Huizhong Wu and Dake Kang, Associated Press, published Monday, May 16, 2022, 6:17 AM EDT
BEIJING (AP) – Nearly one in 25 people in China’s Uyghur district has been sentenced to prison on terrorism charges, the highest known prison rate in the world, according to a review of the Associated Press. . shows.
A list obtained and partially confirmed by the AP cites the names of more than 10,000 Uighurs sent to prison in Konasheher County alone, one of dozens in southern Xinjiang. In recent years, China has carried out brutal repression against Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim minority it has described as a war on terror.
The list is the largest ever to appear, with the names of imprisoned Uighurs, reflecting the large-scale campaign of the Chinese government, through which about a million or more people were thrown into internment camps and prisons. He also reaffirmed what families and human rights groups have been saying for years: China relies on a long-term imprisonment system to keep Uighurs under control, using the law as a weapon of repression.
Under fierce international criticism, Chinese officials have announced the closure in 2019 of short-term out-of-court internment camps where Uighurs have been thrown without charge. However, despite the focus on the camps, thousands of Uighurs are still serving years or even decades in prison for what experts say are fabricated accusations of terrorism.
Uighur farmer Rozikari Tohti was known as a quiet, family-loving man with three children and was not at all interested in religion. So his cousin Mihrigul Musa was shocked to find out that Tohti had been imprisoned for five years for “religious extremism.” She said she knew others were more likely to be swept away in Xinjiang’s crackdown on religion, such as another cousin who prays every week but not Tohti.
“I never thought he would be arrested,” said Musa, who now lives in exile in Norway. “If you see it, you will feel the same way. He’s so serious. “
From the list, Musa learned that Tohti’s younger brother Abilimikh Tohti was also sentenced to seven years on charges of “gathering the public for disturbing public order.” Tohti’s close neighbor, a farmer named Nurmemet Davut, was sentenced to 11 years in prison on the same charges as “picking up quarrels and causing problems.”
Konasheher County is typical of rural southern Xinjiang and is home to more than 267,000 people. Sentences in the entire county ranged from two to 25 years, averaging nine years, the list said. While the people on the list were mostly arrested in 2017, according to the Uighurs in exile, their sentences are so long that the vast majority will still be in prison.
They were swept away from all walks of life and included men, women, young people and the elderly. They had only one thing in common: they were all Uighurs.
Experts say this clearly shows that the people were targeted simply because they were Uighurs, a conclusion strongly denied by the Chinese authorities. Xinjiang spokesman Elian Anayat said the sentences were carried out in accordance with the law.
“We would never target specific regions, ethnic groups or religions, much less Uighurs,” Anayat said. “We would never confuse the good, nor would we miss the bad.”
The list offers the broadest and most detailed view of who is in Xinjiang Prison. It was obtained from Xinjiang scholar Jin Bunin from an anonymous source who described himself as a member of the Chinese Chinese majority, “opposed to the Chinese government’s policy in Xinjiang.”
The list was handed over to the AP by Abduveli Ayup, an Uighur exiled linguist in Norway. The AP confirmed this through interviews with eight Uighurs who identified 194 people on the list, as well as legal messages, recordings of telephone conversations with Chinese officials and checks at addresses, birthdays and identity numbers.
The list does not include people with typical criminal charges such as murder or theft. Rather, it focuses on crimes related to terrorism, religious extremism or vague accusations traditionally used against political dissidents, such as “raising quarrels and provoking problems.” This means that the real number of prisoners is almost certainly higher.
But even with a conservative estimate, the percentage of prisons in Konasheher County is more than 10 times higher than in the United States, one of the world’s leading prisoners, according to Justice Department statistics. In addition, it is more than 30 times higher than in China as a whole, according to state statistics from 2013, when such data were last published.
Darren Bayler, an expert on the Xinjiang Mass Detention System, said most arrests were arbitrary and illegal, with people being detained for having relatives abroad or downloading certain mobile phone apps. He has documented arrest quotas for local police, in some cases leading to the gathering of men from entire villages and the eviction of entire families from their homes.
“It’s really remarkable,” Baylor said. “Nowhere else have we seen entire populations of people described as terrorists or treated as terrorists. …. The state is trying to reconsider the narrative and say, you know, all these people are actually criminals. ”
China has struggled for decades to control Xinjiang, where Uighurs have long resented Beijing’s brutal rule, leading to violent clashes with the Khan-dominated government. With the 9/11 attacks in the United States, Chinese officials began using the specter of terrorism to justify strict controls.
The crackdown erupted in 2017 after a series of knives and bombings by a small handful of Uighur extremists. The Chinese government has defended mass arrests as legal and necessary to fight terrorism.
In 2019, Xinjiang officials declared the short-term detention camps closed and said that all those they described as “interns” were “graduates.” Visits by journalists from the Associated Press to four former camps confirmed that they had been closed or converted to other facilities.
But the prisons remain. Xinjiang began building prisons in tandem with repression, and even when the camps were closed, the prisons expanded. At least several camps have been turned into detention centers, including one that has been turned into a detention center twice the size of the Vatican and estimated to have a capacity of 10,000 or more.
Satellite imagery obtained and analyzed by BuzzFeed shows that by April 2021, the Chinese government had enough space in Xinjiang Prison to cover a third of Manhattan Island. Meanwhile, China has declared success in maintaining Xinjiang’s security.
“For the past five years, Xinjiang has been free of violent terrorist incidents,” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said in February. “People of all ethnicities have lived happy and peaceful lives.”
China is using the law “like a fig leaf of legality” in part to try to deflect international criticism of Uighur detention, said Jeremy Daum, a criminal law expert at Yale University’s China Center Paul Tsai.
“But obeying the law does not mean justice or fairness,” said Daum, who reviewed the data and was not involved in the leak. “It just means it’s legal.”
According to experts, in the last eight years, Chinese authorities have expanded the definition of extremism to include acts of religion such as running a long beard or wearing a veil. Some of the charges against prisoners on the list are new and specific to Xinjiang, such as “preparation for terrorism”, a charge that was redefined in 2016. The size of the sentences was “exceptional,” Daum added.
The plight of Nursimangul Abdureshid’s family shows how so-called “students” released from internment camps can simply be sent to prisons by the Chinese government instead.
“This is a complete lie, they are just trying to whitewash their crime,” said Abdureshid, who lives in exile in Turkey.
In 2017, a relative told Abdureshid that her parents and younger brother had been taken to study, a euphemism for short-term detention camps. Only three years later, in 2020, the Chinese embassy called her with information that all three had been arrested and sentenced to more than a decade in prison.
The leaked list is the first external confirmation of what happened to her brother after that call, she said. Her brother, Memetali Abdureshid, 32, was sentenced to 15 years and 11 months on charges of “picking up quarrels and causing problems” and “preparing to commit terrorist acts”.
Nursimangul Abdureshid saw eight names he recognized on the list, but not those of his parents. She and six other Uighur exiles who spoke to the AP say the list is incomplete because they have not seen some of the people they were close to, which means that the percentage of detainees may actually be even higher. .
The secret nature of the charges against Memetali and other detainees is a red flag, experts say. Although China makes legal files easily accessible otherwise, almost 90% of Xinjiang’s criminal files are not public.
A handful of leaks show that people have been accused of “terrorism” for acting as a warning to colleagues not to watch porn and swearing or praying in prison. In the most impressive cases, detainees in the camp were forced to confess to their “crimes” in group fake trials and transferred to prisons without independent lawyers to defend them.
Another Uighur from the town of Bulaksu, who now lives in exile, said he knew 100 people in …
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