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An investigation of 17 international media, including EL PAÍS, documents Beijing's surveillance, persecution and forced internment practices against the Uighur minority.

n a single week, the one that took place from June 19 to 25, 2017, the Chinese government identified 24,412 people from its Muslim minority as "suspects" of extremism . 706 ended up in jail. Another 15,683 ended up in what Beijing euphemistically calls "centers of ideological education and professional training." In these internment camps, a black hole of the repression of the Chinese regime against the Uyghur ethnic group, the inmates enter without prior trial and remain at least one year, until their "ideological transformation" culminates.

These are massive operations, currently in force, which are carried out under the strictest secrecy thanks to a macrosystem for monitoring and processing personal data. The details, included in a series of confidential documents exchanged between senior officials of the administration of the Communist Party of China (PCC), guide the magnitude of the repression to which the second world power subjects this Muslim population residing in Xinjiang, a region in the northwest strip of the country.

Around 11 million Uyghurs reside in the area, of vital importance in the new silk route designed by Beijing.It is the predominant ethnic group on the western border of the Asian giant; In the rest of the country, most Chinese citizens, as well as the power cadres of the communist regime, belong to the Han ethnic group. They are separated by geography, culture, traits and, above all, religion. The forced transfer of thousands of citizens to the region resulted in a loss of weight of the Uyghurs, today less than half of the population, and a violent escalation between ethnic groups in 2009. About 200 people lost their lives. As Nicolás de Pedro, head of research at the Institute for Statecraft in London, points out, “the arrival of them has generated a tension that was staged even in the most basic: Uyghur houses were thrown to make room for Chinese multi-storey buildings. And they were painted as a group of terrorist fans,

The secret documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and shared with 17 media - including The New York Times , Le Monde and EL PAÍS, the only publication in Spanish - allow recreating, through of the guidelines of the senior officials that administer the region, the methods that the Government of Xi Jinping has put in place to lock around one million Uighurs in detention centers, according to figures endorsed by the UN before the secrecy of the official speech . [ Read the nine keys to understand the research ]

The archives also document convictions without evidence and hunt exiles through their network of embassies. This repression, systematic, organized and massive, uses a digital platform that aggregates innumerable data from techniques that range from the use of mobile applications to facial recognition through cameras. It acts as a system of surveillance and tracking systems to identify “suspects”. The Beijing Government, consulted for this investigation, denies the repression. He says that the separatist protests in Xinjiang - now strongly contained - have turned the region into "a key battlefield against terrorism and religious extremism."

Among the files obtained by the ICIJ, dated in 2017 - the year in which the Xi Jinping regime intensified its offensive against the Uyghurs - highlights a confidential telegram signed by Zhu Hailun, then head of security in Xinjiang and number twopolitician in the region. Aimed at all local prefectures, it gives direct indications on how to manage these centers that they call "ideological education" and "training." Details such as the double closing of the bedroom doors of the so-called "students" or the existence of a video surveillance system without blind spots illustrate well the severity of the protocols. The inmates remain in the center until they reach the required scores in the frequent exams and complete their "de-radicalization" in the official jargon.

Zhu Hailun, the signatory of the documents, is a key man of the party in Xinjiang. The experts consider him executor of the guidelines of Chen Quanguo, secretary of the CCP and top political leader in the region. Chen took over the region in August 2016, following the repression campaign launched precisely against the separatists in Tibet (his work has been rewarded with a place in the party's Politburo). The hard-handed campaign that characterizes Xi Jinping's mandate is based on the “national security” strategy that has reinforced the fight against dissent, the press, protests in Hong Kong, or is trying to quell outbreaks of separatism. Europe has been becoming increasingly aware of these excesses. The last example has been theSakharov Prize award to Professor of Economics Ilham Tohti, one of the victims of this repressive escalation. The EuroCam granted him the award, which recognizes freedom of conscience, last October.

The ICIJ filtering also includes four June 2017 newsletters classified as secrets addressed to those responsible for the CCP in the Political and Legal Affairs Commissions, the highest bodies responsible for complying with the legislation at the local level. A side note details that you have to deliver them "with maximum speed" to "organize operations." Throughout several pages, they detail how to take advantage of the so-called Integrated Joint Operation Platform, a data collection system that is used, as these documents demonstrate for the first time, to identify suspects and intern them in the fields at least since the beginning of 2017

A very brief judicial sentence completes the filtered materials. The text attests to the weakness of an alleged judicial process that confines an Uighur citizen to a long period of imprisonment from charges without supporting evidence. His crime was to harangue his work colleagues - among other things, against porn - which for the Chinese authorities constitutes a sign of Muslim extremism.

The "ideological training"

Xinjiang, with 23 million inhabitants - half of the population of Spain - is one of the priority regions for Beijing in its campaign for "stability" and against "terrorism." The Government has admitted in 2018 the existence of the camps, defending their usefulness in the fight against Islamic extremism. In 2017, the year in which the first testimonies of the presence of internment camps are collected, the number of detainees multiplied by eight compared to the previous year. According to official data, the 227,000 prisoners in the region represented 21% of prisoners across the country .

Pressed by external criticism, the Government of Xi spoke for the first time of these centers in August of this year, with the publication of a white paper. The regime claimed that it is a "strictly internal" issue arising from its "fight against violence, terrorism and separatism." But he did not offer data on how many people have passed through the camps. The UN estimates that nearly one million people (9% of Xinjiang's Uighur population) are locked there. Consulted by EL PAÍS for this research work, the Chinese embassy in Madrid has not provided details or wanted to explain whether it offers a different treatment to Uyghurs who approach diplomatic units.

The facilities, according to confidential papers, have to remain secret: " We have to ensure that our staff is aware that [this] is kept secret, of the seriousness of political discipline and secrecy." The centers have video cameras carefully placed to record in real time “without any blind angle.” The staff that manages the field should not take an eye off any of the inmates . The control extends to the privacy of the inmates, whose daily activities are “closely managed to prevent escapes during classes, meals, breaks to go to the bathroom or to take a shower ”.

The descriptions marry the few dozen existing stories of the Uyghurs who have managed to go abroad after being interned. The Uyghur World Congress estimates that there is a diaspora of between 1 and 1.6 million Uyghurs scattered between Australia, Turkey, Europe (mainly Germany) and the United States. In Spain, according to Mario Esteban, an expert in China from the Elcano Royal Institute, there is no evidence that there is a community of this Chinese minority. Zumrat Dawut, 37, a resident of the United States since April of this year, spent three months in a center in the west of the region, between April and June 2018: “There were no beds as such, but a place on the ground To lay down We didn't all fit, so at night one half slept and the other didn't. The bathrooms were open to everyone, so if anyone used them, anyone could see it, ”Zumrat tells the ICIJ media. “They took us to class with shackles on their feet and handcuffs on their hands. And there were cameras, they could see every corner and everyone we were there, ”he recalls. Zumrat was able to leave after a group of Uighur men among whom was her husband, a Pakistani citizen, denounced the embassy of her country and the international press in Beijing the disappearance of their respective partners.

Emblematic cases also include that of Rebiya Kaader, a leading entrepreneur and, for many, a kind of community leader. In 2005 he had to leave the country after five years in prison. Today he lives in the United States and much of his family in Xinjiang is locked in these internment camps.

The ideological training forces the Uyghurs, who speak a Turkic language closer to Uzbek than to Chinese, to learn Mandarin, the official language in the country, until it is introduced into their daily lives. Field staff must "effectively resolve students' ideological contradictions and keep them from bad emotions," explains a bulletin. "Starting with daily life, health, etiquette and good manners, reinforcing control and habits and cultivating the good health of students, civilization, courtesy and obedience," he continues. It is forbidden, as evidenced by journalists and externals collected by the ICIJ, to use the expression " salaam alaikum ", a greeting in Arabic used by the Muslim community.

In addition to control, the day-to-day center serves to "solve the ideological problems" of inmates. Guards should monitor their "abnormal emotions" in the name of the security of the place and to avoid "abnormal deaths." Possible deaths in the camps, of which there is only one mention in the documents, find echoes in the complaints of Uyghur refugees in other countries. Some testimonies, citing anonymous police officers, have reported the death of at least 150 people in the Aksu camp in the north of the region.

Outdoor surveillance Surveillance is not limited to Chinese territory. One of the leaked newsletters, dated June 16, 2017, is 1,535 citizens of Xinjiang who have obtained a foreign nationality. Of these, 637 would have entered the country since June 1, 2016, although only 75 would have been located and identified within Chinese territory. Zhu Hailun, the top security officer in Xinjiang, asks the province authorities to turn to local security forces to study on a case-by-case basis: those who have “canceled their citizenship” and for whom suspicion cannot be ruled out of terrorism should be expelled; those who had not canceled it should be taken to training centers.

Ablimit Tursun, isolated in Belgium since last year, is one of the escaped from Chinese repression. Ablimit fled to this country during a work trip to Turkey knowing that his brother had been arrested and he could suffer the same fate. At the end of last May, his wife and four children, residents in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, went to the Belgian embassy in Beijing to obtain visas and join him. The documents were not ready, the family was arrested by the Chinese police upon leaving the diplomatic mission and transferred back to Urumqi. “The police have visited them very often,” says Ablimit in videoconference with EL PAÍS. "It's not every day, it seems that surveillance has loosened and has been replaced by another technology."

https://elpais.com/internacional/2019/11/24/actualidad/1574585084_949708.html

**An investigation of 17 international media, including EL PAÍS, documents Beijing's surveillance, persecution and forced internment practices against the Uighur minority.** n a single week, the one that took place from June 19 to 25, 2017, the Chinese government identified 24,412 people from its Muslim minority as "suspects" of extremism . 706 ended up in jail. Another 15,683 ended up in what Beijing euphemistically calls "centers of ideological education and professional training." In these internment camps, a black hole of the repression of the Chinese regime against the Uyghur ethnic group, the inmates enter without prior trial and remain at least one year, until their "ideological transformation" culminates. These are massive operations, currently in force, which are carried out under the strictest secrecy thanks to a macrosystem for monitoring and processing personal data. The details, included in a series of confidential documents exchanged between senior officials of the administration of the Communist Party of China (PCC), guide the magnitude of the repression to which the second world power subjects this Muslim population residing in Xinjiang, a region in the northwest strip of the country. Around 11 million Uyghurs reside in the area, of vital importance in the new silk route designed by Beijing.It is the predominant ethnic group on the western border of the Asian giant; In the rest of the country, most Chinese citizens, as well as the power cadres of the communist regime, belong to the Han ethnic group. They are separated by geography, culture, traits and, above all, religion. The forced transfer of thousands of citizens to the region resulted in a loss of weight of the Uyghurs, today less than half of the population, and a violent escalation between ethnic groups in 2009. About 200 people lost their lives. As Nicolás de Pedro, head of research at the Institute for Statecraft in London, points out, “the arrival of them has generated a tension that was staged even in the most basic: Uyghur houses were thrown to make room for Chinese multi-storey buildings. And they were painted as a group of terrorist fans, The secret documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and shared with 17 media - including The New York Times , Le Monde and EL PAÍS, the only publication in Spanish - allow recreating, through of the guidelines of the senior officials that administer the region, the methods that the Government of Xi Jinping has put in place to lock around one million Uighurs in detention centers, according to figures endorsed by the UN before the secrecy of the official speech . [ Read the nine keys to understand the research ] The archives also document convictions without evidence and hunt exiles through their network of embassies. This repression, systematic, organized and massive, uses a digital platform that aggregates innumerable data from techniques that range from the use of mobile applications to facial recognition through cameras. It acts as a system of surveillance and tracking systems to identify “suspects”. The Beijing Government, consulted for this investigation, denies the repression. He says that the separatist protests in Xinjiang - now strongly contained - have turned the region into "a key battlefield against terrorism and religious extremism." Among the files obtained by the ICIJ, dated in 2017 - the year in which the Xi Jinping regime intensified its offensive against the Uyghurs - highlights a confidential telegram signed by Zhu Hailun, then head of security in Xinjiang and number twopolitician in the region. Aimed at all local prefectures, it gives direct indications on how to manage these centers that they call "ideological education" and "training." Details such as the double closing of the bedroom doors of the so-called "students" or the existence of a video surveillance system without blind spots illustrate well the severity of the protocols. The inmates remain in the center until they reach the required scores in the frequent exams and complete their "de-radicalization" in the official jargon. Zhu Hailun, the signatory of the documents, is a key man of the party in Xinjiang. The experts consider him executor of the guidelines of Chen Quanguo, secretary of the CCP and top political leader in the region. Chen took over the region in August 2016, following the repression campaign launched precisely against the separatists in Tibet (his work has been rewarded with a place in the party's Politburo). The hard-handed campaign that characterizes Xi Jinping's mandate is based on the “national security” strategy that has reinforced the fight against dissent, the press, protests in Hong Kong, or is trying to quell outbreaks of separatism. Europe has been becoming increasingly aware of these excesses. The last example has been theSakharov Prize award to Professor of Economics Ilham Tohti, one of the victims of this repressive escalation. The EuroCam granted him the award, which recognizes freedom of conscience, last October. The ICIJ filtering also includes four June 2017 newsletters classified as secrets addressed to those responsible for the CCP in the Political and Legal Affairs Commissions, the highest bodies responsible for complying with the legislation at the local level. A side note details that you have to deliver them "with maximum speed" to "organize operations." Throughout several pages, they detail how to take advantage of the so-called Integrated Joint Operation Platform, a data collection system that is used, as these documents demonstrate for the first time, to identify suspects and intern them in the fields at least since the beginning of 2017 A very brief judicial sentence completes the filtered materials. The text attests to the weakness of an alleged judicial process that confines an Uighur citizen to a long period of imprisonment from charges without supporting evidence. His crime was to harangue his work colleagues - among other things, against porn - which for the Chinese authorities constitutes a sign of Muslim extremism. **The "ideological training"** Xinjiang, with 23 million inhabitants - half of the population of Spain - is one of the priority regions for Beijing in its campaign for "stability" and against "terrorism." The Government has admitted in 2018 the existence of the camps, defending their usefulness in the fight against Islamic extremism. In 2017, the year in which the first testimonies of the presence of internment camps are collected, the number of detainees multiplied by eight compared to the previous year. According to official data, the 227,000 prisoners in the region represented 21% of prisoners across the country . Pressed by external criticism, the Government of Xi spoke for the first time of these centers in August of this year, with the publication of a white paper. The regime claimed that it is a "strictly internal" issue arising from its "fight against violence, terrorism and separatism." But he did not offer data on how many people have passed through the camps. The UN estimates that nearly one million people (9% of Xinjiang's Uighur population) are locked there. Consulted by EL PAÍS for this research work, the Chinese embassy in Madrid has not provided details or wanted to explain whether it offers a different treatment to Uyghurs who approach diplomatic units. The facilities, according to confidential papers, have to remain secret: " We have to ensure that our staff is aware that [this] is kept secret, of the seriousness of political discipline and secrecy." The centers have video cameras carefully placed to record in real time “without any blind angle.” The staff that manages the field should not take an eye off any of the inmates . The control extends to the privacy of the inmates, whose daily activities are “closely managed to prevent escapes during classes, meals, breaks to go to the bathroom or to take a shower ”. The descriptions marry the few dozen existing stories of the Uyghurs who have managed to go abroad after being interned. The Uyghur World Congress estimates that there is a diaspora of between 1 and 1.6 million Uyghurs scattered between Australia, Turkey, Europe (mainly Germany) and the United States. In Spain, according to Mario Esteban, an expert in China from the Elcano Royal Institute, there is no evidence that there is a community of this Chinese minority. Zumrat Dawut, 37, a resident of the United States since April of this year, spent three months in a center in the west of the region, between April and June 2018: “There were no beds as such, but a place on the ground To lay down We didn't all fit, so at night one half slept and the other didn't. The bathrooms were open to everyone, so if anyone used them, anyone could see it, ”Zumrat tells the ICIJ media. “They took us to class with shackles on their feet and handcuffs on their hands. And there were cameras, they could see every corner and everyone we were there, ”he recalls. Zumrat was able to leave after a group of Uighur men among whom was her husband, a Pakistani citizen, denounced the embassy of her country and the international press in Beijing the disappearance of their respective partners. Emblematic cases also include that of Rebiya Kaader, a leading entrepreneur and, for many, a kind of community leader. In 2005 he had to leave the country after five years in prison. Today he lives in the United States and much of his family in Xinjiang is locked in these internment camps. The ideological training forces the Uyghurs, who speak a Turkic language closer to Uzbek than to Chinese, to learn Mandarin, the official language in the country, until it is introduced into their daily lives. Field staff must "effectively resolve students' ideological contradictions and keep them from bad emotions," explains a bulletin. "Starting with daily life, health, etiquette and good manners, reinforcing control and habits and cultivating the good health of students, civilization, courtesy and obedience," he continues. It is forbidden, as evidenced by journalists and externals collected by the ICIJ, to use the expression " salaam alaikum ", a greeting in Arabic used by the Muslim community. In addition to control, the day-to-day center serves to "solve the ideological problems" of inmates. Guards should monitor their "abnormal emotions" in the name of the security of the place and to avoid "abnormal deaths." Possible deaths in the camps, of which there is only one mention in the documents, find echoes in the complaints of Uyghur refugees in other countries. Some testimonies, citing anonymous police officers, have reported the death of at least 150 people in the Aksu camp in the north of the region. Outdoor surveillance Surveillance is not limited to Chinese territory. One of the leaked newsletters, dated June 16, 2017, is 1,535 citizens of Xinjiang who have obtained a foreign nationality. Of these, 637 would have entered the country since June 1, 2016, although only 75 would have been located and identified within Chinese territory. Zhu Hailun, the top security officer in Xinjiang, asks the province authorities to turn to local security forces to study on a case-by-case basis: those who have “canceled their citizenship” and for whom suspicion cannot be ruled out of terrorism should be expelled; those who had not canceled it should be taken to training centers. Ablimit Tursun, isolated in Belgium since last year, is one of the escaped from Chinese repression. Ablimit fled to this country during a work trip to Turkey knowing that his brother had been arrested and he could suffer the same fate. At the end of last May, his wife and four children, residents in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, went to the Belgian embassy in Beijing to obtain visas and join him. The documents were not ready, the family was arrested by the Chinese police upon leaving the diplomatic mission and transferred back to Urumqi. “The police have visited them very often,” says Ablimit in videoconference with EL PAÍS. "It's not every day, it seems that surveillance has loosened and has been replaced by another technology." https://elpais.com/internacional/2019/11/24/actualidad/1574585084_949708.html

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