A rare and huge leak of Chinese government documents has shed new light on a security crackdown on Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region, where President Xi Jinping ordered officials to act with “absolutely no mercy” against separatism and extremism, The New York Times reported.
Human rights groups and outside experts say more than one million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim minorities have been rounded up in a network of internment camps across the far-western region.
https://twitter.com/austinramzy/status/1195688077731061760
The 403 pages of internal papers obtained by the New York Times provide an unprecedented look into the highly-secretive Communist Party’s controversial crackdown, which has come under increasing international criticism, especially from the United States.
The documents include previously unpublished speeches by Xi as well as directives and reports on the surveillance and control of the Uighur population, the newspaper said on the weekend.
The leak also suggests that there has been some discontent within the party about the crackdown.
The documents show that “there was resistance on a local level” with local officials who disagreed with the policy facing punishment or being purged, Leibold told AFP.
The documents were leaked by an unnamed member of the Chinese political establishment who expressed hope that the disclosure would prevent the leadership, including Xi, from “escaping culpability for the mass detentions”, the Times said.
In a 2014 speech to officials made after militants from the Uighur minority killed 31 people in a train station in southwestern China, Xi called for an all-out “struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism” using the “organs of dictatorship,” and showing “absolutely no mercy”, according to the daily.
Read more: Harsh Turkish condemnation of Xinjiang cracks Muslim wall of silence
The internment camps expanded rapidly following the appointment in 2016 of a new party chief in Xinjiang, Chen Quanguo. Chen, according to the Times, distributed Xi’s speeches to justify the crackdown and urged officials to “round up everyone who should be rounded up”.
Reputed within the party for his handling of minority groups, Chen earlier led iron-fisted policies aimed at crushing dissent in Tibet. The trove of leaked documents included a guide to answering questions from students who had returned home to Xinjiang to find their families missing or detained in camps.
Xi hadn't called for the camps, but under Chen, "[n]ew security controls and a drastic expansion of the indoctrination camps followed." And there you have it: Chen Quango takes a speech by his Party Secretary to its extreme and his career trajectory is heading upward. 13/
— Amy Sommers (she/her) 李雅美 🪷 (@AmySommers1) November 17, 2019
Officials were instructed to say the students’ family members had been infected with the “virus” of extremist thinking and needed to be treated before “a small illness becomes a serious one”.
China’s foreign ministry and the Xinjiang regional government did not immediately respond to AFP’s requests for comment.
China insists such reports are part of a larger Western propaganda against China. Reports covering Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in western media is said to be riddled with misleading headlines, groundless accusations, obscure reporting and double standards.
Read more: Xinjiang crackdown at the heart of China’s Belt and Road
Fabrication of truth is an issue repeatedly criticised. China claims the camps reported are vocational education and training centres, and the pejorative label ‘concentration camp’ has a negative connotation that invokes imagery of Nazism.
“For me, you haven’t seen things like this since the 1930s,” said Michael Kozak, head of the US State Department’s human rights and democracy bureau, at a news briefing on March 13 about China’s treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang.
His statement were criticised by people on the opposing side of the issue saying parallels can not be drawn between nazism and the Chinese government’s treatment of Uighurs as Nazis murdered jews who had done nothing wrong while the regional government in Xinjiang is only trying to limit the actions of those who have committed crimes or are suspected of terrorism.
The UN estimates 1 million #Uighurs are being forcibly held in detention in China’s Xinjiang province. The government says they are voluntary ‘vocational training centres’. @AJ101Est hears accounts from those who have been inside: https://t.co/jt3SstIIAa pic.twitter.com/Cmsm39XwVj
— 101 East (@AJ101East) February 25, 2019
‘Black and white’ confirmation
The documents also shed light on the party’s punishment of one official, Wang Yongzhi, who was investigated from 2017 to 2018 for disobeying party orders.
Wang released on his own initiative more than 7,000 people from camps in Xinjiang, and feared that “rounding up so many people would knowingly fan conflict and deepen resentment”, according to a confession by Wang leaked to the Times.
The leak also suggests that there has been some discontent within the party about the crackdown.
China, after initially denying the camps, has described them as vocational schools aimed at dampening the allure of Islamist extremism and violence through education and job training.
But rights groups and foreign media, including AFP, have reported that official documents and satellite images show the facilities are equipped and run like prisons.
Read more: Senior UN counter terrorism official to visit China’s Xinjiang region
The leak “confirms in black and white, in the party’s own words, its conscious and systematic extrajudicial mass internment of Muslims in Xinjiang,” said James Leibold, an expert on ethnic relations in China and a professor at Melbourne’s La Trobe University.
The documents show that “there was resistance on a local level” with local officials who disagreed with the policy facing punishment or being purged, Leibold told AFP.
Additionally, he said, the fact that the documents were leaked is “a significant indicator that there are many inside the party who think this is an unwise policy and wish to hold Xi Jinping and Chen Quanguo accountable”.