What is happening in the re-education camps in China’s Xinjiang Province? Thousands of new pictures and documents show the crimes committed against the Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities.
Around a million Uyghurs are being held in the Chinese province of Xinjiang.
A Uyghur woman has been missing for five years and nobody knows what happened to her. Now a research team from international media – including the BBC and “Der Spiegel” – is presenting a shocking bundle of images and documents in the form of the “Xinjiang Police Files”.
The documents show, among other things, that the Uyghur woman in question was sentenced to 16 years in prison. The accusation: the organization of an unregistered event – in other countries, at best, an administrative offense. The journalists tracked down the disappeared’s husband, who identified his wife in the submitted pictures. He himself was on a business trip abroad in 2017 when his wife was arrested and was unable to return. He doesn’t know anything about the whereabouts of their children, he suspects that they are in a Chinese orphanage.
A torture chair called «tiger chair»
It is fate like this that shows the brutality of Chinese policy towards the Muslim Uyghur minority, around a million of whom are believed to be in re-education camps. For a long time, satellite images were among the few documents pointing to the re-education camps. They show, for example, how the Tekes camp is getting bigger and bigger. The “Xinjiang Police Files” now show pictures from inside the camps. There are now names and identification numbers for the thousands of human rights crimes, most of which take place in secret.
Under the pretext of fighting terrorism, Uyghurs and members of other Muslim minorities such as Kazakhs have been held in the camps for years. The anthropologist Adrian Zenz, who was also given the documents of the “Xinjiang Files”, speaks in “Spiegel” of a “systematic crime against humanity”, even of genocide.
According to Zenz, the “Xinjiang Files” are “like a window into a police state” from which little information otherwise escapes. “We’ve never seen anything like it.”
The Chinese government never tires of explaining that the re-education camps that have been set up in Xinjiang province since 2017 are just “schools” where people attend voluntarily. This too would be questionable enough. But the documents that have now been verified show internal instructions for the police, for the security guards, and they show never-before-seen recordings of internees. There are cases of 70-year-olds who are suddenly supposed to get “vocational training”. Pictures show detainees sitting on a “tiger chair” surrounded by heavily armed guards.
Arbitrary, draconian judgments
The research shows how the widespread allegation of terrorism, under which thousands of Uyghurs have been sent to official prisons, is used as a pretext for a parallel method of detention. According to the BBC and “Spiegel”, the police documents are full of arbitrary, draconian judgments.
The documents provide some of the strongest evidence yet of a policy directed against almost any expression of Uyghur identity, culture or Islamic beliefs – and a chain of command that stretches all the way to Chinese leader Xi Jinping, the BBC writes.