Investigation Reveals Thousands of Secret Documents About China's Crackdown on Muslim Uyghur Minority
The United States has assured this Tuesday that it is “dismayed” by the revelations about the Chinese repression of the Uyghur Muslim minority after a journalistic investigation has revealed thousands of documents about the Chinese regime’s treatment of the Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang.
The leak includes thousands of photos of detainees, including women, minors and the elderly who are forcibly interned in “political re-education centers.”
The investigation proves the existence of the prison reeducation centers in which soldiers are ordered to shoot to kill if necessary, according to journalists who have worked on the investigation.
These documents have been this Tuesday by a group of 14 international media, coinciding with the visit to this region of northwestern China by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet.
More than a million Uyghurs locked up
The thousands of secret documents were delivered by an anonymous source to the German journalist, Adrian Zenz, who was also the first to accuse the Chinese regime in 2018 of having interned in “political re-education centers” to over a million Uyghur Muslims.
Beijing has always denied this figure, denouncing “the lie of the century” and stating that these sites are actually “vocational training centers” intended to deradicalize people tempted by Islamism or separatism, after a series of attacks that bloodied the region.
But the documents published this Tuesday tend to show that the presence of “trainees” in these centers is not voluntary. They are “tearing at the veneer of Chinese propaganda,” Zenz told the ‘BBC’.
Names such as Zeytunigul Ablehet, a 17-year-old girl arrested for listening to a prohibited speech, or 16-year-old Bilal Qasim, apparently convicted for his ties to other prisoners, appear among the more than 2,800 leaked police photos of detainees.
The Uyghurs, a majority in Xinjiang but a minority in China
You can also see photos of Anihan Hamit, a 73-year-old woman who is the oldest on the list. Not all the images are mug shots of the prisoners, other photos show guards armed with batons holding down a prisoner who is chained up.
The leaked documents now support the idea of a crackdown ordered from the top of the Chinese state. A speech attributed to Police Minister Zhao Kezhi in 2018 explains that President Xi Jinping ordered the expansion of detention centers.
According to Zhao, at least two million people in southern Xinjiang are “severely influenced by the infiltration of extremist thought.”
Uyghurs make up almost the majority of Xinjiang’s population of 26 million. In a 2017 speech, Chen Quanguo, then the region’s chief, ordered guards to shoot anyone trying to escape “the re-education centers” and to “keep a close watch on believers” in Xinjiang.
After the leak of the documents, Beijing has defended itself by assuring that they are only “the latest example of the denigration of Xinjiang carried out by anti-Chinese forces”, according to the spokesman for Chinese diplomacy, Wang Wenbin.
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