China's Final Solution

US Secretary of State backs Mesut Özil in criticism of China’s Uighur persecution

• Mike Pompeo says Beijing can stop broadcasts of team’s soccer games but cannot hide rights violations
• Star midfielder slammed Chinese crackdown on social media last week, urging fellow Muslims around the world to speak up about plight of Uighurs

By Lee Jeong-ho in Hong Kong

Star midfielder Mesut Özil has criticized Muslim countries for not speaking up for minorities subjected to abuse in China. More than 1 million people have been sent to concentration camps in the East Turkestan colony.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo renewed his condemnations of China over human rights issues on Tuesday, tweeting out support for Mesut Ozil, a star midfielder for Arsenal of the English Premier League, and the criticisms Ozil had made of China's treatment of ethnic Uygur Muslims.
"China's Communist Party propaganda outlets can censor Mesut Ozil and Arsenal's games all season long, but the truth will prevail," Pompeo said in his post on Twitter. 

"The CCP can't hide its gross #human rights violations perpetrated against Uighurs and other religious faiths from the world."
Last week, Ozil, a German Muslim of Turkish origin, in social media posts called Uygurs "warriors who resist persecution" and criticised both China's crackdown and the silence of Muslims in response.
Arsenal on Saturday tried to distance itself from Ozil's comments after he posted the messages on Twitter and Instagram. 

"The content he expressed is entirely Ozil's personal opinion," the team's official account said in a post on China's Twitter-like Weibo platform.
But China's state broadcaster CCTV on Sunday removed Arsenal's game against Manchester City from its broadcast schedule. 

The following day, Beijing responded by saying Ozil was "blinded by fake news".
Pompeo's criticism came just a few days after a "phase one" trade deal was reached between the world's two biggest economies, illustrating that the US-China rivalry continues on other fronts.
Moreover, human rights are rising as a potentially explosive topic between the two countries.
In October, the US State Department said it would stop issuing visas to Chinese government and Communist Party officials responsible for or complicit in the detention and surveillance of Uygurs and other Muslim minorities in the far-western East Turkestan colony.US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. 

The United Nations and human rights groups estimate that between 1 million and 2 million people, mostly ethnic Uygur Muslims, have been detained and interned in concentration camps in East Turkestan. 

Beijing doublespeak calls the camps "training centres", and says they are part of its "anti-terrorism" campaign.
The measures were hailed by human rights advocates as the first concrete actions taken by any country since the plight of the Uygurs became public knowledge two years ago.
Earlier this month, the US House of Representatives passed legislation requiring a stronger response to Beijing's treatment of its Uygur Muslim minority. 

The Senate passed a similar bill in September, and the two versions must be reconciled before being sent to US President Donald Trump to sign into law.
A similar sports controversy erupted in October over human rights in Hong Kong when the general manager of the Houston Rockets of the National Basketball Association posted on Twitter a slogan used by pro-democracy demonstrators there. 

The tweet, which was quickly deleted, so angered Beijing and mainlanders online that the league's estimated US$4 billion market in China was put at risk.
Experts say that, as dust from the trade war settles, human rights are likely to become a constant flashpoint in US-China relations.
"Individual rights and religious freedom have long been points of contention between the United States and mainland China," said Sean King, a senior vice-president at the political consulting firm Park Strategies, suggesting that the two countries are less likely to make many concessions.
At a demonstration Saturday in Istanbul, Turkey, a supporter of China's Muslim Uygur Muslims holds a placard of Mesut Ozil reading.

To Kristine Lee, an associate fellow with the Asia-Pacific Security Programme at the Center for a New American Security, "it's deeply ironic that China has touted its 'remarkable achievements in the field of human rights', including at the United Nations.
"East Turkestan is one of the most pernicious examples in the 21st century of the CCP wielding its influence to curb progress on human rights and freedom of expression within its borders and beyond," Lee said.
"The United States must boldly call out these incongruities in China's actions, lest the CCP chip away at consensus around universal human rights, on everything from religious freedom to Hong Kong citizens' right to protest."

China's Final Solution

China is harassing journalists reporting on Uighurs. They cannot be stifled.
By Fred Hiatt

A police station is located next door to a mosque in Yining, in China’s East Turkestan colony, on Aug. 21. 

To punish Gulchehra Hoja, a Washington-based journalist for Radio Free Asia, and to stifle her reporting, China’s rulers have imprisoned her brother, harassed her parents and threatened many other relatives back home in East Turkestan, China.
The punishment is keen. 

But no stifling has taken place.
“Every time they threaten us, we are more proud of you,” Hoja’s mother, who is 72, told her daughter during one of their infrequent phone calls. 

“Keep doing your work.”
And so she has.
The greatest crime against humanity of our young century is unfolding in northwestern China. 

If it were not for Hoja and her 11 colleagues, we might not know it was taking place.
Yes, you read that right: A dozen reporters and editors working for Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur Service, reporting on events taking place halfway around the world, have confounded the massive propaganda machine of the Communist Party of China.
They uncovered the massive but secret incarceration of innocent Uighur men, women and children in a gulag of concentration camps — camps that China at first said did not exist and then insisted were benign vocational training centers.
The RFA reporters disclosed terrible living conditions in orphanages where suddenly parentless children have been sent. 

They chronicled roundups of eminent poets, clerics and intellectuals. 

They have begun to report — always carefully, always with two sources or more, never sensationally — on mass deaths in the camps.
Their reports, greeted with some skepticism when they first appeared in 2017, over time have been confirmed by satellite photography, foreign academics, other journalists and, most recently, an extraordinary leak of documents from the Communist Party itself. 

It is now accepted that more than 1 million and perhaps as many as 3 million Uighurs have been confined, and that thousands of mosques and other sacred spaces have been destroyed.
At every step, Chinese officials have sought to stymie the RFA reporting.
When the journalists began reporting on the mass detentions, the Communist Party began threatening and then rounding up their relatives. 

A half-dozen RFA journalists, Uighurs living in unsought exile, have spoken publicly about family members back home — often dozens of them — being taken away, with explicit references to the journalists’ work.
When hostage-taking did not deter the journalists, China began screening and blocking calls from the United States to East Turkestan, where the crimes are taking place. 

And when reporters found a way around that, China began employing artificial intelligence and voice recognition. 

Now, says reporter Shohret Hoshur, he can still call police desk sergeants and other potential sources — but his calls cut off after one minute.
No matter. 

It was Hoshur’s Oct. 29 story that confirmed the deaths of 150 people over the course of six months at the No. 1 Internment Camp in the Yengisher district of Kuchar county, “marking the first confirmation of mass deaths since the camps were introduced in 2017,” as the story notes.
It was Hoja’s Oct. 30 story that disclosed a camp survivor’s account of forced sterilizations, sexual abuse and other torture in the camps.
It was RFA reporters who disclosed intrusive surveillance, cameras installed even in homes, Uighur women forced to accept male Han Chinese “guests” in their homes and in their beds, and efforts to make Uighurs eat pork and drink alcohol, in violation of their faith.
All of this, we now know from documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, is in service to a campaign instigated by Xi Jinping. 

The Uighurs are a predominantly Muslim, ethnic Turkic people who have lived in Central Asia — in what is now the East Turkestan colony of China — for more than 1,000 years. 

On the pretext of suppressing Islamist extremism, China is trying to eradicate their culture and religion — their identity as a people.
This confirmation notwithstanding, it’s certain that what’s happening is far worse than we yet know, as China blocks communication in both directions. 

Almost no one in the region dares talk to outsiders. 

Radio Free Asia, U.S.-funded but independently run, continues to broadcast in the Uighur language, but shortwave radios are no longer permitted to be sold in the region, and China has blocked satellite transmission of RFA news.
So the RFA reporters continue their reporting, one one-minute call at a time, one call after another, day after painful day. 

Sadly, having dozens of relatives locked away no longer makes them all that unusual among Uighurs, notes Rohit Mahajan, RFA’s vice president of communications.
But even if it did, said Mamatjan Juma, deputy director of the Uyghur Service, they would persist.
“It’s an existential choice for us,” he told me. 

“The Uighurs have no other voice.”

China's Final Solution: China Didn’t Want Us to Know. Now Its Own Files Are Doing the Talking.

More disclosures reveal the full impact of the Chinese repression of ethnic minorities — well beyond concentration camps.
By Adrian Zenz

Uighur men having tea in Yarkand County in the northwestern region of East Turkestan.

No more denying, no more dodging. 

The Chinese Communist Party can no longer hide its relentless campaign of mass internment against the ethnic minorities in the northwestern colony of East Turkestan, or claim that the effort is an innocuous "educational" program. 

What was already widely known, vastly reported and confirmed by firsthand accounts has now been proved beyond doubt by the government’s own records — gigabytes of files, reams of reports, thousands of spreadsheets — some of them classified and highly confidential.
Last weekend, The New York Times disclosed and analyzed the contents of a trove of leaked internal Chinese government documents that outline specific policies for how to repress East Turkestan's predominantly Muslim minorities — and reveal that Xi Jinping himself set out the foundation for them.
This Sunday, the contents of two more sets of documents — all of which I have reviewed — are being disclosed. 

Among the first batch, also leaked, is a confidential telegram signed by Zhu Hailun, East Turkestan's deputy party secretary, which details how local authorities should manage and operate the “vocational skills training centers” — a euphemism for the concentration camps. (All translations here are mine.) 

The second set of documents, a large cache of files and spreadsheets from local governments, reveals the internment campaign’s devastating economic and social impact on the families and communities it targets.
The telegram — dated Nov. 5, 2017, and addressed to local political and legal affairs bureaus — is marked “extremely urgent” and bears the second-highest level of secrecy within China’s classified-document scheme. 

It reveals the extent of the security and surveillance measures taken around the camps, partly to shield the camps from external scrutiny. 

The message, a directive, notes that the work conducted there is “strictly confidential” and “highly sensitive” in nature. 

Even staff at the camps are forbidden from aggregating detainee figures.
The authorities’ attempt to enforce absolute secrecy is confirmed by another document dated November 2018, this one from a local government file in Hotan County. 

It chides officials for not “protecting secrets” related to the internment campaign well enough. 

It stipulates that “no person is under any circumstances permitted to disseminate information about detention or re-education via telephone, smartphone, or the internet,” and that officials are “strictly forbidden” from receiving “related media interviews” or make “unauthorized disclosure” about the internment campaign. 

That the Chinese authorities so deliberately sought to shield from external scrutiny information about operations at the East Turkestan camps suggests that they are only too aware of how incriminating their policies and practices are.
I was also able to obtain a massive cache of local government files from within East Turkestan. Among the most revealing documents are thousands of detailed spreadsheets with the names, identification numbers and addresses of tens of thousands of people, mostly Uighurs and many of them in detention, prison or concentration camps.
In Yarkand, a county of about 800,000 people in southwestern East Turkestan, 96 percent of the population is Uighur. 

Six official spreadsheets about six villages dated 2018 show that, on average, nearly 16 percent of the rural adult population was either interned or in prison. 

In two villages in Kosherik Township — which the documents describe as “heavily polluted by extremist ideology” — nearly 60 percent of all households had one person or more interned.
In addition to the extraordinary scale of the internment campaign, the files reveal its devastating impact well beyond the camps — deep into the communities and families of East Turkestan.
The spreadsheets show that the government has primarily targeted middle-age men, most often the heads of the households and main wage-earners. 

Beijing’s occasional tours of its so-called model camps often feature attractive young women. 

In reality, people between 30 and 59 were especially likely to be interned, according to the spreadsheets.
The policy’s socioeconomic fallout is dire — and local governments are keeping a meticulous record of it. 

One spreadsheet from 2017 for one town in Yarkand County, which listed households with low incomes that might qualify for welfare, included a young family with five children between the ages of three and 14. 

The father had been imprisoned, the mother placed in a concentration camp and the children, in effect, orphaned.
In another, hardly unusual, case, a household’s two working-age parents were detained, leaving elderly grandparents — including a grandmother described as “seriously ill” — to care for two toddlers. 

In a column with the header “reason for poverty,” the relevant spreadsheet offers this explanation: “lacks labor force and finances.” 

The toddlers’ father isn’t scheduled to be released until 2030.
Another spreadsheet from September 2018 shows lists of loan defaulters in Pilal Township, Akto County. 

In 80 percent of the cases where the reason for default was listed as “internment,” most of the borrowed funds were shown to still be in the bank.
A particularly depressing example comes from a village in Yarkand County. 

A Uighur farmer and head of a family of five was interned in 2017. 

In October 2016, he had received a loan of 40,000 renminbi (nearly $5,700) to purchase agricultural machinery. 

The equipment went unused during his detention — no other family member knew how to operate it — and the loan could not be repaid as scheduled. 

The government directed the family to rent out the equipment and send its oldest child, a son, to work. 

The family was then officially marked as having been “poverty-alleviated by benefiting from policies.” 

In June 2018, after his release, the farmer applied for financial assistance so he could repay the loan and related interest. 

In January 2019, he started to work in the Yarkand County textile industrial park, earning just 800 RMB (about $113) a month. 

By then, the son, age 20, had somehow become disabled and was listed on government forms as unable to work.
Thanks to these new document disclosures, we now have hard evidence — and the government’s own evidence — that in addition to implementing a vast internment program in East Turkestan, the Chinese Communist Party is deliberately breaking up families and forcing them into poverty and a form of indentured labor. 

For all its efforts at secrecy, the Chinese government can no longer hide the extent, and the reach, of its campaign of repression in East Turkestan.
Some important elements are still unknown. 

The total internment figure remains a well-guarded secret. (Based on the new evidence, I have revised my own estimate: I think that between 900,000 and 1.8 million people have been detained in East Turkestan since the spring of 2017.) 

Also missing from the official documents that have surfaced so far are precise records of how the detainees are treated and how, exactly, the process of "re-education" works. (About those things, however, we have witness accounts.) 

The confidential telegram and local files do not mention the use of physical violence — but for one notable exception. 

The telegram states that people who resist brainwashing must be singled out for “assault-style re-education.” 

Yet another sinister understatement, and it suggests that force and torture are, in fact, widely used.
In a way, though, we already know all that we really need to know. 

The documents that have been disclosed these past few weeks reveal the staggering scale of the repression in East Turkestan and its ruinous effects on the region’s ethnic communities, well beyond the camps themselves. 

Consider this: Official statistics show that the combined net population growth rates of Hotan and Kashgar, two of the largest Uighur regions, dropped by about 84 percent between 2015 and 2018.
The Chinese Communist Party set out, it claimed, to “transform through education” ethnic minorities in East Turkestan. 

In fact, it is ripping apart entire communities and subjugating them on a colossal scale. 

And this, at the direction of Xi Jinping himself.

Pakistan: China's Uighurs Final Solution Accomplice

'What About Concern Over Plight Of Muslims In China?': US Rebukes Pakistan
Pakistani Imran Khan, asked about the Uighurs, declined comment, saying that Pakistan had a "special relationship" with China.
Agence France-Presse

Imran Khan is known as a Muslim who assists China's Uighurs genocide.

In a snub to Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan, a top US diplomat on Friday questioned why Khan was not speaking out about China, which has detained an estimated one million Uighurs and other Turkic-speaking Muslims.
Amid increased tensions between India and Pakistan after New Delhi scrapped Article 370 of the Constitution, which grants special status to Jammu and Kashmir, Alice Wells, US Acting Assistant Secretary for South and Central Asia said Khan's comments on Kashmir were unhelpful.

"A lowering of rhetoric would be welcome, especially between two nuclear powers."
She also questioned why Khan was not also speaking out about China, which has detained an estimated one million Uighurs. 

"...I would like to see the same level of concern expressed also about Muslims who are being detained in Western China, literally in concentration-like conditions. And so being concerned about the human rights of Muslims does extend more broadly than Kashmir, and you've seen the administration very involved here during the UN General Assembly and trying to shine a light on the horrific conditions that continue to exist for Muslims throughout China," she said.
Khan, asked about the Uighurs at a think tank on Monday, declined comment, saying that Pakistan had a "special relationship" with China and would only raise issues in private.
Rights groups and witnesses say that China has been trying to forcibly stop Islamic traditions and integrate Uighurs into the majority Han population. 

China says it is providing vocational training and discouraging extremism.
US sought to use the annual United Nations summit to build up international pressure on China over its treatment of the Uighurs.
The State Department had organised an event on Tuesday to highlight the plight of Uighurs in China. The conference was held on the sidelines of the General Assembly to garner support "to demand and compel an immediate end to China's horrific campaign of repression," John Sullivan, the US's second-highest diplomat, said.
"We cannot be the only guardians of the truth nor the only members of the international community to call out China and demand that they stop," Mr Sullivan added.
On Tuesday, US President Donald Trump also fired several shots across the bow of the fellow Security Council member, moving beyond his typical attacks against China on international trade.
"The world fully expects that the Chinese government will honor its binding treaty... (and) protect Hong Kong's freedom and legal system and democratic ways of life," Mr Trump told the General Assembly.
"How China chooses to handle the situation will say a great deal about its role in the world and the future," the Republican tycoon added during his third appearance at the diplomatic forum in New York.
It marked one of his most anti-China speeches on the situation in Hong Kong since massive anti-government protests broke out there three months ago. 

The demonstrations have triggered the Asian financial hub's biggest political crisis since its handover from Britain to China in 1997.

China's Final Solution

U.S. to co-host event at U.N. on China's treatment of Uighurs

Reuters

One of numerous Chinese concentration camps in East Turkestan.

UNITED NATIONS -- The United States will co-host an event on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly on China's treatment of Muslim minorities including ethnic Uighurs, the U.S. State Department said in a statement on Monday.
The event on Tuesday will be hosted by U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan and will feature personal stories of victims, the statement said. 

It did not identify other hosts.
"China’s repression campaign includes, among other abuses, the mass detention of more than one million individuals in internment camps since April 2017," the State Department said.
U.N. experts and activists say at least 1 million Uighurs and members of other largely Muslim minority groups have been detained in massive concentration camps in the remote East Turkestan colony. 

Beijing describes complexes in East Turkestan as "vocational training centers" helping to give people new skills.
Washington has been weighing how to confront China on the issue at the annual gathering of world leaders in New York this week. 

On Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged all countries in the world to resist China's demands to repatriate Uighurs.
Pompeo said Beijing's campaign in the western Chinese colony of East Turkestan was an "attempt to erase its own citizens."
Pompeo and U.S. Vice President Mike Pence could also address China's treatment of the Uighurs at events this week, but a final decision on any U.S. remarks "is expected to hinge on how the trade issue is going," an administration official said last week. 

China and the United States are fighting a trade war and are set to resume trade talks in October. 

China's Final Solution

UN boss raises East Turkestan Uyghurs during his trip to China

By Julia Hollingsworth

Uyghur refugee describes horror inside Chinese concentration camps 

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has reminded China that its treatment of Uyghurs is still under close watch. 

Human rights must be respected even when fighting terrorism, he told Chinese authorities during a visit to last week's billion-dollar Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, according to a UN spokesman.
China has cracked down on its population of Muslim Uyghurs, who are concentrated in the country's East Turkestan colony. 

Last year, a US State Department official estimated that at least 800,000 and possibly up to two million people may have been detained in huge "re-education centers." 

In February, Turkey's Foreign Ministry spokesman Hami Aksoy said the people detained in the camps were subject to "torture and political brainwashing" and called the camps a "great shame for humanity."
During Guterres' trip to Beijing last week, he met with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping. 

Asked by reporters on Monday whether Guterres had raised the issue of Uyghurs during that conversation, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric replied that the UN chief had "discussed all relevant issues with Chinese authorities."
"He did just that, and that includes the situation in East Turkestan," he said.
"Each community must feel that its identity is respected and that it fully belongs to the nation as a whole," Dujarric said, explaining Guterres' stance.
When asked by a reporter whether Guterres was satisfied by the China's response, Dujarric was evasive.
"It's not for me to speak on behalf of the Chinese authorities," he said. 

"This is part of a dialogue that the Secretary‑General has had with Chinese authorities in the past and that he will continue to have."
Guterres left Beijing on Saturday after speaking at the Belt and Road Forum, a meeting about Xi's signature global infrastructure policy.
In March, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet presented a report on human rights around the world to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland, and raised the issue of "enforced disappearances and arbitrary detentions" in East Turkestan.

China's crimes against humanity

U.S. Steps Up Criticism of China for Detentions in East Turkestan

By Nick Cumming-Bruce

Kelley Currie, an American diplomat, denounced the mass detention of Muslims in China’s western colony of East Turkestan.

GENEVA — As China prepared to defend its record before the United Nations Human Rights Council, the United States on Wednesday led Western governments, academic experts and human rights supporters in challenging Beijing over its mass detention of Muslims in the western colony of East Turkestan.
China’s oppression of religious and ethnic minorities is well known. 

“What’s new is the breadth of the repression and how the Chinese government is using breakthroughs in technology to increase its effectiveness,” Kelley Currie, a senior United States diplomat, told a meeting on the sidelines of the council in Geneva.
The United States would consider targeted measures against East Turkestan officials to promote accountability for violations there, said Ms. Currie, who serves with the State Department’s Office of Global Criminal Justice. 

She urged China to reverse its policies and allow access to the region by United Nations experts.
The United States withdrew from the human rights council last year, accusing it of having an anti-Israeli bias and serving as a platform for some of the world’s worst rights abusers, but it has since pulled back from complete disengagement.
American diplomats returned to the council months later to criticize China’s human rights record. 

The United States called Wednesday’s meeting an effort to draw global attention to China’s extreme measures in detaining upward of a million people in re-education and detention centers and to build momentum for action by countries that are members of the Human Rights Council.
The meeting also highlighted an escalating effort by China to counter international criticism. 

China is scheduled to appear at the council on Thursday for the last round of a formal review of its human rights performance.
Leading up to that appearance, China played host to diplomats from several largely sympathetic countries posted to their diplomatic missions in Geneva — including Pakistan, Russia, Belarus, Cuba and Venezuela. 

It led guided tours of East Turkestan and showed off what it called "vocational training centers".
China’s mission to the United Nations in Geneva organized four meetings and a photo exhibition to reinforce that narrative. 

Diplomats and human rights activists reported that it also lobbied hard to dissuade other countries from attending the United States event on Wednesday, warning it would view participation as a hostile act.
That pushback, along with qualms about aligning too closely with the Trump administration appears to have kept some countries from supporting the event. 

But Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and Canada agreed to sponsor the meeting, drawing diplomats from a dozen countries and a large crowd of rights activists.
Adrian Zenz, a German lecturer and an expert on East Turkestan, told the gathering that China’s re-education and detention centers have expanded rapidly in the past two years and hold as many as 1.5 million Uyghurs and members of other Muslim minorities. 

He called China’s tactics “nothing less than a systematic campaign of cultural genocide.”
Omir Bekali, a 43-year old Kazakh Uyghur, said that East Turkestan police arrested and tortured him for days in 2017, after which he was held at a camp for six months, in a small room with 40 people.
There, Mr. Bekali said, the detainees had to sing songs about Xi Jinping, praise the country’s Communist Party and eat pork. 

“We had no right to talk,” he told those who attended the meeting.
A diplomat who carried a placard that identified him as representing China called Mr. Bekali’s account “a complete lie.”
“These centers are nothing else than normal boarding schools” he said.
That narrative, supported by China’s political and economic muscle, has silenced many countries, especially those that are predominantly Muslim.
In an earlier council session reviewing China’s human rights record, Turkey was the only Muslim country that criticized China’s treatment of Uyghurs and other Muslims.
Still, human rights groups saw Wednesday’s meeting as a chance to build momentum for a stronger response by Human Rights Council members later this year.
Beijing’s strong defense of its measures in East Turkestan, Mr. Zenz said, “tells me that the re-education campaign” there “is part of a more strategic effort that we may see expand beyond East Turkestan and possibly beyond China.”

China's Final Solution

Critic Who Exposed China’s Muslim Concentration Camps is Detained, Even Across the Border

By Austin Ramzy

Serikzhan Bilash of Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights in Almaty, Kazakhstan, in January. His arrest this week has raised questions about China’s efforts to silence critics of its policies in the East Turkestan colony.

HONG KONG — For six days a week, every week, in a crowded office in Kazakhstan’s largest city, Serikzhan Bilash had been ringmaster of one of the most influential efforts detailing China’s internment of Muslim minorities.
Clad in a suit and tie, he would bounce from room to room, consoling distraught relatives of people held in Chinese concentration camps in the colony of East Turkestan and arranging supplies and housing for those who had recently arrived in Kazakhstan from China.
He would also record hours and hours of videos describing the extent of China’s crackdown — speaking in English, Chinese and Kazakh.
This week, however, Mr. Bilash went uncharacteristically quiet.
The police detained him early Sunday in Almaty, the city in southeastern Kazakhstan where his organization is, and flew him to the capital, Astana, where he was placed under house arrest.
He is under investigation on accusations of “inciting ethnic hatred,” said his lawyer, Aiman Umarova.
A conviction carries a punishment of up to 10 years in prison.
On two short videos sent to his family by the police, Mr. Bilash said that he was physically safe.
He urged the members of the group he leads, Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights, to continue their work while he contested the allegations against him.
Mr. Bilash’s case has raised questions about China’s efforts to silence critics of its policies in East Turkestan.
In the months before his detention, he warned that the Chinese authorities were trying to use their influence in Kazakhstan to silence his group.
“They just want to close Atajurt,” he said last month.
“They just want to close Serikzhan’s mouth and they just wanted so nobody would stand up against Chinese concentration camps.”
The Chinese authorities have bristled at foreign criticism of the camps.
First, officials denied their existence, then they said the camps were part of a "training program" for poor Uighurs, Kazakhs and other minorities to help them find jobs and resist extremist ideologies.
On Tuesday, an East Turkestan official said the camps were “like boarding schools.”
After Turkey broke the general silence of Muslim nations to demand that China close the camps, China announced a temporary closure of its consulate in Istanbul, Turkey’s commercial capital, and warned that criticism could lead to economic retaliation.
For Kazakhstan, the camps pose a particular challenge.
Russia is still the biggest trading partner for the former Soviet republic, but trade with China is expanding rapidly.
In 2013, Chinese dictatorXi Jinping used a visit to Astana to announce the creation of the Belt and Road Initiative, the program of sweeping infrastructure investment more closely linking China with Asia, Africa and Europe.
Ethnic Kazakhs in China make up the second largest population of people held in the concentration camps, behind Uighurs. 
Kazakhstan has worked to help Kazakh citizens get out of China, but at the same time has avoided publicly criticizing Beijing’s policies in East Turkestan.
Activists working on the subject of East Turkestan have been a subject of particular scrutiny by the authorities, human rights groups say.
“It is a concern that the authorities detained him and took him away in the middle of the night,” said Maya Wang, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch.
“It is a concern given the Kazakh authorities’ history of harassing and surveilling activists in general and in particular those related to the cause of East Turkestan.”
Mr. Bilash, who was born in East Turkestan and migrated to Kazakhstan in the early 2000s, had previously worked as a translator who tried to facilitate Chinese investment in Kazakhstan, said his wife, Leila Adilzhan.
As Kazakhs learned about the detention of their relatives in China, they reached out to Mr. Bilash for help, she said.
“He didn’t want do this kind of thing but people started to call him and say my father has been arrested, my wife has been arrested, my mother has been arrested,” Ms. Adilzhan said.
“So he started collecting their statements and testimonies.”
Each workday at Atajurt, dozens of desperate people would fill the offices seeking help for friends and relatives held in China.
Many would provide statements that were recorded on video and uploaded to YouTube.
Volunteers would translate their messages into Chinese, English and Russian.
In some cases, the testimony appeared to have pressured the local authorities to release detainees.
In interviews at Atajurt’s office earlier this year, a half dozen Kazakhs said the appeals contributed to their freedom or the release of relatives held in camps.
Mr. Bilash said he often received threats to his safety, which he ignored.
He openly worried that China would use its influence in Kazakhstan to shut down his work.
Last month, a group of Kazakh intellectuals signed an open letter complaining that Atajurt’s work was harming the relationship between Kazakhstan and China.
Some activists have privately expressed concerns that his rhetoric could be bombastic.
Anti-Chinese slogans featured heavily during protests in Kazakhstan in 2016 over land sales to foreigners, and the authorities are wary of moves that could inflame such sentiment.
Prosecutors in Astana said in a statement they were focusing on remarks by Mr. Bilash in February calling for “jihad” against the Chinese.
A video of his comments was shown on state television after his detention.
But his supporters say the clip was edited to omit the full context of his comments, which were referring to waging a campaign of information and not violence.
The status of Mr. Bilash’s defense was unclear.
On Wednesday, Mr. Bilash told colleagues he was forced to sign documents and record a video rejecting Ms. Umarova as his lawyer and saying he wanted a government-appointed defense attorney — a sign that the authorities might bar her from representing him.
Mehmet Volkan Kasikci, a Turkish researcher who has worked with Atajurt, said that Mr. Bilash’s work helped create a model for documenting detentions in East Turkestan case by case.
“Most of what we know about the concentration camps we know thanks to Atajurt testimony,” he said.
“What Atajurt brought was this dynamism to provide concrete evidence as much as possible.”
When the police in Almaty raided the group’s offices on Sunday they took away equipment used to make videos about people held in East Turkestan.
But volunteers have continued to post videos on the group’s YouTube page.
Now, they are calling for the release of Mr. Bilash.

China's Final Solution

China is behind the arrest of a whistleblower on East Turkestan

The Washington Post

Kazakh rights activist Serikzhan Bilash in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on Feb. 13. 

THE WAY that China’s leaders tell it, the string of camps they have built in East Turkestan colony in the country’s northwest are for "vocational education", meant to combat extremism. 

A recent commentary by the official news service Xinhua declared that China has “significantly improved people’s sense of security and happiness in the autonomous region.” 

If that is the case, then why is Serikzhan Bilash, an activist who has called attention to mass detentions in East Turkestan, under arrest?
Mr. Bilash, who was born in East Turkestan, is now a naturalized Kazakh citizen. 

Many detainees in the Chinese camps are ethnic Muslim Uighurs, but a significant additional portion of those arrested are Kazakhs. 

Mr. Bilash has run an advocacy organization in Almaty, Kazakhstan, to tell their story and call attention to the East Turkestan concentration camps, which are designed to forcibly eradicate the culture, language and traditions of the Uighurs, Kazakhs and others. 

Mr. Bilash organized several gatherings of ethnic Kazakhs from East Turkestan who settled in Kazakhstan and complained that their relatives were held in the camps, according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Mr. Bilash, who has tangled with the Kazakh authorities in recent months over legal registration of his group, was arrested at 2:30 a.m. on Sunday in Almaty by Kazakh authorities and flown to Astana, the capital. 

The office of his group, Atajurt, was raided by police, who confirmed he was being held on suspicion of inciting “national discord or hatred” but provided no details.
Kazakhstan borders East Turkestan and plays an important role in China’s expansive Belt and Road Initiative to forge new trade routes to Europe and elsewhere. 

Sixty percent of China’s land transit shipments to Europe now pass through Kazakhstan, according to China’s ambassador to Kazakhstan; the two nations have a major trade relationship with each other, and the growing web of shared transit routes gives Kazakhstan access to faraway ports. 

It should come as no surprise that Kazakh authorities might heed a request from Beijing. Kazakhstan’s leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, presides over an authoritarian system at home and has navigated carefully among Russia, China and the West.
In return for its investment, China demands loyalty and leverage. 

Its rulers have been pummeled with international criticism following disclosure of the vast scope and malevolent purpose of the East Turkestan camps. 

The work of Mr. Bilash most certainly was nettlesome in Beijing, not in the least because he enabled eyewitnesses to tell the truth about the camps, a truth that China has long denied: that they are a factory of cultural genocide.
Mr. Bilash appeared in a video made by the Kazakh authorities after his arrest in which he said he was not taken “by either the Chinese or Chinese spies.” 

That’s hardly comforting, knowing how China exercises a long arm to snatch or punish adversaries. Mr. Nazarbayev should not do the bidding of China’s secret police, and Mr. Bilash should be freed immediately. 

Otherwise, a small but valuable window on the tragedy of East Turkestan will go dark.

China's Final Solution

UN religious freedom expert requests visit to East Turkestan
Reuters
Men pray at a mosque at the East Turkestan Islamic Institute during a government organised trip in Urumqi 

The United Nations investigator for religious freedom has asked China to let him visit its East Turkestan colony where some one million ethnic Uighurs and other Muslims are being kept in concentration camps.
Facing growing international opprobrium for what it calls "re-education and training centres", China has stepped up diplomatic efforts to fend off censure.
Defending its programme in the remote western region, China told diplomats recently that "absurd preachings" from "Islamist extremists" there had turned some people into "murderous devils".
"I have requested for a visit to go there because this a priority for me in terms of looking at what is happening there. There is reason to be seriously concerned about reports coming out of the East Turkestan colony," UN special rapporteur Ahmed Shaheed told a news briefing on Tuesday.
China has not yet replied to his February request, he said.
Shaheed, a former Maldives foreign minister, disclosed he was among several UN rights experts to write to China last November voicing anxiety at its programme targeting "extremism".
The letter is also signed by UN investigators on arbitrary detention, disappearances, freedom of expression, minority issues, and protecting rights while countering "terrorism".
"I wrote to China along with a couple of other rapporteurs on the 'de-extremification' law that they are implementing which has resulted in millions being interned," Shaheed said.
"The concerns we raised were first of all that the laws were overly broadly worded and were targeting essentially protected activities of communities, in terms of their right to thought, conscience and belief. So a whole range of violations occurring in these communities," he said.

Deaths in custody
The UN letter voices concern that China's regulation "targets Turkic Muslim ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities as well as Kazakh nationals" within a context of a "crackdown on the exercise of fundamental rights in East Turkestan".
It calls on Beijing to repeal the measure.
"There have been allegations of deaths in custody, physical and psychological abuse and torture, as well as lack of access to medical care," it said.
The Chinese regulation defines extremification as the "spreading of religious fanaticism through irregular beards or name selection", the letter said.
The law's stated aim to make "religion more Chinese" was unlawful, it added.
A bipartisan group of US legislators on Monday complained to the administration of Donald Trump that its response to abuses against China's Muslim minority was inadequate months after it said it was looking into imposing sanctions.

Kazakhs Won’t Be Silenced on China’s Concentration Camps

Activists are speaking out for those imprisoned in East Turkestan—even if their own government doesn’t like it.
BY REID STANDISH, AIGERIM TOLEUKHANOVA

Gulnur Kosgeulet shows a photo of her husband, Ekpor Sorsenbek, whom she believes is in a concentration camp in East Turkestan, in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on Jan. 21. 

ALMATY, Kazakhstan—Gulzira Auelkhankyzy remembers little about the January day when she was released from East Turkestan’s vast network of concentration camps. 

Auelkhankyzy, an ethnically Kazakh Chinese citizen, spent 15 months inside an internment camp, where she was regularly interrogated, forced to give blood, and required to learn Chinese and Communist Party songs. 

Auelkhankyzy was then coerced into signing a contract and sent to a “black factory” in October 2018, where she worked long hours sewing gloves for a measly wage. 

By the time Auelkhankyzy was taken to the border with Kazakhstan, she said, she was so exhausted and sick from her ordeal that she can barely remember the crossing.
Now back in Kazakhstan, she has joined the growing chorus of voices speaking out against the sweeping internment program in China’s western colony of East Turkestan, where United Nations human rights officials estimate the Chinese currently hold a million or more Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities. 

It’s causing uproar among Kazakhs—and sparking heavy-handed pushback from a government that is more interested in maintaining good relations with Beijing than protecting its own people.
Auelkhankyzy credits her freedom to her husband, who is a Kazakh citizen, and his efforts in lobbying the Kazakh government for help and raising attention to her case on social media and by speaking to local and international journalists. 

Like many Kazakhs and Uighurs in China, Auelkhankyzy does not read Chinese. 

When she first learned of her release, Auelkhankyzy was forced to sign pages of documents that she did not understand before having her passport returned to her. 

She was told by Chinese officials that her relatives in China would face consequences if she spoke about the camps once back in Kazakhstan. 

Her two daughters and her elderly parents are still in East Turkestan. 

Despite the threats, however, she insists on speaking out about what she experienced.
“I know how awful these camps are, and I want the world to know about them,” Auelkhankyzy said during an interview in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city. 

“In Kazakhstan I can speak about this, so I am doing it on behalf of those still trapped in East Turkestan.”
The plight of ethnic Kazakhs in China has become the source of growing uproar inside Kazakhstan, with the testimonies of former detainees such as Auelkhankyzy fueling a growing guerrilla advocacy campaign inside the Central Asian country of 18 million people. 

The grassroots effort has turned authoritarian Kazakhstan, which has been overseen by President Nursultan Nazarbayev since 1989, when it was still part of the Soviet Union, into an unlikely battleground for the truth about the political indoctrination camps in East Turkestan.
The groundswell has also left the Kazakh government walking a tightrope between appeasing Beijing—a strategic, economic, and political partner—and quelling an increasingly exasperated segment of the population focused on the fate of their relatives and ethnic brethren in neighboring China.

The Kazakh government has avoided criticizing China and publicly toes Beijing’s line about the camps, but behind the scenes, Kazakh diplomats have grown increasingly active in working for the release of the country’s own citizens and ethnic Kazakh Chinese citizens with ties to Kazakhstan.
Interviews conducted by Foreign Policy with 60 other people in Kazakhstan, including former detainees, those with firsthand knowledge of the concentration camps, and people who believe their relatives are in detention in East Turkestan, show the devastating imprint of the camps and how powerful public outrage has been.
“Our government is dependent on China, but they’re also dependent on public opinion,” said Andrey Grishin, a researcher at the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, a nongovernmental organization based in Almaty. 

“Now, they’re stuck balancing between the two.”

Orynbek Koxebek, a Kazakh citizen born in China who spent 125 days in a concentration camp, shows a East Turkestan identification document and photos in Almaty on Jan. 21. 

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kazakhstan opened its doors to ethnic Kazakhs scattered outside its borders as part of a repatriation program that offered a pathway to citizenship. The influx has mostly come from neighboring Central Asian countries and China, but the flow of immigration has also left families divided across the border and separated by multiple citizenships and residence statuses.
That made life hard for many Kazakhs in China. 

Spending time in a foreign country, even a close neighbor like Kazakhstan, is one of the many warning flags used by Chinese security forces to determine who to imprison. 

As Beijing’s dragnet has expanded from Uighurs to other Muslim minorities, ethnic Kazakhs have been increasingly targeted for visiting family across the border. 

Bureaucratic excuses such as collecting a pension or signing documents to finalize their status outside of China were often used to force their return to East Turkestan. 

Other detainees include naturalized Kazakh citizens born in China, with Beijing refusing to acknowledge that they had relinquished their Chinese citizenship, according to multiple interviews conducted by FP.
“I told them that I was a Kazakh citizen and no longer had a Chinese passport, but they didn’t care,” said Orynbek Koxebek, a Kazakh citizen born in China who was released in April 2018 after spending 125 days in a concentration camp. 

His Kazakh passport was taken from him and that he was beaten and waterboarded for failing to learn Chinese at the indoctrination camp, resulting in suicide attempts and lingering trauma. 

He was forced to sign documents in Chinese that he did not understand, which he later learned were forms to re-open his Chinese citizenship.
“I’m thankful to the Kazakh diplomats that helped get me released,” Koxebek said, “but China has ruined my life.”
Beijing’s influence is a charged issue in Kazakhstan. 

Popular anger over China was the gist of widespread protests across Kazakhstan in 2016 due to fears that a proposed legislative change would allow Chinese interests to buy up land in the country. 

As more ethnic Kazakhs have been caught up in the camps in East Turkestan, Astana is keen to avoid any similar flashpoints that could turn into another popular outpouring.
“Kazakhstan needs Chinese investment, and the government would have preferred to have this stay on the sidelines, but it has grown too big,” said Nargis Kassenova, a Central Asia expert and senior fellow at Harvard University. 

“Public opinion is definitely getting worse, and anti-Chinese sentiments are growing.”
Despite reluctance on the part of Kazakh authorities to defy Beijing, the government has lobbied hard for its own citizens in order to ease mounting civic pressure.
After initially pleading ignorance, Kazakh delegations have made several visits to East Turkestan, and the Kazakh Foreign Ministry began offering press briefings to show that it is active on the issue. Official accounts remain rosy, but high-level meetings have been followed by news of fresh releases, although the official line from both countries stressed that the detained Kazakhs were the result of bureaucratic problems due to dual citizenship.
This diplomacy has paid off for some of those imprisoned. 

A couple weeks after an early November 2018 meeting between then-Kazakh Foreign Minister Kairat Abdrakhmanov and China’s Ambassador Zhang Xiao, the Kazakh Foreign Ministry announced that 29 citizens had been detained in East Turkestan, of which 15 have been released. 

This was followed by an announcement in December 2018 by the Kazakh Foreign Ministry that China had given the green light to 2,500 ethnic Kazakhs to abandon their Chinese citizenship and come to Kazakhstan. 

The development was framed as a purely administrative issue, and no details were provided about how or when the move would take place.
These figures were updated on Monday when Kazakh Foreign Minister Beibut Atamkulov announced that 20 Kazakh citizens had now been freed out of a total of 33 from the camps. 

He also noted that the ministry has received more than one thousand letters from citizens appealing to the government to help relatives located in re-education centers in neighboring East Turkestan.
Other accounts attest to a more active, upstream role played by Kazakh diplomats in East Turkestan. One naturalized Kazakh citizen, who requested anonymity in order to protect relatives still in East Turkestan, credits the Kazakh government for helping secure his exit from China. 

The person returned to China in 2013 after gaining citizenship in Kazakhstan and had their Kazakh passport seized upon re-entry. 

In May 2018, the person was told by a colleague that because they had spent time in a foreign country, they would be sent to a camp. 

The Kazakh consulate in Urumqi, the regional capital of East Turkestan, issued a temporary passport for the person and pushed the Chinese government to issue an emergency visa, which allowed them to leave for Almaty by bus.
“If it wasn’t for Kazakhstan, I’d be in a camp right now,” they added.

Kazakhs with family members missing in the camp system in neighboring East Turkestan show documentation at Atajurt Eriktileri’s offices in Almaty, Kazahkstan, on Jan. 21. 

While the Kazakh government has worked behind the scenes to secure some releases from the camps, it has also begun to exert pressure at home against activists raising awareness about the situation in East Turkestan.
Serikzhan Bilash, the head of Atajurt Eriktileri (“Homeland Volunteers”), an organization of volunteer activists and family members whose relatives have disappeared in East Turkestan, was fined 252,000 tenge (about $700) in February for operating an unregistered organization. 

Bilash said that he tried to register Atajurt several times since it was founded in 2017 but was denied by the Ministry of Justice. 

Despite being unregistered, Atajurt faced few obstacles until earlier this year, when in late January a group of Kazakh intellectuals, citing harm caused to Kazakhstan’s relationship with China, called in an open letter for the organization to be closed. 

A legal case was launched against Bilash a few days later.
Atajurt, which Bilash says has documented close to 10,000 cases of ethnic Kazakhs who have been detained, has been successful in raising awareness about the camps in East Turkestan. 

Bilash intends to appeal his recent fine and will attempt again to officially register Atajurt, but he said that the organization will continue to be a target for further legal actions so long as it continues its sensitive work.
“I think they will stop us. They will try to close our organization,” Bilash said in an interview. 

“We collected so many testimonies and shared them with the world. That makes us a big enemy for the Chinese government.”
A litmus test for Kazakhstan’s difficult balancing act is the case of Sayragul Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh Chinese national who illegally fled to Kazakhstan after being forced to work at a camp where she says around 2,500 ethnic Kazakhs were being held for indoctrination. 

In August 2018, a court refused to extradite her back to China, in what many commentators saw as a rebuke of Beijing by Astana. 

However, her asylum claim has since been denied twice, leaving her future status in Kazakhstan up in the air. 

Keeping her in Kazakhstan could strain ties with Beijing, but Sauytbay’s case has become a cause célèbre, and deporting her could spark new protests.
Sauytbay recently fired her lawyer, whom she says was absent at crucial times during her case and encouraged her to stay quiet. 

During an interview with FP in January, Sauytbay said that she has received threats against speaking out and feared that Astana could succumb to pressure from Beijing and send her back to China
Sauytbay’s new lawyer is Aiman Umarova, a prominent human rights lawyer who was presented an International Women of Courage Award last year by U.S. first lady Melania Trump. 

Umarova told FP in an interview that her client continues to face intimidation against speaking publicly about what she witnessed while working at a camp. 

According to Umarova, Kazakh security officials have pressured Sauytbay against taking on new legal representation and even encouraged her to publicly discredit both Bilash and Atajurt on national television. 

As she prepares a new legal strategy, Umarova said that she fears pushback from Kazakh authorities intended to remove her from the case and silence Sauytbay.
“They will do everything to stop me from being her lawyer and create problems for [Sauytbay],” Umarova said. 

“They can extend her case, deny her asylum application, and then she can just disappear.”
One ethnic Kazakh Chinese national, who also crossed into Kazakhstan illegally in the spring of 2018 and spoke to FP on the condition of anonymity, said that they are watching the outcome of Sauytbay’s case closely. 

They said they were stopped at the border in East Turkestan by Chinese authorities while trying to enter Kazakhstan legally and were then detained and extensively interrogated about their ties to the country and loyalty to China. 

After learning that their name was added to a list of people slated to be sent to a concentration camp, the person said they decided to flee East Turkestan illegally. 

They are hesitant to come forward because they believe that the Kazakh government will deport them back to China.
“Recognizing someone from East Turkestan as a refugee would mean acknowledging that the camps and the abuses in them are real, which would contradict Beijing,” said Aina Shormanbaeva, the president of the International Legal Initiative, an NGO based in Almaty that provides legal assistance to Kazakh families with relatives currently in concentration camps. 

“The [Kazakh] government’s strategy for now is to avoid any decision or action when it comes to people like [Sauytbay], but it is very possible that she gets sent back to China.”

A Uighur woman walks on a street of the old town in Kashgar, in East Turkestan, on July 16, 2013. 

For the families separated by the camps in East Turkestan, however, advocacy remains one of the few options available. 

Despite growing internal pressure on them in Kazakhstan, many activists and family members feel that their efforts are bearing fruit.
On a snowy afternoon in January, relatives of Dina Iemberdi, a 25-year-old ethnic Kazakh artist who is a Chinese citizen, received word that she is now under house arrest after being sent to a camp in February 2018. 

Iemberdi is still in East Turkestan, and there is no word yet if she will be allowed to come back to Kazakhstan, but for her relatives lobbying for her freedom the news was cause for tears of joy. Iemberdi joins hundreds of other ethnic Kazakhs in China who have been released from detention camps and placed under house arrest in recent months.
Other families remain in the dark about their relatives’ fate in East Turkestan but see value in publicly advocating for them despite the risks it entails.
After not hearing from Meiramgul Togzhan, an ethnic Kazakh journalist in East Turkestan, for more than one year, her two daughters and son-in-law posted a video appeal on Atajurt’s YouTube channel pleading for news of her whereabouts. 

Within a few hours, they received a call from Togzhan, saying that she is fine and that they should stop asking about her. 

Several other people who posted video appeals about relatives shared similar stories about receiving calls—often from numbers listed in countries around the world—asking them to stop their advocacy efforts in Kazakhstan and saying there would be repercussions for them and their relatives should they continue. 

But Togzhan’s family says the calls have only emboldened them to keep fighting.
“What choice do we really have?” said Arai Zhenis, one of Togzhan’s daughters. 

“At least now they know that someone is asking about her and she can’t just disappear like the others.”

China's Final Solution

Trump has taken no meaningful action over China's horrible treatment of Muslims

By James Griffiths

Uyghur refugee describes horror inside Chinese camps.

A bipartisan group of US lawmakers said the Trump administration's response to China's abuses of the largest Muslim Uyghur ethnic minority in East Turkestan was inadequate and urged it to hold Beijing to account.
"The administration has taken no meaningful action in response to the situation in East Turkestan," lawmakers wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, four months after they originally called on him to take action on this issue.
CNN has reached out to the State Department for comment.
As many as two million Uyghurs are estimated to have been imprisoned in huge detention centers in China's far west, according to a US government report.
The human rights crisis in East Turkestan has drawn increasingly harsh criticism from across the world. At a UN hearing in November, more than a dozen countries called on Beijing to end its "arbitrary detention" of Uyghurs.
A former detainee told CNN she witnessed abuse and torture, and lost one of her sons during her time in the camps.
Beijing has repeatedly denied it is detaining Uyghurs against their will, calling the camps "vocational training centers" and suggesting they are providing education.
In their letter Monday, the US lawmakers, led by House Committee on Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot Engel, said that "over a million Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities have been interned in 'political re-education camps' without due process as part of a broader attempt to wipe out their separate identity, language, and history."
"Global responses to these abuses have been insufficient. Of particular concern are reports of US companies that may be contributing to Beijing's persecution of Uyghurs through their support or commercial ties to Hikvision and Dahua -- two Chinese tech giants that have profited from the surge of security spending in East Turkestan," the letter added.
It also pointed to plans by Frontier Services Group, a Hong Kong-based company that counts former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince among its investors, to build a "training center" in East Turkestan.
"These examples demonstrate not just the need to increase public awareness of human rights issues in (East Turkestan), but also impose consequences on PRC officials responsible and those who enable their abuses," the letter said. 

"Rhetoric without action will only embolden Beijing."
Lawmakers requested information on whether the US monitors the use of American technology in facilitating the surveillance and detention of Muslim minorities in East Turkestan, and details of "any US companies that are providing technology transfers, sales, or security training for Chinese government officials or closely associated entities that operate in the East Turkestan colony."
They also called on the Trump administration to reveal its plans, either unilaterally or with allies, for "holding Beijing accountable."
The letter comes as Beijing is facing a growing global backlash over the situation in East Turkestan, as reports of abuses stack up. 

Last month, Turkey -- which has a large Uyghur population -- said the detention camps were a "great shame for humanity."
In a strongly-worded statement, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hami Aksoy said hundreds of thousands of prisoners were subject to "torture and political brainwashing" in China's camps, and called on the UN and the international community "to take effective measures in order to bring to an end this human tragedy in East Turkestan."
Lawmakers in Indonesia and Malaysia have also expressed alarm over the alleged abuses in East Turkestan, and called for a full accounting of the "re-education camp" system.

He Needed a Job. China Gave Him One: Locking Up His Fellow Muslims.

China’s vast detention program for Muslims has required more and more police officers. And recruits are coming from the very ethnic groups that are being suppressed.
By Austin Ramzy

Baimurat, who lives in Kazakhstan, says he helped deliver hundreds of fellow Muslims to an indoctrination camp in China’s East Turkestan colony. “I came to regret ever coming back to China,” he said. “That choice led me into doing such awful things.”

ALMATY, Kazakhstan — The businesses he started had failed, and he had a wife and two children to support. 

So when the authorities in China’s far western East Turkestan colony offered him a job with the auxiliary police, Baimurat welcomed the good pay and benefits.
For months, he stood at roadside checkpoints, looking for people on the government’s blacklist, usually from Muslim ethnic minorities. 

As a Kazakh Muslim himself, he sometimes felt uncomfortable about his work, but he needed the money.
Then he was asked to help bring 600 handcuffed people to a new facility — and was stunned by what he saw. 

Officials called it a job training center, but it was basically a prison, with toilets and beds behind bars. One detainee was an acquaintance he barely recognized because he had lost so much weight.
Mr. Baimurat, 39, suppressed his emotions.
“There are cameras everywhere,” he recalled, “and if they see you look unhappy, you will be in trouble.”
The Chinese have detained as many as a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities in a network of indoctrination camps across East Turkestan, provoking international condemnation. 

In doing so, they have vastly expanded the security apparatus in the sprawling, strategically important region on China’s western frontier.
This rapid buildup has relied in large part on recruitment of officers from the same ethnic minorities that the authorities have targeted, dividing communities and families while forcing people like Mr. Baimurat to confront difficult choices.

Clients of a human rights group in Almaty, Kazakhstan, that supports ethnic Kazakhs who have fled East Turkestan, where many Muslims have been detained. The photos are of family members who are still there.

In a series of recent interviews in Kazakhstan, where he and his family fled last year, Mr. Baimurat offered a rare, firsthand glimpse into the workings of East Turkestan’s security forces — and the dilemmas that many employed by them grapple with daily.
Mr. Baimurat, who goes by only one name, said he had decided to speak out because he regretted working for the police in Qitai county outside Urumqi, the regional capital. 

He also described how close he came to ending up in a camp himself.
“I feel an obligation because I have seen so many people suffering in the camps,” he said.

In several interviews, Mr. Baimurat’s description of his experience has remained consistent, with details that match those in police recruitment notices and the accounts of former camp detainees. Auxiliary police in China are sometimes hired through private contractors who give police agencies more flexibility to add and reduce staff.
Since going public last month, Mr. Baimurat has received anonymous telephone calls warning that his relatives in China would be placed into camps if he did not recant, said Serikzhan Bilash, an activist who helps ethnic Kazakhs from East Turkestan.
Mr. Baimurat immigrated to Kazakhstan in 2009, but returned to East Turkestan a few years later, to be closer to family. 

After businesses he opened selling fruit and horse meat, a Kazakh specialty, failed, he joined the police in 2017, he said, earning a good salary — about $700 a month and decent benefits.

Serikzhan Bilash, who runs the Almaty rights group, says his clients do not bear Mr. Baimurat ill will for working for East Turkestan’s security forces. “Nobody blames him because he had no choice,” he said.

His tasks included examining travelers’ vehicles and IDs at police checkpoints on major roads.
He focused on people on government watch lists, searching their mobile phones for content considered subversive.
In particular, officers were told to look for images of the deadly ethnic riots in Urumqi in 2009, Mr. Baimurat said.
The authorities responded to that rioting with a security crackdown, which intensified after deadly attacks in 2013 and 2014 were blamed on Uighur separatists who embrace radical Islam.
The government appointed a new regional leader in 2016 who tightened controls and blanketed East Turkestan with surveillance.
That was when recruitment of auxiliary officers like Mr. Baimurat took off, according to James Leibold of La Trobe University in Australia and Adrian Zenz of the European School of Culture and Theology in Germany.
By 2017, East Turkestan’s police force was more than five times the size it had been a decade earlier, according to a forthcoming paper by Mr. Zenz and Mr. Leibold.
The government recruited ethnic minorities in particular, part of an effort to address simmering grievances by providing jobs.
Decades of migration by Han, China’s dominant ethnic group, have transformed East Turkestan, fueling Uighur anxieties.
Uighurs, once the majority, are 46 percent of the region’s 22 people million people, Han are 40 percent and Kazakhs 7 percent, according to government estimates.

Volunteers for the rights group in Almaty, called Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights, prayed before having dinner together.

The Chinese government has hoped that economic development in the resource-rich region would ease tensions.
But many Uighurs and Kazakhs complain they have been left out of growth and face discrimination in hiring, along with stifling restrictions on their practice of Islam, their cultures and their languages.
Chinese officials quoted in state media have praised the contributions of minority police officers.
But those who join the security forces are often viewed with suspicion by both the authorities and their own communities.
“Some of them are typical degenerate traitors to their ethnic group,” said Dilxat Raxit, a Uighur activist in Germany.
“Some of them have consciences but wear the uniform for the sake of their own and their families’ safety.”
Tahir Imin, a Uighur activist in Washington, said four relatives of his worked as police officers in East Turkestan only because there were few good jobs for Uighurs.
“There are big problems between Uighur police and ordinary people,” he said.
“People hate them and consider them as traitors, call them dogs of Chinese.”
Mr. Bilash, the Kazakh activist, said ethnic Kazakhs who fled East Turkestan do not hold Mr. Baimurat’s work for the police against him.

Almaty’s city center. Mr. Baimurat said he knelt down in thanks after crossing the border from Xinjiang into Kazakhstan.

“Nobody blames him because he had no choice,” Mr. Bilash said.
Within the police force, Mr. Baimurat said, officers like him were scrutinized for signs of political disloyalty.
He said he was required to attend regular political indoctrination meetings and memorize quotes by Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.
Minority officers were prohibited from speaking anything but Chinese with each other, he added, and were punished if a word of Kazakh or Uighur slipped out.
The worst experience, he said, was bringing people to the internment camp.
The government presents the camps as part of a vocational training campaign that steers Muslims away from religious extremism and has halted violence.
Former inmates, however, say the authorities hold people without charge and force them to renounce their religious beliefs.
Evidence has also emerged that the camps are operating a system of forced labor.
“I came to regret ever coming back to China,” he said.
“That choice led me into doing such awful things.”
Mr. Baimurat had another reason to lament his return: The authorities discovered he had lived in Kazakhstan and obtained citizenship there.
In recent years, the police have come to regard foreign ties as grounds for suspicion — and for sending someone to an internment camp.
Mr. Baimurat decided he had to get out.
But he and his family had handed in their Kazakh passports when they returned to China in 2013. They were trapped.
“I was so scared that my legs were trembling,” he recalled.
Eventually, a contact in another part of China, who could call Kazakhstan without drawing attention, was able to get Kazakh officials to provide temporary travel documents, he said.
At the border, the police questioned his family, including his young children, for hours before letting them through.
Back on Kazakh soil, Mr. Baimurat knelt down in thanks.
“We were so happy,” he said.
“It was like we had come out of hell.”

China has turned East Turkestan into a zone of repression — and a frightening window into the future

The Washington Post

The Chinese database that Victor Gevers, a Dutch cybersecurity researcher, found online has given a rare glimpse into China’s extensive surveillance of East Turkestan, a remote colony home to an ethnic minority population that is largely Muslim. 

AT A minimum, the minority Muslim Uighur population of East Turkestan colony in China is about 11 million people, and probably significantly higher. 

So consider the scope of surveillance over Uighurs in light of a recent database leak that indicated about 2.5 million people in East Turkestan are being tracked by cameras and other devices, generating more than 6.6 million GPS coordinates in one 24-hour period, much of it tagged with locations such as “mosque” and “hotel.”
Victor Gevers, a security researcher for the GDI Foundation, a nonprofit that seeks to defend Internet freedom, found the database, belonging to SenseNets, a Chinese company that provides facial recognition and other monitoring systems to the police. 

The company had left the database unguarded but closed it off when Mr. Gevers inquired. 

It included records such as identification numbers, gender, nationality, address, birth dates, photographs, employers and which cameras or trackers they had passed. 

Mr. Gevers suggests that more than a quarter of those in the database appear to be ethnic Uighurs, although it also included Han Chinese and others.
The data provides another glimpse into the darkening world of East Turkestan, which China’s authorities have turned into a zone of repression. 

In addition to ubiquitous electronic and physical surveillance, an estimated 1 million Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims have been incarcerated in concentration camps where they are being brainwashed to wipe out their traditional culture and language.
According to Xiao Qiang, director of the Counter-Power Lab at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Information, East Turkestan is a window on the future of China, a “frontline” test-bed for data-driven surveillance that could then be spread well beyond. 

Mr. Xiao wrote in the Journal of Democracy last month that China under Xi Jinping is attempting to marshal the powers of artificial intelligence to process all kinds of surveillance data, including facial recognition, and systems that can monitor gender, clothing, gait and height of passersby, as well as voice recognition, and creating a DNA database.
After being asked by the New York Times about the use of its technology to build the DNA database, a Massachusetts company, Thermo Fisher, said it would no longer sell its equipment in East Turkestan. 

Congress is considering important legislation that would help expose and pressure others who enable China’s abuses.
China’s goal is to use these technologies to suppress dissent, and to predict and snuff out any challenge to the ruling Communist Party’s grip on power. 

In East Turkestan, surveillance is part of a policy of cultural genocide. 

In addition to the camps and cameras, Mr. Xiao says the government has issued guidelines to collect DNA samples from all East Turkestan residents between ages 12 and 65.
When George Orwell’s “1984” was published seven decades ago, it seemed a dire warning of a future dystopia ruled by thought police and authoritarian control. 

Today, such a world is becoming a reality in East Turkestan. 

We agree with human rights groups who have urged the United Nations Human Rights Council, when it meets starting Monday, to launch an international fact-finding mission to East Turkestan to expose this unsettling experiment in state control of human behavior.