MESSAGE
| DATE | 2020-11-15 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] Our Chinese Partners who we depend on for
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-muslims-detention-centers-xinjiang-crackdown/2020/09/23/44d2ce50-f32b-11ea-8025-5d3489768ac8_story.html
washingtonpost.com
China is building vast new detention centers for Muslims in Xinjiang
By Anna FifieldcloseAnna FifieldFormer Beijing bureau
chiefEmailEmailBioBioFollowFollow
9-11 minutes
KASHGAR, CHINA — A huge Brutalist entrance gate, topped with the red
national flag, stands before archetypal Chinese government buildings.
There is no sign identifying the complex, only an inscription bearing an
exhortation from Communist Party founding father Mao Zedong: "Stay true
to our founding mission and aspirations."
But the 45-foot-high walls and guard towers indicate that this massive
compound — next to a vocational training school and a logistics center
south of Kashgar — is not just another bureaucratic outpost in western
China, where authorities have waged sweeping campaigns of repression
against the mostly Muslim Uighur minority.
It is a new detention camp spanning some 60 acres, opened as recently as
January. With 13 five-story residential buildings, it can accommodate
more than 10,000 people.
The Kashgar site is among dozens of prisonlike detention centers that
Chinese authorities have built across the Xinjiang region, according to
the Xinjiang Data Project, an initiative of the Australian Strategic
Policy Institute (ASPI), despite Beijing's claims that it is winding
down its internationally denounced effort to "reeducate" the Uighur
population after deeming the campaign a success.
A recent visit to Xinjiang by The Washington Post and evidence compiled
by ASPI, a Canberra-based think tank, suggest international pressure and
outrage have done little to slow China's crackdown, which appears to be
entering an ominous new phase.
For the past year, the Chinese government has said that almost all the
people in its "vocational training program" in Xinjiang, ostensibly
aimed at "deradicalizing" the region's mostly Muslim population, had
"graduated" and been released into the community.
"This shows that the statements made by the government are patently
false," said ASPI researcher Nathan Ruser, adding that there had merely
been a "shift in style of detention."
'Prisons by another name'
The new compound, one of at least 60 facilities either built from
scratch or expanded over the past year, has floodlights and five layers
of tall barbed-wire fences in addition to the towering walls.
Satellite imagery reveals a tunnel for sending detainees from a
processing center into the facility, and a large courtyard like those
seen in other camps where detainees have been forced to pledge
allegiance to the Chinese flag.
"This is a much more concerted effort to detain and physically remove
people from society," Ruser said. "There aren't any sort of
rehabilitative features in these higher-security detention centers. They
seem to rather just be prisons by another name."
Some prison-style facilities like the one outside Kashgar are new. Other
existing sites have been expanded with higher-security areas. New
buildings added to Xinjiang's largest camp, in Dabancheng, near Urumqi,
last year stretched to almost a mile in length, Ruser said.
Some 14 facilities are still being built across Xinjiang, the satellite
imagery shows.
The findings support recent reporting from BuzzFeed News that China has
built massive new high-security prison camps to create a vast and
permanent infrastructure for mass detention.
These detention camps are the backdrop to all Chinese government efforts
to control the population in Xinjiang, said James Millward, a professor
of inter-societal history at Georgetown University who has been tracking
the plight of the Uighurs.
"They exist as a threat," Millward said. "[The authorities] can go to
people and say: We want you to move 600 miles and work in a factory, or
your father better not object to this marriage that's been set up for
you by the party committee, otherwise you'll be seen as an extremist."
Blocked by security
When a Post reporter tried to visit the detention center half an hour's
drive south of Kashgar this month, her vehicle was quickly surrounded by
at least eight cars that had previously been tailing at some distance.
This site was clearly sensitive.
When The Post's reporter and two European journalists headed toward
another new camp in Akto, south of Kashgar, they were stopped
repeatedly, made to register their passports and drive behind police
cars, only to be turned around at a county border. Coronavirus
precautions were given as the reason.
Conversely, when they visited several compounds that previously held
local Uighurs, authorities didn't bother much with trying to obstruct
the reporters.
Those facilities appeared empty. Windows swung open at one former
"vocational training" center. Bunk beds lay in piles in the yard at
another. Litter rolled past ping-pong tables and over lonely soccer fields.
About eight camps appear to have been decommissioned and 70 more, almost
all of them lower-security facilities, have had their internal fencing
or perimeter walls removed, according to ASPI's database. But there are
no signs of soccer fields, factories or vocational facilities at the new
compound south of Kashgar that would indicate a rehabilitative purpose.
Many Uighurs and people of other ethnic minority groups who have been
sent to reeducation camps have subsequently disappeared into prisons.
Mayila Yakufu, a Mandarin-speaking insurance company worker, was
released this month after two years and three months of detention
without trial. She had previously been put into a "vocational training"
internment camp for 10 months.
When the scale of the human rights abuses in Xinjiang came to light in
2017 and 2018, China categorically denied their existence. But as
satellite imagery and testimony from survivors and relatives became
incontrovertible, and United Nations experts estimated that 1 million
people or more had been incarcerated, Beijing tried to explain away the
camps as a necessary program to deal with terrorists.
The region, which was conquered during the Qing dynasty in the 1700s and
given a name meaning "new frontier" in Chinese, is home to Uighurs and
other Turkic Muslims whose culture and language are distinct from that
of China's dominant Han people.
For more than two centuries, people here have protested, sometimes
violently, against Chinese repression. Some 200 people were killed in
riots in the provincial capital, Urumqi, 11 years ago.
In recent years, under the leadership of Xi Jinping, Beijing has used
these protests as a reason to carry out what many human rights advocates
have labeled cultural genocide.
People who have been interned in the camps have described being forced
to eat pork and drink alcohol; to renounce their religion and pledge
allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party; and to undergo what they have
described as systematic brainwashing. Women have been forcibly
sterilized and the Uighur birthrate has plummeted.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has called China's treatment of Uighur
Muslims the "stain of the century," and the administration is reportedly
weighing a declaration of China's actions as genocide.
Xinjiang authorities did not respond to repeated requests for an
interview about the development of the detention system.
But Xinjiang government chairman Shohrat Zakir, the top Uighur official
in the party structure in the region, has said that the "reeducation
camps" were needed to combat violent religious extremism and that the
"graduates" now faced brighter futures.
In Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said this month
that suggestions that China was persecuting Uighurs had been "concocted
by some anti-China forces" and were "another farce designed to smear and
discredit China."
A chilling shift
The shift is part of a chilling new reality here in Kashgar, the
traditional capital of Uighur culture, which has been under strict
Communist Party controls for three years coinciding with the reeducation
campaign.
With the population cowed, authorities recently appear to have let up a
bit, secure in their control of Kashgar.
The "convenience" police stations that used to monitor movements at
every major intersection have gone. Airport-style security checks at
markets and in underpasses have largely disappeared, with only metal
detectors in use.
Around Kashgar, Uighurs were palpably afraid to talk to foreign
visitors, waving away reporters before they could ask questions.
The Old City, once an atmospheric oasis on the Silk Road, has been
turned into a theme park for Han Chinese tourists, complete with light
displays featuring Mandarin Chinese characters and kitschy settings that
are perfect for selfies.
But closer observation reveals that none of the men in this Muslim city
have beards and none of the women wear hijab. The men chopping fruit and
meat in the bazaar use knives that are chained to their stalls.
Many of the historic buildings remain, but an alarming number have
padlocked doors and bear signs reading "empty house."
There are no working mosques — they have been turned into cafes or
museums or closed entirely — and the landmark yellow-tiled Id Kah Mosque
stands as a lonely monument to the reeducation campaign.
The Post reporter who visited the mosque on a day its doors were opened
for tourists had to register her passport number to be allowed in and
was then accompanied through the courtyard, empty but for banks of
facial recognition cameras and the smell of bleach.
The prayer hall was locked; a guide told one reporter that prayers were
at 6 a.m. and 2 p.m. — times that did not adhere to the Islamic schedule
— and another reporter that they had been canceled because of the
coronavirus.
Opposite the mosque, a large red banner in Chinese characters thanked
President Xi for his loving care.
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
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Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
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