China's Reinhard Heydrich -- Zhu Hailun

The man behind China's detention of one million Uighur Muslims

AP

This screenshot taken from the Xinjiang Legal News Network website shows Zhu Hailun who has played a key role in detaining a million or more Uighurs in detention camps. 

After bloody race riots rocked China's far west a decade ago, the ruling Communist Party turned to a rare figure in their ranks to restore order: a Han Chinese official fluent in Uighur, the language of the local Turkic Muslim minority.
Now, newly revealed, confidential documents show that the official, Zhu Hailun, played a key role in planning and executing a campaign that has swept up a million or more Uighurs into concentration camps.
Published in 2017, the documents were signed by Zhu, as then-head of the powerful Political and Legal Affairs Commission of the Communist Party in the East Turkestan colony.

A Uighur linguist recognized Zhu's signature scrawled atop some of the documents from his time working as a translator in Kashgar, when Zhu was the city's top official.
"When I saw them, I knew they were important," said the linguist, Abduweli Ayup, who now lives in exile. 

"He's a guy who wants to control power in his hands. Everything."
Zhu, 61, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Long before the crackdown and despite his intimate familiarity with local culture, Zhu was more hated than loved among the Uighurs he ruled.
He was born in 1958 in rural Jiangsu on China's coast. 

In his teens, during China's tumultuous Cultural Revolution, Zhu was sent to Kargilik county, deep in the Uighur heartland in East Turkestan. 

He never left.
Zhu joined the Party in 1980 and moved up East Turkestan's bureaucracy, helming hotspot cities. 

By the 90s, he was so fluent in Uighur that he corrected his own translators during meetings.
"If you didn't see him, you'd never imagine he's Han Chinese. When he spoke Uighur, he really spoke just like a Uighur, since he grew up with them," said a Uighur businessman living in exile in Turkey, who declined to be named out of fear of retribution.

The businessman first heard of Zhu from a Uighur friend who dealt with the official while doing business. 

His friend was impressed, describing Zhu as "very capable" — a Han Chinese bureaucrat the Uighurs could work with. 

But after years of observing Zhu oversee crackdowns and arrests, the businessman soon came to a different conclusion.

A sample of classified Chinese government documents leaked to a consortium of news organisations, is displayed for a picture in New York on Friday. 

"He's a crafty fox. The really cunning sort, the kind that plays with your brain," he said. 

"He was a key character for the Communist Party's policies to control Southern East Turkestan."
Ayup, the linguist, met Zhu in 1998, when he came to inspect his township. 

He was notorious for ordering 3 a.m. raids of Uighur homes, and farmers would sing a popular folk song called 'Zhu Hailun is coming' to poke fun at his hard and unyielding nature.
"He gave orders like farmers were soldiers. All of us were his soldiers," Ayup said. 

"Han Chinese controlled our homeland. We knew we needed to stay in our place."
Months after a July 5, 2009 riot left hundreds dead in the region's capital of Urumqi, Zhu was tapped to replace the city's chief. 

Beijing almost always flew in officials from other provinces for the job, in part as training for higher posts. 

But central officials on a fact-finding mission in Urumqi concluded that Zhu, seen as tougher than his predecessor, needed to take charge.
"They were super unhappy," said a Uighur former cadre who declined to be named out of fear of retribution. 

"It had never happened before, but because locals said he was outstanding at maintaining stability, he was snatched up and installed as Urumqi Party Secretary."
Uighur security personnel patrol near the Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar. Classified documents lay out the Chinese government's deliberate strategy to lock up ethnic minorities. 

Upon appointment, Zhu spent three days holed up in the city's police command, vowing to tighten the government's grip. 

Police swept through Uighur neighborhoods, brandishing rifles and rounding up hundreds for trial. Tens of thousands of surveillance cameras were installed.
But instead of healing ethnic divisions, the crackdown hardened them. 

Matters came to a head in April 2014, when Chinese dictator Xi Jinping came to East Turkestan on a state visit. 

Just hours after his departure, bombs tore through an Urumqi train station, killing three and injuring 79.
Xi vowed to clamp down even harder.
In 2016, Beijing appointed a new leader for East Turkestan — Chen Quanguo. 

Chen, whose first name means "whole country", had built a reputation as a hard-hitting official who pioneered digital surveillance tactics in Tibet.

A guard tower and barbed wire fences are seen around one of a growing number of concentration camps in the East Turkestan colony, where by some estimates over 1 million Muslims have been detained. 

Zhu was his right-hand man. 

Appointed head of the region's security and legal apparatus, Zhu laid the groundwork for an all-seeing state surveillance system that could automatically identify targets for arrest. 

He crisscrossed the region to inspect internment centers, police stations, checkpoints and other components of an emerging surveillance and detention apparatus.
After Chen's arrival, Uighurs began disappearing by the thousands. 

The leaked documents show that Zhu directed mass arrests, signing off on notices ordering police to use digital surveillance to investigate people for having visited foreign countries, using certain mobile applications, or being related to "suspicious persons". 

State television shows that Zhu continued on his relentless tour of East Turkestan's camps, checkpoints, and police stations, personally guiding the mass detention campaign.
Zhu stepped down last year after turning 60, the traditional retirement age for cadres in the Chinese Communist Party. 

Chen remains in his post.
"Chen Quanguo came in the name of the Party," said the Uighur businessman. 

"Zhu knows how to implement, who to capture, what to do."

China's crimes against humanity

Secretary of State Pompeo Urges Asia to Resist China's Demands to Repatriate Uighurs

BY ASSOCIATED PRESS

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo meets with Central Asian (C5) foreign ministers from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan, Sunday, Sept. 22, 2019, in New York. 

UNITED NATIONS — America’s top diplomat says Central Asian nations should reject Chinese demands to repatriate ethnic minorities to China, where they face repression.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says Beijing’s detention of Uighur Muslims in western China has nothing to do with terrorism, as China claims, but is an attempt “to erase” minority cultures and religions.
He says it’s important for all countries “to resist” China’s demands that Uighurs who’ve fled the campaign in East Turkestan colony be sent back to China.
Pompeo made the comments in a Sunday meeting with the foreign ministers of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan on the sidelines of the annual U.N. General Assembly.
China says the detention sites are “vocational” centers aimed at training and skills development.

China: A New World Order review – are we conniving with a genocidal dictatorship?

This documentary dared to do what politicians the world over would not, asking tough questions of Xi Jinping’s totalitarian rule 

By Stuart Jeffries

Is Xi Jinping ... creating a personality cult? 

The drink Mihrigul Tursun’s captors offered her was strangely cloudy. 

It resembled, she said, water after washing rice. 

After drinking it, the young mother recalled in China: A New World Order (BBC Two), her period stopped. 

“It didn’t come back until five months after I left prison. So my period stopped seven months in total. Now it’s back, but it’s abnormal.”
We never learned why Tursun was detained – along with an estimated one million other Uighurs of East Turkestan colony, in what the authorities euphemistically call re-education centres – but we heard clearly her claims of being tortured. 

“They cut off my hair and electrocuted my head,” Tursun said. 

“I couldn’t stand it any more. I can only say please just kill me.”
Instead of murdering one Uighur mother, China is attempting something worse – eliminating a people. 

“There’s a widely held misunderstanding that genocide is the scale of extermination of human beings,” said the former UN human rights envoy Ben Emmerson QC. 

“That’s not so. The question is: is there an intention to, if you like, wipe off the face of the Earth a distinct group, a nation, a people?” 

This, Emmerson and Barack Obama’s former CIA director Leon Panetta claimed, is what is happening to the Islamic people of East Turkestan. 

“This is a calculated social policy designed to eliminate the separate cultural, religious and ethnic identity of the Uighurs,” said Emmerson. 

“That’s a genocidal policy.”
Independently verifying Tursun’s treatment is scarcely possible, but this documentary heard claims of similar treatment in the colony.

A teacher and Communist party member told how she had been sent to teach Chinese at a detention camp for 2,500 Uighurs. 

She claimed not only to have heard detainees being tortured, but also to have learned from a nurse that women were given injections that had the same effect as the drink Tursun took. 

“They stop your periods and seriously affect reproductive organs,” she said.
What its critics call concentration camps, Beijing describes as “vocational education and training centres” resembling “boarding schools”. 

We cut to official footage of drawing, dancing and in one room a class singing in English “If you’re happy and you know it, shout ‘Yes sir!’” 

Which, while not proof of genocidal policy, was grim enough viewing.

But without doubt, since 2013 when Xi Jinping became president and there was an attack in Tiananmen Square in which Uighurs killed five people and injured 38, Beijing has cracked down on what it perceives as an Islamist threat from the province. 

That crackdown has included using smartphones and street cameras to create a surveillance state for Uighurs.
Should Britain roll out the red carpet to a country charged with crimes against humanity, of undermining freedom of speech and democracy in Hong Kong, of crushing freedom movements in Beijing, of – it was suggested here – creating a cult of personality around Xi the likes of which have not been seen since Chairman Mao? 

“Better we engage with them so we can influence them,” said the former chancellor George Osborne.
But does the UK have any influence? 

Certainly not as much as we did in in the 19th century when, instead of trying to charm them into trade deals, we militarily subdued the Chinese. 

“Very few countries have any leverage at all,” said Jeremy Hunt, the former foreign secretary. 

The rest of the world shrinks from criticising China’s human rights violations because we’re awed by its economic power and how we benefit from it, argued Panetta.
This first of a three-part series did what politicians dare not do, namely to raise hard questions, not just of Beijing, but of us. 

Are we so in thrall to consumerism, to buying cheap goods made by cheap labour in China, so intimidated by Chinese military and economic might, that we connive with what may well amount to a criminal dictatorship? 

The Chinese refer to the 19th century as the Century of Humiliation. 

Ours is becoming the Century of Moral Feebleness.
One day in 2015, while Xi was being charmed by the Queen and David Cameron, a bookseller from Hong Kong set off to see his girlfriend. 

Suddenly, Lam Wing-kee recalled, he was surrounded by 31 people. 

He spent the next five months in solitary confinement and was released only after he admitted to selling illegal books. 

“I am very remorseful,” he told his captors, clearly under duress. 

“I hope the Chinese government will be lenient to me.” 

The books he had mailed from his shop to customers in mainland China included those critical of the constitutional change that allows Xi to remain president for life.
Forget morality, it’s time for more cloudy drinks. 

While Lam Wing-kee sat in solitary, Cameron and Xi went to the pub for ye venerable nightmare of ye photo-op. 

Neither waited for their pints to settle, for clouds to resolve into clarity. 

Instead, both precipitately drank what, had the cameras not been there, I feel sure, neither would have touched. 

An emblem of Sino-British relations in the 21st century.

A Tale of Two Nazisms

European Companies Get Rich in China’s Final Solution

Volkswagen, Siemens and more are making money in East Turkestan, where minorities are being herded into concentration camps.
By Benjamin Haas


BERLIN — Many people around the world may just now be learning that around a million Uighur Muslims and other minorities have been locked up in concentration camps in the colony of East Turkestan, in western China. 

There is a reason for that: East Turkestan is remote and the Chinese government has expended considerable effort to keep the news hidden, from harassing foreign journalists to seizing family members of activists to censoring information within its own borders.
Herbert Diess, however, should have no excuse.
Diess is the chief executive of Volkswagen, which opened a plant in East Turkestan in 2013 that employs almost 700 local workers and can make up to 50,000 cars a year. 

In an interview with the BBC in April, Diess said he was not aware of the system of camps or the Muslim minorities subject to mass detention, even though his company’s factory is within a 90-minute drive from four such detention centers. (The company issued a new statement saying it did, in fact, know about the treatment of Uighurs in East Turkestan and was committed to human rights.)
What excuse do the other chief executives and board presidents use?
I have found that about half of the largest 150 European companies had some presence in East Turkestan, an area that Amnesty International has described as “an open-air prison.” 

Their investments merit far more scrutiny from both regulators and the public, and European governments need to form standards for companies dealing with East Turkestan.
At the top of the list of companies that deserve a thorough review is Siemens. 

This large German conglomerate collaborates on advanced technologies in automation, digitization and networking with China Electronics Technology Group Corporation, a state-owned military contractor that has developed a policing app used in East Turkestan that has led many people to be sent to the camps.
The Spanish telecommunications firm Telefónica has a joint venture with China Unicom that appears to use big data for tracking people. 

The company markets the software as a way to deliver location-based ads or monitor public transportation use, and while it says the data is anonymous, I reviewed an internal presentation that appears to have shown ID numbers unique to each cellphone user. 

It is easy to see how such software could be used by the authorities in East Turkestan to track minorities in real time, and it has already been deployed in the region, according to a presentation.
Other investments are less immediately tied to abuses of the Uighur population. 

KfW, a German state-owned bank, provided 100 million euros ($111 million) in funding for the construction of a subway line that opened in 2018 in the regional capital, Urumqi, built with components from ABB, a Swiss engineering firm, and Airbus Defense and Space, the European aircraft manufacturer. 

Unilever and Nestlé both buy tomato products from a state-owned company in East Turkestan that could end up in the ketchup in kitchens across Europe. 

Neither company responded to questions about how products from East Turkestan are used.
While this research did not uncover any direct relationship between European companies and the concentration camps, conversations with executives in Germany showed that most headquarters have little understanding of how their businesses operate in East Turkestan.
The Chinese government has long pushed to develop its far-flung western colonies, partly to shore up their links with the rest of the country and partly in the hopes that economic development will depress religious observance and quell the desire for basic freedoms. 

In some cases, European companies have been pressured to start operations in East Turkestan as conditions for expansion elsewhere in China. 

Carrefour, the French supermarket chain, is just one example. 

It opened stores in East Turkestan only after receiving “strong advice” from Chinese officials. 

Other European executives told me that they had received similar messages.
But China’s desire for investment gives foreign companies with ties in the region — and European governments — real power. 

Now they need to use it.
The European Union should enact laws that set standards for companies operating in East Turkestan and punish those that fail to live up to European ideals of human rights, with audits on whether camp labor was involved in any part of their supply chains, where profits end up in China and how products and technology are used.
If all European Union members fail to agree on regulations, the charge should be taken up by national parliaments, especially in countries like Germany with extensive business in East Turkestan. 

These standards should apply to any European company, not just the large multinationals, and would have powerful ramifications beyond just East Turkestan.
Companies found to be flouting these standards could be barred from bidding for government contracts as an initial measure, with fines and government-appointed monitors as additional punishments. 

The European Union also needs to immediately impose export bans on technology that could be used in the repression of dissidents and religious minorities.
Business leaders and politicians frequently bristle at the idea of directly confronting China on its human rights abuses, worried that a firm stance could jeopardize future deals. 

But while China may issue statements condemning such actions and threaten to stop buying products from critics, it’s unlikely that Beijing is ready for another economic fight amid a slowing economy and a trade war with the United States.
European exports could take a hit or Chinese regulators may begin investigations into European companies as a punitive measure. 

But such actions would only further isolate China, a country that knows it needs all the stable economic relationships it has. 

While plenty of diplomatic protests and bombastic editorials in state-run newspapers are sure to follow such a move, Xi Jinping cannot afford to further destabilize the economy over a political spat with the European Union, which is China’s largest trading partner.
This confluence of circumstances is exactly why the European Union must act now to stand up for its values and leverage its economic relationship with China to pressure it to end one of the most egregious human rights violations in the world today. 

Feigning ignorance is no longer an option.

Global Magnitsky Act

Vice President Mike Pence signals openness to sanctions over China's human rights abuses
By Erica Pandey, Jonathan Swan

Vice President Mike Pence at the UN. 

Vice President Mike Pence has signaled that the Trump administration is open to using the Global Magnitsky Act to sanction top officials in East Turkestan, China, where more than 1 million Uighur Muslims are being held in concentration camps, according to a Chinese religious freedom advocate who met with Pence at the White House Monday.

Driving the news: Bob Fu, founder of ChinaAid, said that Pence also told him that he planned to give a second speech about China in the fall to address religious freedom issues.

Beijing has been paying close attention to Pence's plans for a second speech, as the vice president has been at the forefront of the administration's confrontation with China. 

Behind the scenes: Fu told Axios he sat next to Pence at the meeting and handed him a list of 9 officials, including Chen Quanguo — the Chinese Communist Party's secretary of East Turkestan who has been dubbed the brains behind the detention camps. 

Fu said Pence made no commitments but told him he would personally follow up about the recommendation to sanction the individuals. 

Pence's office did not respond to requests for comment.

Why it matters: As we've reported, much of the world has shrugged as the Chinese Communist Party has detained over a million Uighur Muslims in East Turkestan in "political re-education" camps. 

The Communist Party has posted 100,000 jobs for security personnel in East Turkestan in just the last year, reports Quartz. 

The province has turned into a police state, with officials surveilling Muslim residents, collecting their DNA and seizing their passports.
Only a handful of countries have come out against Beijing on the East Turkestan issue. 

Meanwhile, all authoritarian regimes, including Saudi Arabia, Russia and North Korea, have signed a letter expressing support for China.

Between the lines: While the Trump administration has condemned the concentration camps, it has taken no specific action against Beijing for the human rights abuses. 

Magnitsky sanctions — if imposed — would be a significant step.
Since the passage of the Magnitsky Act in 2012, the U.S. has sanctioned more than 100 individuals for human rights abuses in Russia, Myanmar and South Sudan, among other places.
But the U.S. has only sanctioned one Chinese national under Magnitsky. 

In December 2017, President Trump sanctioned Gao Yan, a former Chinese police officer, for his role in the death of a Chinese human rights lawyer who lost her life in custody, per the South China Morning Post.
Magnitsky sanctions have never been used against an official of the Chinese Communist Party.

The big picture: Pence's meeting with the Chinese human rights advocates on Monday came on the same day President Trump took another step to escalate his economic conflict with China. 

Just hours after the meeting, the Treasury Department labeled China a currency manipulator.
President Trump's tweet accusing China of currency manipulation came during the meeting, and Pence pointed it out to the table as an example of the president's constant focus on China, said Fu.
On the table, Pence had printed copies of his and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's recent speeches on China to demonstrate that the administration has been clear about its views on  East Turkestan, Fu said.
Fu's list of Chinese officials:

Uighurs challenge China to prove missing relatives are free

Diaspora and experts sceptical over claim inmates released from East Turkestan concentration camps

Agence France-Presse

At least 1 million ethnic Uighurs and members of other largely Muslim minority groups have been detained in camps in East Turkestan.

China’s claim that most inmates have been released from mass detention centres in East Turkestan colony has been met with scepticism by the Uighur diaspora, which has launched a social media campaign challenging Beijing to prove it.
Rights groups and experts say more than 1 million mostly Muslim ethnic minorities have been detained in internment camps in the tightly controlled north-west colony, home to China’s ethnic Uighur population.
On Tuesday a senior East Turkestan official told reporters “most” people held in the camps had been “returned to society”, though no figures were shared to back up the claim.

“It’s absolutely not true,” said Guly Mahsut, 37, a Uighur based in Canada. 

“One of my cousins and one of my tour guide friends, and my friend’s husband, they are still in the camps,” she told AFP.
Mahsut and other overseas Uighurs have responded to China’s claim with the hashtag #Provethe90%, featuring stories and photos of missing friends and family they have been unable to contact in East Turkestan.

The hashtag is a reference to remarks made by the East Turkestan chairman, Shohrat Zakir, who said “more than 90%” of those who “return to society ... have work that they like and find suitable”.
“China does not need to say they released most if they really did so,” said Arfat Erkin, an Uighur student in the US who used the #“Provethe90% hashtag in a tweet about his missing father. 

“All it needs is to give journalists normal access to those camps – not staged camps – and give official permission for Uighurs to contact their relatives abroad.”
Bahram Sintash, who has posted information about destroyed mosques and neighbourhoods in East Turkestan, also tweeted about his father, a retired editor who was detained in December 2017.

A foreign ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, said on Wednesday she was not aware of the “specific number” of people who had left the centres. 

It is difficult to verify China’s claims as the government has made independent reporting in East Turkestan extremely challenging. 

Amnesty International’s director for East Asia, Nicholas Bequelin, said: “China is making deceptive and unverifiable statements in a vain attempt to allay worldwide concern for the mass detentions of Uighurs and members of other ethnic minorities in East Turkestan.” 

He said Amnesty had not received any reports of large-scale releases.
On a six-day trip to the region last month, AFP reporters were followed by plainclothes officials almost constantly. 

They encountered roadblocks and were turned away by security forces upon nearing some camps.
Beijing initially denied the existence of any internment camps. 

In October 2018 it began calling them “vocational education centres” in the face of mounting evidence in the form of government documents, satellite imagery and testimonies from escaped detainees.
Beijing claims the centres are a necessary counter-extremism measure, and that detainees learn subjects including Mandarin and Chinese law. 

But former inmates and rights groups say those held are subjected to political indoctrination and abuse. 

One ex-detainee told AFP he was forced to sing the Chinese national anthem every morning and to eat pork, which is prohibited in Islam.

Adil Mijit, a prominent Uighur comedian, has been missing since November 2018. 

Even if people were released, “how permanent is it?” asked Arslan Hidayat, the son-in-law of a prominent Uighur comedian, Adil Mijit, with whom he lost contact last November.
“They are still in East Turkestan and they can again be arbitrarily detained,” he said, adding that inmates could technically be released from detainment only to be sent to what some reports have described as forced labour camps.
“There are still so many hopeful Uighurs,” he said, explaining that some believed staying silent could help keep loved ones out of the camps.
Hidayat said China’s claim could affect “those who are already scared, people who don’t want to speak up, to stop them further.”

China's crimes against humanity

Security cameras and barbed wire: Living amid fear and oppression in East Turkestan
By Matt Rivers and Lily Lee

East Turkestan -- The small bedroom is frozen in time. The two little girls who used to sleep here left two years ago with their mother and now can't come home.

Their backpacks and school notebooks sit waiting for their return. 

A toy bear lies on the bed. 

Their clothes hang neatly in the closet.
The girls' grandmother says she can't bring herself to change it.
"The clothes still smell like them," she says, her words barely audible through heavy sobs.
Ansila Esten and Nursila Esten, ages 8 and 7, left their home in Almaty, Kazakhstan, with their mother, Adiba Hayrat, in 2017.
The three traveled to China where Adiba Hayrat planned to take a course in makeup application and visit her parents in the western border region of East Turkestan, leaving her husband, Esten Erbol, and then 9-month-old son Nurmeken behind in Kazakhstan, Esten told CNN.
Not long after she arrived, however, she was detained. 

He hasn't heard from her for more than two years.
"My son wasn't even 1 when she left," Esten Erbol said. 

"When he sees young women in the neighborhood, he calls them mama. He doesn't know what his own mother looks like."

Adbia Hayrat's two daughters, Ansila Esten and Nursila Esten, in a family photo kept by their father.

Adiba Hayrat and her two daughters are Chinese citizens, of Kazakh minority descent.
She grew up in China, as did their daughters.
Their young son was born in Almaty.
The family was in the process of becoming citizens of Kazakstan when Adiba Hayrat was taken by Chinese authorities.
Her family in Kazakhstan says she was held in a detention camp in East Turkestan for more than a year, while her children were sent to live with distant relatives.
She has since been released, according to her family.
But Adiba Hayrat is now living with her parents and working in a forced labor facility, earning pitiful wages, unable to contact her family in Kazakhstan for fear of being sent back into detention.
According to the US State Department, up to 2 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyzs and other predominately Muslim ethnic minorities have been held against their will in massive camps in East Turkestan.
An unknown number are working in forced labor facilities, and like Adiba, they are unable to leave China.

'My wife is not a terrorist'
Activists and former detainees allege the East Turkestan concentration camps were built rapidly over the last three years, the latest stage in an ongoing and widespread crackdown against ethnic minorities in the region.
Torture inside the camps is rampant, including in accounts given to CNN by former detainees.
The Chinese government has faced a rising tide of international criticism over its East Turkestan policies, including from the United States.
The camps are Beijing's attempt to eliminate the region's Islamic cultural and religious traditions -- a process of sinicization, by which ethnic minorities are forcibly assimilated into wider majority Han Chinese culture.
Beijing says the camps are "vocational training centers" designed to fight terrorism.
Even if you buy that explanation, Esten Erbol said, it wouldn't apply to his wife.
"My wife is not a terrorist," he said.

Adiba Hayrat and her son Nurmeken, who has been separated from his mother for more than a year.

After Adiba's detention ended, Esten Erbol was told by a friend in the area that his wife had been allowed to live with her parents and children again while she worked in the forced labor facility.
Many ex-detainees are forced to work in such facilities, used by authorities to maintain control over the former detainees.
A US congressional bill introduced in January said there were credible reports that former detainees were made to produce cheap consumer goods in forced work facilities under threat of returning to the detention centers.
Esten Erbol has been told by a friend in the area that officials took his wife's passport, so she and their daughters can't return to Kazakhstan.
The wait is agony.
He has no way to contact her directly, and fears if he traveled to East Turkestan to find her, he could end up in a camp himself.
China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not reply to a request for comment when asked about the family's allegations about her detention, or whether she is currently being forced to work.

China's 'new territory'
East Turkestan is the largest Chinese colony, a sprawling arid landscape in the country's far west which has a comparatively tiny population of 22 million.
It is home to a variety of minority groups, of which the predominantly Muslim, Turkic-speaking Uyghurs are the largest.
Uyghurs are culturally and linguistically distinct from Han Chinese, the country's dominant ethnic group.
This is due in part to the fact that East Turkestan has only officially been part of China for less than two centuries.
These differences have led Beijing to often take a stricter approach to security in East Turkestan but those policies have become more draconian following violent protests against Han Chinese in July 2009.
The riots saw locals rampage through the capital Urumqi with clubs, knives and stones, resulting in a brutal counterattack by paramilitary police and the Chinese military.
Chinese state media said a total of 197 people were killed.
When CNN travelled through East Turkestan, the signs of an increased police presence were everywhere.
Today, in most cities in East Turkestan, there are facial surveillance cameras about every 150 feet, feeding images back to central command centers, where people's faces and routines are monitored and cross-referenced.
Mobile police checkpoints pop up at random throughout the region, leading to long lines on public roads.
At the checkpoints, and sometimes randomly on the street, police officers stop people to ask for their ID cards and occasionally demand to plug unidentified electronic devices into cellphones to scan them without explanation.
Daily life is much easier in East Turkestan for Han Chinese, the dominant ethnic majority in the rest of China.
At the security checkpoints, Han Chinese are often waived through without being checked or presenting ID.
During a nearly week-long trip to the region CNN did not witness one non-Han Chinese person afforded the same privilege.
For Uyghurs or other residents, the increased surveillance has turned their lives upside down.
A simple trip to the market or to see friends can take hours, due to the unpredictable and intrusive nature of the police checks.
Everyone knows someone who's been detained or at least harassed, activists say.
Behind the walls of East Turkestan's camps, former detainees say even worse awaits those who fall foul of authorities.
State media has produced a constant drum beat of news that the terrorism threat in the region is real and would spin out of control were it not for the strict security measures.
As a result, many local Han Chinese we spoke to support the policies.
"Life has gotten so much safer in the past few years," one Han Chinese taxi driver said, declining to give his name.
He said East Turkestan is safer for everyone now.
"Even if I leave my car on the street unlocked, I don't worry about it getting stolen."

Barbed wire and guard towers
In late March, CNN traveled to East Turkestan for six days to get a first-hand look at the camps, attempting to see three different facilities in three cities hundreds of miles apart.
The Chinese government has repeatedly decried foreign media's reporting on the camps as inaccurate, claiming authorities have been transparent about the facilities.
Beijing has invited diplomats from select countries to tour the camps in a tightly controlled setting. 
The diplomats come from countries with their own circumspect records on human rights, including Pakistan, Russia and Uzbekistan.
A select group of journalists has visited the camps under similar conditions.
Reuters was the only representative of Western media.
CNN has asked repeatedly to be allowed to visit the camps.
All those requests were denied or ignored.
When CNN attempted to visit the camps, there was repeated obstruction by Chinese authorities who blocked attempts to film, to speak to the relatives of inmates and to even travel to certain parts of the region.
The closest CNN got to a camp was in a small city named Artux, not far from the city of Kashgar, in East Turkestan's southwest.

Concentration camp on the outskirts of Kashgar, which CNN tried to enter but was turned away by guards.

The building which China has described as a "voluntary vocational training center" looked far more like a prison. 
The massive facility was ringed by a high wall, barbed wire and guard towers, as well as large numbers of security personnel.
CNN was prevented by authorities at the facility from openly filming it, despite complying with Chinese laws on journalistic activities.
Attempts to speak to the dozens of people bringing food to their family members inside the camp were blocked by nearly 20 security personnel and government officials who pulled up not long after CNN arrived.
When asked, a woman told CNN her mother was "receiving training" inside the camp.
Another man said his brother was being held there for a vague "ID violations."
But when both were pressed for more information, a half-dozen plain-clothed officials shouted at the man and the woman to be quiet and return to their cars.
They didn't fight the order.

'Why are you here?'
More than 1,000 miles to the east of Kashgar lies the city of Turpan.
It's a small town by Chinese standards, just over 600,000 people, surrounded by a fiercely inhospitable desert.
CNN attempted to see another camp in the city, finding a large facility surrounded by a high wall.
But after arriving at the center, the team were greeted by local police, who angrily demanded to know what they were doing there.
When asked what the facility was, one police officer responded angrily, "You don't have to be asking that! Why are you here?"
No further access to the camp was given, and the officer demanded the footage be deleted.

Another concentration camp outside the town of Turpan, which CNN also found to be inaccessible.

Outside Urumqi, a third camp was completely inaccessible.
A police checkpoint blocked the only road leading to the facility, several miles away from the site.
Local drivers were allowed to pass the site, but a police officer told CNN that no foreigners were allowed down the road.
When asked why, he simply shrugged and asked the team to respect "local regulations."
It's unclear what regulations he was referring to.
CNN asked both the East Turkestan government and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs about the obstacles faced when doing legal journalism in East Turkestan.
Neither responded.

China tries to thwart CNN probe into detention camps

'Love of my life'
Hundreds of miles to the north, the town of Toli also turned out to be completely inaccessible.
Esten Erbol, the father of the two missing girls, believes that this town is where his wife and daughters are residing with her parents.
It's also where he and his wife, Adiba Hayrat, first met and fell in love.
CNN tried on two separate occasions to drive to Toli to see the town and try to find Adiba but was blocked by officials both times before reaching its center.
On the first occasion, local government officials at the nearest airport said it would be possible to see the town.
But on the drive there, the road was blocked by police who said there had been a traffic accident up ahead.
No accident was visible for miles down the flat, empty road.
The second time, instead of being allowed to access the town, the CNN team was escorted by police to a small tourist area and forced to attend a banquet that had been hastily arranged inside a makeshift yurt.
Horse and lamb were served as musicians played traditional folk music, to which government officials danced enthusiastically.
Multiple requests to leave and see the town were ignored.
In the end, the team had to drive back to the airport immediately to avoid missing its flight.
Despite multiple attempts, the CNN team didn't locate Adiba or her daughters.
Esten had sent a message to be passed onto his wife, should the team reach her.
"Tell her that her son and I are waiting for her, that we will always wait for her and that she is the love of my life," Esten wrote CNN via text message.
Adiba did not hear those words.
And it's unclear if she ever will.

China vs. Islam: China's mission to raze the mosques of East Turkestan

Guardian and Bellingcat investigation finds more than two dozen Islamic religious sites completely demolished since 2016
By Lily Kuo in Beijing

Keriya Aitika mosque in November 2018. The gatehouse and dome have been removed, part of China’s destruction of mosques in East Turkestan. 

Around this time of the year, the edge of the Taklamakan desert in far western China should be overflowing with people.
For decades, every spring thousands of Uighur Muslims would converge on the Imam Asim shrine, a group of buildings and fences surrounding a small mud tomb believed to contain the remains of a holy warrior from the eighth century.
Pilgrims from across the Hotan oasis would come seeking healing, fertility, and absolution, trekking through the sand in the footsteps of those ahead of them. It was one of the largest shrine festivals in the region.
People left offerings and tied pieces of cloth to branches, markers of their prayers.
Visiting a sacred shrine three times, it was believed, was as good as completing the hajj, a journey many in underdeveloped southern East Turkestan could not afford.
But this year, the Imam Asim shrine is empty.
Its mosque, khaniqah, a place for Sufi rituals, and other buildings have been torn down, leaving only the tomb.
The offerings and flags have disappeared.
Pilgrims no longer visit.
It is one of more than two dozen Islamic religious sites that have been completely demolished in East Turkestan since 2016, according to an investigation by the Guardian and open-source journalism site Bellingcat that offers new evidence of large-scale mosque razing in the Chinese colony where Muslim minorities suffer severe religious repression.
Using satellite imagery, the Guardian and Bellingcat open-source analyst Nick Waters checked the locations of 100 mosques and shrines identified by former residents, researchers, and crowdsourced mapping tools.
Out of 91 sites analysed, 31 mosques and two major shrines, including the Imam Asim complex and another site, suffered significant structural damage between 2016 and 2018.
Of those, 15 mosques and both shrines appear to have been completely or almost completely razed. The rest of the damaged mosques had gatehouses, domes, and minarets removed.
A further nine locations identified by former East Turkestan residents as mosques, but where buildings did not have obvious indicators of being a mosque such as minarets or domes, also appeared to have been destroyed.

China’s is waging hi-tech war on its Muslim minority 

Uprooted, broken, desecrated
In the name of containing religious extremism, China has overseen an intensifying state campaign of mass surveillance and policing of Muslim minorities — many of them Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking group that often have more in common with their Central Asian neighbours than their Han Chinese compatriots.
As many as 1.5 million Uighurs and other Muslims have been sent to concentration camps.
Authorities have bulldozed hundreds, possibly thousands of mosques as part of the campaign. 
But a lack of records of these sites — many are small village mosques and shrines — difficulties police give journalists and researchers traveling independently in East Turkestan, and widespread surveillance of residents have made it difficult to confirm reports of their destruction.
The locations found by the Guardian and Bellingcat corroborate previous reports as well as signal a new escalation in the current security clampdown: the razing of shrines. 
While closed years ago, major shrines have not been previously reported as demolished.
The destruction of shrines that were once sites of mass pilgrimages, a key practice for Uighur Muslims, represent a new form of assault on their culture.

Three-way composite of Jafari Sadiq shrine.

“The images of Imam Asim in ruins are quite shocking. For the more devoted pilgrims, they would be heartbreaking,” said Rian Thum, a historian of Islam at the University of Nottingham.
Before the crackdown, pilgrims also trekked 70km into the desert to reach the Jafari Sadiq shrine, honouring Jafari Sadiq, a holy warrior whose spirit was believed to have travelled to East Turkestan to help bring Islam to the region.
The tomb, on a precipice in the desert, appears to have been torn down in March 2018.
Buildings for housing the pilgrims in a nearby complex are also gone, according to satellite imagery captured this month.

Before and after imagery of the Jafari Sadiq shrine. L-R Dec 10 2013, April 20, 2019. 

“Nothing could say more clearly to the Uighurs that the Chinese state wants to uproot their culture and break their connection to the land than the desecration of their ancestors’ graves, the sacred shrines that are the landmarks of Uighur history,” said Thum.

‘When they grow up, this will be foreign to them’
The Kargilik mosque, at the centre of the old town of Kargilik in southern East Turkestan, was the largest mosque in the area.
People from various villages gathered there every week.
Visitors remember its tall towers, impressive entryway, and flowers and trees that formed an indoor garden.
The mosque, previously identified by online activist Shawn Zhang, appears to have been almost completely razed at some point in 2018, with its gatehouse and other buildings removed, according to satellite images analysed by the Guardian and Bellingcat.
Three locals, staff at nearby restaurants and a hotel, told the Guardian that the mosque had been torn down within the last half year.
“It is gone. It was the biggest in Kargilik,” one restaurant worker said.
Another major community mosque, the Yutian Aitika mosque near Hotan, appears to have been removed in March of last year.
As the largest in its district, locals would gather here on Islamic festivals.
The mosque’s history dates back to 1200.
Despite being included on a list of national historical and cultural sites, its gatehouse and other buildings were removed in late 2018, according to satellite images analysed by Zhang and confirmed by Waters.
The demolished buildings were likely structures that had been renovated in the 1990s.
Two local residents who worked near the mosque, the owner of a hotel and a restaurant employee, told the Guardian the mosque had been torn down.
One resident said she had heard the mosque would be rebuilt but smaller, to make room for new shops.
“Many mosques are gone. In the past, in every village like in Yutian county would have had one,” said a Han Chinese restaurant owner in Yutian, who estimated that as much as 80% had been torn down.
“Before, mosques were places for Muslims to pray, have social gatherings. In recent years, they were all cancelled. It’s not only in Yutian, but the whole Hotan area, It’s all the same … it’s all been corrected,” he said.
The destruction of these historical sites is a way to assimilate the next generation of Uighurs. 
According to former residents, most Uighurs in East Turkestan had already stopped going to mosques, which are often equipped with surveillance systems.
Most require visitors to register their IDs.
Mass shrine festivals like the one at Imam Asim had been stopped for years.
Removing the structures, critics said, would make it harder for young Uighurs growing up in China to remember their distinctive background.
“If the current generation, you take away their parents and on the other hand you destroy the cultural heritage that reminds them of their origin... when they grow up, this will be foreign to them,” said a former resident of Hotan, referring to the number of Uighurs believed detained in camps, many of them separated from their families for months, sometimes years.

Imam Asim shrine festival 2010. 

“Mosques being torn down is one of the few things we can see physically. What other things are happening that are hidden, that we don’t know about? That is what is scary,” he said.

The ‘sinicisation’ of Islam

A demolished mosque in the old town of Kashgar, East Turkestan. 

Beijing is open about its goal of “sinicising” religions like Islam and Christianity to better fit China’s “national conditions”.
In January, China passed a five-year plan to “guide Islam to be compatible with socialism”.
In a speech in late March, party secretary Chen Quanguo who has overseen the crackdown since 2016 said the government in East Turkestan must “improve the conditions of religious places to guide “religion and socialism to adapt to each other”.
Removing Islamic buildings or features is one way of doing that.
“The Islamic architecture of East Turkestan, closely related to Indian and Central Asian styles, puts on public display the region’s links to the wider Islamic world,” said David Brophy, a historian of East Turkestan at the University of Sydney.
“Destroying this architecture serves to smooth the path for efforts to shape a new ‘sinicised’ Uighur Islam.”
The razing of religious sites marks a return to extreme practices not seen since the Cultural Revolution when mosques and shrines were burned, or in the 1950s when major shrines were turned into museums as a way to desacralise them.
Today, officials describe any changes to mosques as an effort to “improve” them.
In East Turkestan, various policies to update the mosques include adding electricity, roads, news broadcasts, radios and televisions, “cultural bookstores,” and toilets.
Another includes equipping mosques with computers, air conditioning units, and lockers.
“That is code to allow them to demolish places that they deem to be in the way of progress or unsafe, to progressively yet steadily try to eradicate many of the places of worship for Uighurs and Muslim minorities,” said James Leibold, an associate professor at La Trobe University focusing on ethnic relations.
Authorities are trying to remove even the history of the shrines.
Rahile Dawut, a prominent Uighur academic who documented shrines across East Turkestan, disappeared in 2017.
Her former colleagues and relatives believe she has been detained because of her work preserving Uighur traditions.
Dawut said in an interview in 2012: “If one were to remove these … shrines, the Uighur people would lose contact with earth. They would no longer have a personal, cultural, and spiritual history. After a few years we would not have a memory of why we live here or where we belong.”

China's crimes against humanity

Uyghurs urge action against China in Washington

By Jennifer Hansler

Zeynep Ablajan said she hasn't been able to speak to her husband, Yalkun Rozi, in over two years. He is a Uyghur scholar and textbook author who was detained in East Turkestan, China in October 2016.
That was the last time she heard his voice.
"It is torturing looking back," she told CNN through a translator.
"I didn't expect that would be my last contact with my husband."
Ablajan said that he was accused of "disseminating separatist ideology" and sentenced in 2018 to 15 years in prison -- a sentence Ablajan said was predetermined and came after a "sham trial."
Ablajan said she doesn't know where her husband is.
"I'm very concerned about his health," she told CNN, adding that she wants to "hear his voice" and "know if he's okay."

'Everything that makes the Uyghurs unique has been targeted'Ablajan was one of dozens of members of the Uyghur community, advocates and lawmakers who gathered on Capitol Hill in Washington Monday to recognize the plight of the Uyghurs and other persecuted minorities being detained in China.
The evening reception capped a day of activism on the Hill organized by the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community.
The US State Department, according to its most recent Human Rights Report, estimates that China has "arbitrarily detained 800,000 to more than two million Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and other Muslims in internment camps designed to erase religious and ethnic identities."
"International media, human rights organizations, and former detainees reported security officials in the camps abused, tortured, and killed some detainees," the report noted.
Rushan Abbas, a Uyghur-American activist and founder of Campaign for Uyghurs, said that even living in the US has not protected her from being a target.
Days after she spoke out about the Uyghur crisis in September 2018, she said, her sister and her aunt were abducted.
"I have been a proud citizen of the United States for 25 years, yet the long arm of the Chinese Communist regime has extended its reach across the borders to ravage my heart by jailing the only close family I have," she said.
She accused the Chinese government of targeting the Uyghurs' "right to live."
"Everything that makes the Uyghurs unique has been targeted and treated as abnormality: language, culture, religion, history and ethnic identity. All normal activities in Islam are being banned and labeled as 'religious extremism' as part of a 'war on terror,'" she said.

'Where is the outrage?'
Members of the Trump administration and many lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have been outspoken about the crimes being committed against the Uyghurs.
"We need to push aggressively on the plight of the Uyghurs," said US Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback, who also addressed the issue in a briefing last week.
However, many at Monday's event called for more to be done.
"I am saddened by the timid response of the world community, world leaders, who should be defenders of the freedom and democracy," Abbas said.
"Where is the outrage against such horrendous, repugnant catastrophe that's happening on our watch?" she said.
"Isn't anyone seeing that Uyghurs are facing cultural and physical genocide today because of their identity and religion?"
She told CNN she believed that the US should consider sanctions.
Legislation introduced by Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Bob Menendez (D-NJ) in the Senate and by Reps. Chris Smith (R-NJ) and Thomas Suozzi (D-NY) in the House, calls for the application of Global Magnitsky and related sanctions, among other measures.
The House version had 43 co-sponsors, according to Congress.gov; the Senate version, 28 co-sponsors.
Participants on Monday urged more lawmakers to sign on.
On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of lawmakers led by Rubio, Menendez, Smith and Rep. James McGovern (D-MA) sent a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross urging them to impose Global Magnitsky Sanctions on Chinese government and Communist Party officials.
The letter, signed by 22 other senators and 17 other representatives, also called on the Commerce Department "to strengthen export controls to ensure that US companies are not assisting the Chinese Government in creating the vast civilian surveillance or big-data predictive policing systems used in East Turkestan."
"Despite the Chinese government's obfuscations and its slanderous attacks on critics of its abusive policies, there is mounting global concern regarding China's treatment of its minority populations—human rights abuses that may constitute crimes against humanity," the letter said.
"We are disappointed with the Administration's failure so far to impose any sanctions related to the ongoing systemic and egregious human rights abuses in East Turkestan."
At Monday's event, there were also calls for Donald Trump to speak out against the abuses in conversations with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping and other Chinese officials.
Trump will meet with the Vice Premier of China on Thursday.
"I would urge Trump to bring this up in his bilateral discussions as a higher priority than it is right now. There's nothing more important than, at the end of the day, celebrating what makes America exceptional and that is our commitment to human rights and to dignity and to freedom," Rep. Raja Krishnamoorth said.
"And if we can't uphold those values abroad, then where are we as a country? The day that we do not mention this in our bilateral discussion with any other countries is the day that we've lost our way," the Illinois Democrat said.

China's Final Solution

US legal residents are being held in Chinese concentration camps

By Michelle Kosinski and Jennifer Hansler

State Department sources say they know American residents -- either US citizens or people with legal status in the United States -- are being held in detention camps in East Turkestan, China.
When asked if there were many, one of the sources said, "No, a few."
They were unable to disclose more details due to privacy concerns, for the time being.
At a State Department briefing Thursday, Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback said he had a new report about a man in California whose father, a legal US resident, had not been heard from since returning to East Turkestan.
"He had legal status being here, traveled back to East Turkestan after being here with his son in California. And then has not been heard from since. And he's deeply concerned about whether, what his treatment is. He has a number of chronic illnesses, he's a 75-year-old man and an intellectual," Brownback said.
The 2018 State Department Human Rights report estimated that China arbitrarily detained 800,000 to possibly more than two million Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and other Muslims in concentration camps designed to erase religious and ethnic identities.
Uyghur refugee tells of death and fear inside China's East Turkestan camps

"International media, human rights organizations, and former detainees reported security officials in the camps abused, tortured, and killed some detainees," the report noted.
"And it's not just the camps anymore. Entire villages are being encased and people limited on their movement in and out, of the villages in that region that's occurring as well. The situation appears to be escalating, not de-escalating," Brownback said Thursday.
Former detainees say they were forced to endure intensive brainwashing sessions, including close studies of Communist Party propaganda. 

The Chinese government has defended these camps as a means of fighting what they claim is a rising tide of extremism in East Turkestan.
The Chinese government claims that the camps are "vocational and educational training centers for counter-terrorism and de-radicalization purposes."

Brownback said he raised the issue a few weeks ago with Chinese officials at the UN, who first denied anything was happening and then said they were "vocational training camps."
"To which I said, 'I get and have lists of names, hundreds of names that are sent to me, that can't find their relatives,'" he said.
"We are advocating strongly against these actions that the Chinese government is doing and continues to do," Brownback said.
The State Department on Thursday night reiterated its travel advisory for US citizens going to China, warning specifically of "extra security measures in the East Turkestan colony."
"We are committed to providing all possible consular assistance to US citizens in need abroad," a State Department spokesman said. 

"However, China does not recognize dual nationality. This means that China may prevent the US Embassy from providing consular services in some cases, and US-Chinese citizens and US citizens of Chinese heritage may be subject to additional scrutiny and harassment."
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who this week met with Uyghur refugee Mihrigul Tursun and several other members of the Uyghur community, has denounced the human rights violations in China.
"This is one of the worst human rights countries that we've seen since the 1930s," he said in a mid-March interview.

China's crimes against humanity

China Has Also Been Targeting Turkish Nationals In Its Brutal Crackdown On Muslims
Turkey is the only Muslim country to call out China’s crackdown on Uighur Muslims. Our investigation finds that several Turkish nationals have also disappeared, something that has never been publicly acknowledged by Turkey.
By Megha Rajagopalan and K. Murat Yildiz

A baker prepares bread for display in a Uighur bakery in the Zeytinburnu district of Istanbul.

ISTANBUL — It was supposed to be a routine business trip, so the young Turkish man was surprised when immigration officials at the Chinese airport pulled him into a room and questioned him for hours. 

He asked to speak to diplomats from his home country, but the Chinese officials shrugged their shoulders, telling him to take it up with police.
When police brought him in handcuffs to a jail cell on the other side of the country, so damp and dark that he immediately became sick, the man asked again. 

They told him his Turkish passport, whose edges had worn out from use, was fake.
A week later, with his arms and legs shackled to a chair in an underground interrogation room in the city of Ghulja in western China, where he had lived before he became a naturalized citizen of Turkey, he asked for a third time to speak to Turkish diplomats. 

This time the answer came sharp and clear.
“You are not a Turk,” an officer told him. 

“You are from here. Don’t think you are special — we kill people like you so that others can live in peace.”
The young businessman said he had endured 38 days of interrogations, hunger, sleep deprivation, and abuse in Chinese custody before finally being released and deported back to Istanbul, without ever being told of any charges against him.
He is an ethnic Uighur — a religious and cultural minority group that the Chinese government views as a threat to the country’s security. 

The government has subjected Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims in the far-west colony of East Turkestan to a sweeping campaign of mass surveillance and incarceration that has seen more than a million people detained in concentration camps.
Despite his ordeal, the young businessman was fortunate to have been released. 

BuzzFeed News has found that six Turkish nationals — and possibly dozens more — have gone missing in China’s East Turkestan colony, including a pair of young children. 

None of their cases have been publicly acknowledged by the Turkish government, and are being reported here for the first time.
Their families believe they have been sent to prisons or concentration camps, or in the case of the children, to state-run orphanages.

The families’ claims have been corroborated by email correspondence with government officials and copies of Turkish identification documents.
Every family interviewed by BuzzFeed News said Turkish authorities had given them little information on the status of their relatives, and that they had no evidence that their loved ones had ever been allowed to speak to Turkish diplomats — a privilege guaranteed to both prisoners and detainees by the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, to which China is a signatory. 

None of the six people hold dual citizenship with China, according to their families.
Three other families contacted by BuzzFeed News said they also had relatives who were Turkish nationals who had gone missing in East Turkestan, but declined to speak further or be identified because of the sensitivity of the cases. 

And three different Uighur community leaders in Istanbul said dozens more Turkish nationals have gone missing in East Turkestan, but BuzzFeed News could not independently verify all of these cases or speak to the families of those involved.
The families' stories show that Chinese authorities have been unafraid to sweep up foreign nationals in their campaign against Turkic Muslims, even people from countries that are important diplomatic partners.
The businessman who had spent more than a month in Chinese custody over the summer of 2017 became a Turkish citizen in 2011, giving up his Chinese citizenship, and was traveling in China on a tourist visa using his Turkish passport.
“At first I wasn’t that scared,” he said, neatly dressed in a black blazer and sporting a close-cropped haircut at a popular Uighur restaurant in Istanbul last month. 

“I told my cellmates I’m a Turkish citizen, and sooner or later they’d release me.”
The businessman, who asked his name not be used because he is afraid Chinese authorities will retaliate against his family there, was only released after weeks of interrogations about his contacts in Turkey and pictures he had shared on Facebook. 

Though he was never allowed to speak to his family or any Turkish diplomats while he was in custody, he believes he was ultimately let go because of his citizenship.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is one of the few leaders of Muslim-majority countries to have ever criticized China’s treatment of ethnic Uighurs, describing in 2009 a crackdown by Chinese authorities following deadly riots in East Turkestan as “genocide.” 

But the Turkish government, like many others in the world, went mostly quiet on the issue, as Turkey and China established closer economic and diplomatic ties.
That changed in February this year, when Turkey issued the strongest statement in years through its foreign ministry, condemning the use of “concentration camps” by China.
In its unusual rebuke, the foreign ministry called China’s treatment of Uighurs a “shame for humanity.” 

But it said nothing about its own citizens who have been sent to internment camps without charge or who have been missing, in some cases, for more than a year.
In the cases of disappearance confirmed by BuzzFeed News for this article, families said they have contacted the Turkish foreign ministry as well as the presidency, members of parliament, and the Turkish embassy and consulates in China; been assigned case numbers; and been told the ministry is working to find out more information about their missing relatives. 

But they have become distraught. 

After months of begging the Turkish government for information, there have been few responses and no real news on the fates of their children, parents, and siblings. 

Amid constant news reports of detainees facing torture, hunger, and abuse in Chinese internment camps, the lack of information has been terrifying.
The Turkish foreign ministry was asked whether dozens of Turkish nationals had gone missing in China, and if so why it had not said anything about the issue publicly, what Turkey was doing on behalf of the individuals and their families, and to respond to comments from the families that they had heard little from the Turkish authorities. 

The ministry did not comment by the time of this article’s publication.
The Chinese embassy in Turkey also did not respond to a request for comment.

The main street in the Zeytinburnu district of Istanbul, the unofficial center of the city's Uighur diaspora.

Turkey is home to one of the world’s largest Uighur diasporas, with a population of between 20,000 and 50,000 people, according to Uighur community leaders there. 

Uighurs share close cultural, historical, and linguistic ties with Turkish people, and the public there is broadly sympathetic to Uighurs. 

Protests have broken out in Turkey as recently as 2015 over news of mistreatment of Uighurs in China and over forcible repatriation of Uighur migrants.
More recently, there was a public outcry in Turkey after reports in February of the death of Uighur folk musician Abdurehim Heyit, whose music is popular in Turkey. 

It was after this that the Turkish foreign ministry issued its strong statement calling for China to close the camps.
“This tragedy has further reinforced the reaction of the Turkish public opinion towards serious human rights violations committed in the East Turkestan colony,” the statement said.
Heyit later appeared in a video released by Chinese state media saying he was in good health, sparking a Twitter hashtag campaign by overseas Uighurs calling for displays of proof of life for their own family members.
The Uighur community in Turkey has been the heart of the exiled movement for the independence of East Turkestan — the name of the independent state some Uighurs hope to establish as their homeland — since the Communist party took power in China in 1949 and a group of Uighur leaders migrated to Turkey, said Erkin Emet, an associate professor of language at Ankara University who is himself an ethnic Uighur and has researched the history and culture of Uighurs.
“From China’s perspective, Turkey is the most dangerous place for Uighurs,” Emet said, “because of the common culture and history we share with Turks. It is also a place where, unlike in many other Muslim countries, we can easily form political parties and organizations.”
The center of this independence movement, Emet said, is still in Turkey.
Since the early days of its campaign, the Chinese government has specifically targeted Uighurs with links to Muslim countries for detention. 

That has included people who have worked or studied in Muslim countries, or even those who just have relatives living there. 

In particular, China has seized on links to Turkey.
According to the Associated Press, Uighur activists and officials from Syria and China estimate at least 5,000 Uighurs at one time traveled to Syria to fight, many doing so via Turkey. 

China has also said Uighur separatist militants were responsible for a wave of deadly knife and bomb attacks in 2013 and 2014 in East Turkestan and elsewhere in the country. 

But China has targeted millions of Turkic Muslims in its crackdown, the overwhelming majority of whom have no proven links to any extremist cause.
The total number of foreign nationals swept up in the campaign against Muslim minorities, which includes ethnic Kazakhs, is not publicly known. 

Many countries have preferred to advocate for their citizens through quiet diplomacy rather than public advocacy.
Three Australian citizens were released last year after being detained in internment camps. 

Australia is also now working to secure the release of a Uighur Australian baby boy whose father believes he’s at risk of being sent to a state-run orphanage, in a case first reported by BuzzFeed News.
Kazakhstan has remained publicly silent about the plight of ethnic Kazakhs in the region who have been swept up by China’s crackdown, although last August, a Kazakh court ruled against deporting Sayragul Sauytbay — who had worked in an internment camp as a teacher and later fled to Kazakhstan — to China.
BuzzFeed News has shown how Uighurs in countries as far flung as Sweden, Australia, Turkey, and the United States have reported facing harassment and intimidation from Chinese government agents who have contacted them through social media.
Several countries and multinational bodies, including the United States, the United Nations Human Rights Council, and the EU, have publicly condemned the Chinese government’s human rights abuses in the region, but China’s incarceration campaign has not led to any international sanctions.
China does not consider the concentration camps to be a form of criminal punishment. 

Government officials have said they are for "vocational training" and have likened them to “boarding schools,” though escapees from the camps have reported being forcibly taught Chinese language and party propaganda, and subjected to hunger, stress positions, sleep deprivation, and other abuses.
But this puts families of detainees in a difficult spot because it means there is no arrest paperwork, no sentence, and frequently no communication at all from Chinese police. 

It is as if their parents, siblings, or children have simply vanished. 

And it’s unclear whether Chinese authorities have provided Turkish officials with any more information.

Hankiz Kurban and her younger sister Nurbiye Kurban in Istanbul.

Hankiz Kurban was, like her three younger siblings, born and raised in Turkey, but has lived in China on and off for years, trying to make the family’s import and export logistics business a success.
For years the 28-year-old had lived in Urumqi, the regional capital of East Turkestan, with her mother, Amina, and her father, Yahya, to whom she had always been close. 

A quiet, methodical man, 52-year-old Yahya would draw up a to-do list each morning before breakfast. 

Because they planned to keep working in China, he was careful, Hankiz said. 

He forbade her from getting involved in political causes, even in Turkey. 

She went to a Uighur cultural event once when she was younger, and he scolded her.
Hankiz started taking Chinese lessons, hoping it would make it easier to work with business partners in China.

In 2017, she started hearing rumors of people who were disappearing. 

Friends and neighbors told her about fathers and brothers who were taken away by police in the middle of the night.
Hankiz started to worry, but her father was unfazed. 

After all, they were Turkish citizens, staying legally in China. 

They paid taxes. 

They had taken care to do everything aboveboard.
When Hankiz’s visa expired, she returned to Turkey to renew it. 

This was already unusual, she said — in the past she could have done this within China. 

While she was in Turkey, what she had feared the most happened. 

Both of her parents were detained. 

She found out through a final voice message from her mother. 

“They’re taking us away,” she said in the message. 

“Contact the embassy.”
“That was when our hell began,” Hankiz said.
Yahya and Amina Kurban were not the only family members to disappear. 

Hankiz’s uncle, Mehmet Emin Nasir, 39, disappeared in Kashgar, a city in southern East Turkestan, on September 9, 2017.
“We never thought this would last so long. We thought that as a Turkish citizen, sooner or later he’d be released,” Muyesser Temel, Nasir’s sister and Hankiz’s aunt, said as she sat in a yellow armchair at her family’s home in the immigrant-heavy neighborhood of Zeytinburnu, where much of Istanbul’s Uighur community lives in apartment blocks. 

“At the beginning I wasn’t scared, but as time passed I realized this was serious.”
Temel first heard that Nasir was taken away by police from her mother, who had gotten a phone call from relatives in East Turkestan. 

Nasir, who ran a shop that sold curtains, was living in Kashgar with his wife and four children at the time. 

He held a Turkish passport, but unlike many other Turkish Uighurs, he wanted to live in his homeland. 

His wife never sought Turkish citizenship because the family was settled in East Turkestan.
Temel said she reached out to the Turkish foreign ministry through repeated phone calls for months since she discovered her brother had been taken away. 

“They tell us they’re in touch with Chinese authorities, but we have no proof of it,” she said. 

“They just tell us on the phone they are dealing with this, but there’s no evidence.”
“We trust above everything our country, Turkey,” she said. 

“But nothing has come out of this. We have exhausted all of our options.”
Both women, and other individuals interviewed for this article, said they had received few signals from the Turkish foreign ministry about the status of their families, even when Turkish officials promised to help.
Even Turkish children have not been spared from China’s crackdown.
Pashahan Kuçar, 75, has two young grandchildren. 

Both Turkish citizens who were traveling on their mother’s Chinese passport, they have disappeared in East Turkestan along with their mother, Kuçar's daughter-in-law. 

According to their identification records, which her family provided to BuzzFeed News, Kuçar's granddaughter is 7 and her grandson has recently turned 6. 

When their mother was taken away to an internment camp, the children were left alone. 

A neighbor took them in and explained the situation to Kuçar's family by text. 

But not long after, the neighbor stopped responding to messages. 

Kuçar hasn’t heard from her grandchildren in months.
Though Kuçar can barely walk and suffers from several health conditions, she has relentlessly campaigned for the release of her family. 

In Turkey’s capital, Ankara, she has protested outside the presidential palace on a mobility scooter, draped in the light blue flag of East Turkestan. 

She has met with Turkish foreign ministry officials, but they’ve given her no clues about where her grandchildren are or whether Turkish diplomats have been able to contact them.

Pashahan Kuçar

In a way, Temel, the woman whose home is in Zeytinburnu, counts her missing brother among the lucky. 

The fact that he holds Turkish citizenship means at least she can expect Turkish authorities to help.
“You cannot find a family in this neighborhood that does not have family in the camps,” she said. “The internet is blocked over there; there’s no way to contact them — if my mother had not gotten that call we would simply not know.”
Hankiz Kurban, the 28-year-old who once dreamed of building a business in China with her father, has tried everything to find news on her missing parents. 

She reported the matter to Turkish authorities and received a case number in an automated email. 

She began calling the Turkish Embassy in Beijing every other day — so much that officials started to hang up when they heard her voice.
She lies awake at night obsessing about what might be happening to her father and mother. 

She tried taking medication for her anxiety and depression, but it just made her feel sleepy and fuzzy. What she can’t figure out is how her father, who all his life eschewed political causes so as not to get on the wrong side of the government, could have been targeted.
Two years ago in Ghulja, interrogators asked the young businessman detained at the airport in China the same questions about his politics and connections over and over again, searching for evidence of his connections to extremist groups. 

There were two interrogators, he said, one Han Chinese — China’s largest ethnic group — and the other Uighur, both fluent in the Uighur language.
One day they demanded his social media passwords — to Facebook, WhatsApp, and the Chinese messaging app QQ. 

They found a post he had shared on Facebook showing both the Turkish flag and the flag for East Turkestan. 

That day they became certain, he said, that he was a threat. 

It was like they had discovered a smoking gun.
Another day they asked him to list his contacts in Istanbul, to tell them which Uighur restaurants he frequented. 

He gave a list of made-up names, he said. 

But the pair of interrogators knew the Uighur community in Turkey well.
Unlike many Uighurs in Istanbul, the businessman didn’t live in Zeytinburnu. 

His interrogators knew the neighborhood’s shops and alleyways better than he did.
In the days before his departure, one of his interrogators mentioned he’d be traveling to Turkey in a few months. 

“If you see us in Istanbul,” he said, “will you welcome us?” ●