“No reason has anything to do with terrorism” – News International: Asia & Oceania

The bureaucracy of repression, spelled out in a table. Printed for 137 pages, with personal details of more than 2,000 people, all members of the Uighur people, at home in China, in the Karakax district in southern Xinjiang, between the Karakoram Mountains and the Taklamakan Desert.

The table pays particular attention to hundreds of people who all have one thing in common: they were torn from their everyday lives, their families and their jobs and instructed in institutions that the document called “training” or “training centers”. This is the Chinese government’s euphemism for the vast network of internment camps it has set up in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region in northwest China, home of the mostly Muslim Uyghurs. Experts estimate that a total of more than one million people are imprisoned there.

The Karakax list has been leaked to several international media. The document, the most recent entry of which is from March 2019, makes a recommendation for more than 300 people whether they should be locked up after the end of their one-year internment or released from the camps. These are re-education camps where people are to be “de-radicalized” as the Chinese government calls it. People who, according to her, are “infected with unhealthy thoughts”.

Reason for instruction: “Wears shorts”

What is meant are thoughts about Uyghur culture, Uyghur language and religion. They are people against whom there are no charges and no legal proceedings, who are therefore not legally at fault, but who are often given the term “worrying” or “not trustworthy” in the table – Beijing ultimately sees potential in them terrorists.

• Case 1 for example. Male. Interned in training center No. 1, briefing on May 23, 2017. Reason for the briefing: «1. His wife used to wear a veil. 2. Has four children more than allowed. »
• Case 4. Male, Training Center No. 1, briefing on March 11, 2018. Reason for the briefing: “He is a worrying person from the generation of those born in the 1980s.”
• Case 560. Male. Reason for the briefing: «Has grown a beard and wears shorts, hints at Wahhabi thoughts.»
• Case 568. «A worrying person from the generation born in the 1990s. He didn’t open his restaurant normally during Ramadan. » (So ​​he adhered to Muslim Lent.)
• Case 597. Woman, training center No. 2. Reason for instruction: «1. She applied for a passport without leaving the country. 2. She gave birth to two children too many. »
• Case 666. “Has had business relationships with sensitive countries four times.” (For China, these are states with a majority Muslim population.)

Again: According to the Karakax list, for all these points (long beard, shorts, too many children, fasting in Ramadan, passport applied for, business relationships to the wrong country) people have been locked up in camps for a year or more. There have been indications for a long time that these camps exist. The publication of the China Cables by the International Network of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) last November finally proved that the alleged “schools” were actually barbed wire and watchtowers: locked, tightly guarded, and geared towards political indoctrination.

Try to keep an entire people at bay

The Karakax list is another document about the Xinjiang storage system, which apparently comes directly from the Chinese administration. In the bureaucratic jargon of the Chinese Communist Party, it provides evidence of the largest internment of an ethnic-religious minority of the present. The document confirms what is known from interviews with former inmates.

It shows for the first time in detail and from the inside how the infantry of the surveillance and warehouse machinery, the district and community officials organize the internment at the grassroots. It shows the banal reasons why people end up in the camp and how the party’s apparatus tries to keep whole families and ultimately a whole people at bay with the threat of internment.

«In its effects, this sometimes reminds of medieval witch hunts»Adrian Zenz, Chinese scientist

The German Chinese scientist Adrian Zenz, who has done research like no other in recent years to prove the existence of the camps, has examined the Karakax list. He was able to verify the identity of many of the internees listed from other sources and considers the list to be authentic. This coincides with the assessment of other experts.

For Zenz, the Karakax list is “the strongest evidence so far that Beijing is actively pursuing and punishing normal traditional religious practices in direct violation of its own constitution”. The document speaks of the party’s fear of any kind of religiousness, a fear that sometimes has the effects of “medieval witch hunts”.

Watchtower and barbed wire: A Chinese scientist calls internment an “enormous act of collective punishment”. Photo: Keystone / AP / Ng Han Guan

For the Chinese scientist Rian Thum from the University of Nottingham, one thing is particularly surprising: “None of the listed reasons for which they have sent people to the camps have anything to do with terrorism,” he said on request. Thum has been studying Islam in China for a long time. The Karakax list, says Thum, supports the view that the mass internment of the Uyghurs is an «enormous act of collective punishment».

There have been individual acts of violence and terrorist attacks in Xinjiang in the past decade. “But locking up a million people in internment camps is not a healthy answer to the violence of a few dozen people,” says Thum. In fact, the reasons for internment mentioned in the list are sometimes “extremely banal”.

Traveling Uighurs are suspicious

Occasionally there are points in the document as a reason for internment, such as “downloading videos of extremist content” – although it remains unclear what exactly makes the videos “extremist”. The overwhelming part, however, came under suspicion for simple things that are also normal in China outside of Xinjiang. “Has relatives abroad” is mentioned several times in the list as a reason for internment, or: “Has spoken to people abroad.”

Uyghurs who leave their homeland to travel within China are equally suspicious. A taxi driver on the list, for example, ended up in the camp because of his many long-distance journeys. Others were interned because “their thinking is difficult to make out”.

Around a million Uighurs are said to be interned in camps or forced to work in factories. Image: Keystone / Planet Labs via AP

It is the fear of a state with totalitarian control addiction that speaks from the list. A state in which there is an automatic presumption of guilt rather than innocence. One can become suspicious in such a state solely by belonging to a certain generation, the generation born in the 1980s or 1990s, for example, a term that appears almost 100 times in the document, always with the addition «bu fangxin », Which can be translated as« worrying »or« not trustworthy ». 90 percent of all internees are men, the majority of them are between 25 and 49 years old.

The control often has no end after the camp detention

The Karakax list is also evidence of clans. A pious family or a wife who once wore a face veil are considered internment reasons. In some cases, both parents are in state custody – there are now many reports of thousands of Uyghur children for whom the state has apparently built boarding schools, where children are taught love for the party and China, and where “school is the place of parents.” occupies », as the propaganda puts it.

The recommendation for dismissal includes those who “recognize their mistakes”, “show remorse” and “reform their thinking”. This is awarded to around three quarters of the people in the list. For the majority of those to be released, another recommendation is made, “Continuation of surveillance at the place of residence registration”, for example by the Neighborhood Committee at home.

Some are said to be sent to a factory after the labor camp. In other words, control has no end for most people even after being held in camp. If the mechanisms that the Karakax list shows remain in force, Xinjiang researcher Zenz judges, then every minority research in the region will “increasingly resemble autopsy on a corpse”.

Created: 2/17/2020, 6:48 PM