BEIJING — A
leak of thousands of photos and official documents from Xinjiang has shed new
light on the violent methods used to enforce mass internment in the region,
researchers said Tuesday. The files, obtained by academic Adrian Zenz, were
published as UN human rights chief
Michelle Bachelet begins a long-awaited and
controversial trip to Xinjiang.
اضافة اعلان
Activists say
Chinese authorities have detained more than one million Uyghurs and other
mostly Muslim minorities in a network of detention centers and prisons in the
region, which Beijing has defended as “training centers”.
But the trove of
police photographs and internal documents — sent to Zenz by an anonymous source
who hacked into official databases in Xinjiang — add to evidence that the mass
internments were far from voluntary, with leaked documents showing top leaders
in Xi Jinpingincluding President
Xi Jinping calling for a forceful crackdown.
The files include
a 2017 internal speech by Chen Quanguo, a former Communist Party secretary in
Xinjiang, in which he allegedly orders guards to shoot to kill anyone who tries
to escape and calls for officials in the region to “exercise firm control over
religious believers”.
A 2018 internal
speech by public security minister Zhao Kezhi mentions direct orders from Xi to
increase the capacity of detention facilities. After initially denying their
existence,
Beijing has claimed the facilities are vocational training schools,
attended voluntarily and aimed at stamping out religious extremism.
But the leaked
documents give an insight into how leaders saw the minority population as a
security threat, with Zhao warning that more than two million people in
southern Xinjiang alone had been “severely influenced by the infiltration of
extremist religious thought”.
Mugshots
More than 2,800 police photos of
Xinjiang detainees included minors such
as 17-year-old Zeytunigul Ablehet, detained for listening to an illegal speech,
and 16-year-old Bilal Qasim, apparently sentenced for being related to other
detainees. The details echo a separate police list leaked earlier to AFP which
showed the government crackdown snaring hundreds of people at a time from
villages, often many from the same household.
“The sort of
paranoid threat perception comes out in these files, and the internal
justification for why one has to move against an entire population,” said Zenz
in video comments published alongside the leaked files. Zenz works for the
US-based non-profit organization the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
The files, parts of
which have been verified by multiple news organizations including the BBC and
Le Monde, also provide a window into life in detention facilities. Photos
appear to show officers restraining hooded and shackled inmates with batons,
while other guards wearing camouflage stand by with firearms.
UK Foreign
Secretary
Liz Truss on Tuesday called the details of the newly leaked documents
“shocking” and urged China to grant Bachelet “full and unfettered access to the
region so that she can conduct a thorough assessment of the facts on the
ground”.
But China’s foreign ministry dismissed the leaked documents
as “cobbled-together material” by “anti-China forces smearing Xinjiang”, with
spokesman Wang Wenbin accusing media of “spreading lies and rumors”.
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