women in rural settings got a small degree of latitude in deviating from the one-child policy. But often the punishments for exceeding the quota are excruciating. Horror stories about China’s genocidal and infanticidal policies abound.

 

One woman, Arzigul Tursun, was detained by police in the sixth month of her third pregnancy. Officials then forced her to undergo a late-term abortion.

 

Even if she had somehow escaped the medically-unnecessary procedure? Then she would have faced a 45,000 renminbi fine for the crime of conceiving a third child. That fine exceeds several years family income.

 

A Threat to Life and Choice

Pro-life and pro-choice Americans alike should condemn the brutal practices of China’s Communist Party. The simple truth is that they threaten both life and choice.

 

Pro-life and pro-choice Americans should also come together on at least this common ground. Forced abortion is abhorrent.

 

Now the people of East Turkistan are facing nothing less than a genocide. The Party’s goal is nothing short of the wholesale extermination of an entire people. From womb to tomb, the Communist Party has no respect for the sanctity of human life or bodily integrity.

 

It feels strange to commemorate the Baren Massacre as if it were some fact of Cold War history. Because, inside China’s concentration camps, it’s still going on.

 

How Do You Commemorate a Slaughter that Never Ceased?

But we won’t let that stop us. From 1 to 3 p.m. on Friday, April 5, the East Turkistan National Awakening Movement will be holding a nonviolent demonstration outside the White House. This peaceful event is cosponsored by the Vulnerable People Project, Movie-To-Movement, the Institute for Religion and Democracy, and others.

 

There we will ask the United States government to demand an end to China’s genocidal policies against East Turkistanis. And we’ll call on all civilized nations to impose sanctions against the officials responsible for these atrocities.

 

This commemoration already includes pro-life, feminist, Christian, Muslim, American, and Turkistani participants. If you can, please join us there.

 

If you aren’t able to make it to the White House, there’s another way to join us. Share our message as widely as you can. Tell your neighbors. Help us make the whole world aware of China’s ongoing atrocities, especially against women and children.

 

Together, let’s finally put an end to the Baren Massacre.