Affichage des articles dont le libellé est World Uyghur Congress. Afficher tous les articles
Affichage des articles dont le libellé est World Uyghur Congress. Afficher tous les articles

vendredi 19 avril 2019

How Chinese go after Beijing's critics overseas

By James Griffiths
Hong Kong -- Arslan Hidayat was at work when the Chinese attacked.
"My phone was going 'bring, bring, bring,'" said the 31-year-old English teacher.
"I was like, What the hell's going on?"
A Facebook page he helps run which focuses on the Uyghur ethnic minority was being flooded by thousands of comments in a targeted attack by the Chinese.
Australian-born Hidayat lives with his wife and children in Istanbul, Turkey, which is home to a large Uyghur diaspora. 
Their relatives in China have been swept up by the Communist Party's crackdown on the largely Muslim minority group in the country's far-western colony of East Turkestan.
Hidayat has just such a story. 
He has not heard from his father-in-law, Adil Mijit, a popular comedian and entertainer, for over five months. 
The family fears he is among the more than one million Uyghurs detained in a vast system of concentration camps established in East Turkestan.
China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to questions about Adil Mijit's whereabouts.
Hidayat has publicized this story, and many others like it, on a Facebook page, Talk to East Turkestan (TET), to thousands of followers. 
Facebook is banned in China, as are Twitter and Reddit — accessing them requires jumping the Great Firewall, the country's vast censorship and surveillance apparatus.
Despite this, these sites appear to be becoming a key battleground of Chinese influence, as a growing army of Chinese assemble on forums and in Facebook groups to attack voices hostile to Beijing's interests.

Arslan Hidayat (left) seen with his father-in-law, Uyghur comedian Adil Mijit, who the family say they have not heard from since November 2018.

The raid on Hidayat's page began at 8 p.m. in China. 
Photos and quotes at the ready, the Chinese began posting.
"We are Chinese! We reject East Turkestan's independence, and we will never stop!" read one message in English.
"East Turkestan has been China's territory since ancient times," said another.
(The colony's relationship with Beijing has changed considerably over time, and in the modern era it has been the subject of particular dispute. In the last century, following the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, Uyghurs twice declared independence and created their own republics before the CCP took control of East Turkestan and declared it Chinese territory.)
The comments flooded the Facebook pages of TET and the Munich-based World Uyghur Congress (WUC), an exile group that receives funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, a Washington-linked group. 
Photos posted alongside comments by the Chinese showed smiling Uyghurs, many in ethnic dress, with captions in Chinese and English such as "We live very well" or "East Turkestan sheep and cattle fat, we live well every day." 
Other posts just quoted large blocks of text taken from speeches by Chinese dictator Xi Jinping or a Chinese white paper on the situation in East Turkestan.

The Chinese raid lasted for two hours — according to timestamps on posts and an announcement by organizers — with dozens of comments posted per minute in the busiest period, according to page administrators, who could do little but flag the posts to Facebook via automated tools.
"There was not much you could do in the middle of it except watch and try to alert people that it was happening," said Pete Irwin, a WUC researcher and an administrator of its Facebook page. 
"In the middle of it, comments were coming constantly."
Locating those responsible for the raid was not hard.
Many of the photos and comments referenced Diba, a popular online bulletin board akin to China's version of 4Chan, the notorious meme factory.
Photos featured Diba's logo, and many of those commenting changed their profile pictures to represent the forum.

Comments left on the Facebook page of Talk to East Turkestan during a raid by users of the Diba forum. 

Football forum
Diba is a sub-forum of a Reddit-style offshoot of Baidu, China's biggest search engine.
The forum began as a place for fans of footballer Li Yi to hang out, but has since evolved into a sprawling, generalist forum of more than 31 million users, according to stats on the official Diba page.
That size has given Diba a huge influence on Chinese internet culture, experts say.
Any large groups organizing inside China are often liable to censorship or deletion by the CCP.
As Diba grew, it risked facing this type of control, but for the foresight of its moderators: In around 2014, according to a study of the forum, moderators worked to transform Diba into a pro-government forum, reducing some of its controversial content in favor of more nationalist topics and tighter standards.
Diba began to go after Beijing's enemies overseas, adopting a trolling tactic called brigading.
Known in Mandarin as baoba, or "bursting the board," in China, brigading is when members of one forum flood another with irrelevant or abusive posts with the aim of shutting the board down.
The tactic is popular with trolls on 4Chan and Reddit.
The latter has listed it as one of just three "prohibited behaviors."
Diba's first major international raid — or "expedition," as participants referred to it — was in January 2016, after the election of Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen.
Tsai's Democratic Progressive Party is traditionally supportive of Taiwanese independence, and her election came amid heightened tensions between China and Taiwan, which the Communists view as a renegade province, to be reclaimed by force if necessary.
At 7 p.m. China time on January 20, thousands of comments against Taiwanese independence began flooding Tsai's Facebook page, as well as those of pro-Taiwanese news outlets Apple Daily and Sanlih News.
While many posts followed organizers' guidance to be "positive" in their trolling, there were plenty of posts during the raid insulting Tsai and Taiwan, telling Taiwanese people they "belonged to China" and warning them not to "talk back to your father."

Uyghur expedition
In many ways, according to admins and a study of the forum, the people behind the raid on the Facebook pages of Tsai Ing-wen and Hidayat are much like the Uyghur activist: tech savvy, highly-educated millennials.
But when it comes to their beliefs and values they are diametrically opposed.
Those involved in the raid believe the TET Facebook account is spreading lies, maligning China's reputation overseas and promoting separatism and even terrorism.
And they are determined to stop it.
But contrary to most stereotypes about internet trolls, they are committed to doing so without profanity or insults, for the most part.
On Diba, Chinese social media site Weibo, and a handful of Facebook pages and groups, the instructions organizers posted for the raid included behavioral guidelines.
Guidelines given to Diba users listed the forum's four key principles: be patriotic, don't curse, be reasonable and maintain truth above all else.
Organizers appeared to be conscious that the raid would attract a global audience.

A poster and instructions for a raid organized against two Facebook pages by members of Diba, a Chinese forum. 

"There will be media screenshots of the process, don't lose face for yourself and your country," they said.
"We are only anti-extremist, not anti-religion or ethnicity, and everyone has their own freedom of belief. Please do not attack people or religion, and do not publish extreme rhetoric. Our purpose is national harmony and equality for all."
Speaking via instant messenger, an admin of one of the Facebook groups coordinating the raid said it had two primary purposes.
"The first one is to refute all the rumors about East Turkestan colony spread by the East Turkistan separatists," said the admin, who gave her name as Vicky.
The admin said while she was based in China, others involved in the campaign were overseas Chinese.
Even though most of the comments have since been deleted by page admins, Vicky felt it was a successful operation.
"I think we got our foot in the door," she said.
The Facebook raid comes amid what appears to be heightened concern within China over how the country is portrayed on Western social media.
In China, Twitter users critical of the government have reportedly been visited by the police and ordered to delete posts or their entire accounts.
Accounts of Chinese dissidents, and even non-political researchers, have gone silent without explanation.
Reddit administrators have also noticed a surge in threads relating to topics critical of China being downvoted and those maligning it being buried, according to BuzzFeed News.
The Cyberspace Administration of China did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
In a statement, China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that "as a principle, we don't normally comment on social media activities and opinions."
"Nowadays, the overall social situation of East Turkestan is stable and the momentum for economic development is good. All ethnic groups get along well," the foreign ministry said in its statement. "The sense of security and fulfillment from a stable society have improved greatly."
A Facebook spokeswoman told CNN the company was working "in a variety of ways to find and disrupt this kind of abuse and to provide people with the tools that help people control the content they see."
"In this case, we have removed content and accounts that violate our policies, and will continue to investigate and take action on any abusive behavior we find," she said.
"I think it speaks to a paranoia or anxiety" over how the East Turkestan issue is reflecting on China, Irwin said of the recent raid on the WUC Facebook page.
Hidayat agreed: "For them to go out of their way to attack in this manner, we felt very proud. It shows they're taking notice."
But he was also worried that the content used in the campaign, such as quotes from allegedly happy Uyghurs, could undermine the claims made by his organization.
"For those newbies just catching up to this issue ... the claims that we make and some of the stuff that is written looks far-fetched — people not being able to pray or fast — but it's true," he says.
Even in Turkey, with its large community of Uyghurs there are people who "don't even know what East Turkestan and the Uyghurs are," he says.
"But if East Turkestan was really (as) stable as they say it is then they wouldn't have gone out of their way to attack such a small page," Hidayat says.
As of this publication, his page has fewer than 20,000 followers.
In the wake of the attack, the TET Facebook page saw a spike in followers thanks to the extra media attention, adding around a thousand.
"It's all positive from our side," he says.
"I would like to thank the CCP for promoting our Facebook."
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mardi 5 février 2019

China's crimes against humanity

Rights Groups Seek U.N. Inquiry Into China’s Mass Detention of Muslims
By Nick Cumming-Bruce

A Uighur resident of Kasghar, in China’s East Turkestan colony, in 2017. China has swept around a million people, mostly ethnic Uighur Muslims, into indefinite detention.

 GENEVA — Human rights groups called on Monday for a United Nations investigation into China’s mass detention of Muslims in the colony of East Turkestan, seeking to galvanize an international response to allegations of widespread abuses.
The rights organizations, presenting the issue as a test of the United Nations Human Rights Council’s credibility, urged it to set up an international fact-finding mission during its session that starts at the end of February.
“The magnitude of abuses occurring in East Turkestan demand uncompromising scrutiny,” Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, said in a statement released at a news conference in Geneva.
“The Human Rights Council’s integrity demands that states not allow China to hide behind its membership or economic might to escape accountability,” he said.
Human Rights Watch was joined by Amnesty International, the Geneva-based International Service for Human Rights and the World Uyghur Congress, a Munich-based group representing the Uighur ethnic group, sometimes spelled Uyghur.
Investigations by academics and journalists over the past year have exposed a campaign that has swept around a million people, mostly Uighur Muslims, into indefinite detention in an expanding network of secretive "re-education" camps across East Turkestan.
The Chinese authorities, invoking what they called the threat of "terrorism", have also carried out a draconian crackdown on Muslims that has targeted religious practice and customs. 
Officials have banned beards, religious instruction of children and even the granting of names with religious connotations to children.
“This is an effort to change the religious and ethnic identity of an important minority,” Mr. Roth said, and “absolutely demands an international response.”
Underpinning the campaign has been a surveillance program involving widespread installation of facial recognition technology, collection of DNA samples and deployment of thousands of additional security personnel.
“East Turkestan has become an open-air prison — a place where Orwellian high-tech surveillance, political indoctrination, forced cultural assimilation, arbitrary arrests and disappearances have turned ethnic minorities into strangers in their own land,” Kumi Naidoo, secretary-general of Amnesty International, said in a video statement.
China’s mission to the United Nations in Geneva could not immediately be contacted for comment. Many Chinese government offices have closed in celebration of the Lunar New Year.
China initially responded to reports of mass incarceration of Muslims by issuing blanket denials, but its position changed after a United Nations panel monitoring religious equality expressed its alarm in August.
Defending its record at the Human Rights Council in November, China brushed aside allegations of mass detentions and abuses as politically motivated, presenting its camps as "vocational training" centers designed to improve the economic prospects and living standards of China’s minorities.
China has sought to reinforce the official narrative this year by taking small groups of diplomats and journalists on carefully arranged visits to East Turkestan, but journalists trying to make independent visits have faced obstacles.
The European Union said last week that a visit by three of its diplomats to sites carefully selected by the Chinese authorities had provided insight into China’s official thinking, “but does not invalidate the E.U.’s view of the human rights situation in East Turkestan, including in relation to mass detention, political re-education, religious freedom and sinicization policies.”
With their call for an international investigation on Monday, the human rights groups sought to ratchet up pressure for action not only by the United Nations but also by its member states, including members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which remained conspicuously silent during November’s review of China’s record.
Last year, European states and members of the group of Muslim nations had combined in the Human Rights Council to step up investigation of Myanmar’s atrocities against Rohingya Muslims. 
“In our view, East Turkestan demands a similar response,” Mr. Roth said.
Discreet diplomacy, Mr. Roth said, would have no impact on Chinese leaders who, in his view, have concluded that they can get away with the abuses against Muslims. 
Mr. Roth said only public exposure through an international investigation could change China’s course.
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mardi 30 octobre 2018

They Escaped China’s Crackdown, but Now Wait in Limbo

By Christina Anderson and Chris Buckley
Abdikadir Yasin, a Uighur Muslim from China seeking asylum in Sweden, with his wife and one of their children in emergency housing in the city of Gävle.

GAVLE, Sweden — Abdikadir Yasin and his wife waited for months, dreading a call telling them they would have to leave Sweden and return to western China, where the government has corralled hundreds of thousands of Muslim Uighurs like them into re-education camps.
The couple had joined an outflow of Uighurs from the Chinese colony of East Turkestan three years ago, when China’s clampdown on the minority group was intensifying.
They ended up in Sweden, where their asylum request was rejected, leaving them in fear of being deported and ending up in the camps.
Fleeing Uighurs have struggled to win acceptance and asylum in a world where the restrictions on them in China — including omnipresent surveillance and arbitrary detention — have won little attention until recently.
They face an array of pressures from the Chinese authorities and from host countries, some of which, like Sweden, have already taken in many people fleeing conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
“As long as you are a Uighur, it’s just a matter of time before you end up in a situation like this,” Mr. Yasin said in Gavle, a small city north of Stockholm that is the latest stop on their journey.
“Today it was me.”
This sense of precarious invisibility is often felt among the million or more Uighurs living beyond China’s borders, especially those who left in recent years.
Beijing’s rising influence has raised the risks of their being forced back to China.

Sweden denied Mr. Yasin’s family the right to stay, though they later won a reprieve from deportation. “The staff didn’t understand China,” Mr. Yasin said.

China has called them illegal migrants and dangerous extremists, although very few have headed toward trouble spots in the Middle East.
It has pressured and cajoled neighboring countries to return Uighurs who are caught without travel permits.
And increasingly since last year, the Chinese authorities have directly pressed Uighurs to return from abroad, contacting them over messaging apps or threatening their families in East Turkestan.
Since last year, the expansion of the indoctrination camps, which are designed to sever the attachment of Uighurs and other Muslim minorities to their religion and culture, has drawn an international chorus of criticism.
The Chinese government recently tried to blunt that criticism by presenting the camps as "comfortable job training centers".
Mr. Yasin and his lawyers said the Swedish officials who considered the family’s applications for refugee status seemed unsure about threats waiting for them in East Turkestan, which is the homeland of 11 million Uighurs.
Despite statements from lawyers that Mr. Yasin was likely to be detained if sent to China, the Swedish Migration Agency ruled that he did not qualify for asylum, he said.
“They didn’t believe that in East Turkestan there were so many problems for Uighurs,” Mr. Yasin said.
“The staff didn’t understand China.”
Tens of thousands of Uighurs left China over a period of years before a crackdown choked off the departures, leaders of the exile community say.
Many settled in Central Asian countries and in Turkey, others in Arab countries.
Some have tried to make it to the United States and other Western countries, which they hoped would offer more security.
But Uighur migrants often live in limbo, unsure of how long they can stay in their host country, fearful of returning to China and constantly worried about family members back home.
Many Uighurs must exploit loopholes and gray zones to get the passports and visas needed to go abroad.
Abdusalam Muhemet, 41, with his children at his home in Istanbul. The family sought refuge in Turkey after Mr. Muhemet was released from one of China’s indoctrination camps for Uighurs and other Muslims.

“Diaspora leaders have been frustrated with the lack of interest in the Uighur issue in general, but are particularly sensitive about Western governments and their lack of interest,” Işık Kuşçu-Bonnenfant, an associate professor at the Middle East Technical University in Turkey who studies Uighur migrants, said by email.
Only recently, she said, have diaspora leaders “been able to use the detention camp issue effectively to raise awareness among Western governments.”
Until a few years ago, Mr. Yasin and his wife had, like many urban, middle-class Uighurs, adapted to the ways of China and its vast Han ethnic majority.
Most Uighurs are Sunni Muslim, and their language and culture have much more in common with those of peoples across Central Asia and Turkey than with the Han’s.
Mr. Yasin, 36, learned Chinese and tried to stay aloof from politics, making a living selling cars in Urumqi, the regional capital of East Turkestan.
His wife, 30, was a preschool teacher who also ran a textile shop.
In the 2000s, China suffered a string of attacks which the government said were perpetrated by Uighur separatists backed from abroad.
In 2009, a spasm of deadly ethnic conflict rocked Urumqi.
The police tried to snuff out protests by Uighurs; tensions boiled over into anti-Chinese killings and counterattacks on Uighurs.
Even relatively wealthy, middle-class Uighurs who kept away from protests and political causes faced intensifying suspicion.
“Urbanized Uighurs I spoke to seemed to lose hope of a future in China due to economic discrimination and racial profiling,” said Henryk Szadziewski, a researcher with the Uyghur Human Rights Project, based in Washington. (Uyghur is an alternate spelling.)
“This subpopulation of Uighurs had the means to bribe officials in East Turkestan and obtain the visas and paperwork required to make the move.”
Mr. Yasin’s troubles began in 2015, when neighbors recruited him as their leader in a dispute over compensation for demolished homes, he said.
As the dispute heated up, the police detained Mr. Yasin.
Officers stunned him with an electric prod and forced him and other residents to sign documents admitting to offenses, he said.
He was detained again after he tried to publicize the dispute on social media and by contacting journalists.
This time, he said, he was beaten and tortured, then sent to a hospital to recover.
While he was there, relatives made preparations to spirit him out of China along with his wife and infant daughter.
The family caught a plane to Kazakhstan in Central Asia, where they spent a month, then flew to Russia and finally on to Stockholm, where they applied for asylum in May 2015.
After nearly two years and an appeal, the couple were formally denied the right to stay.
The Swedish Migration Agency accepted that Mr. Yasin was Uighur, but it did not believe his account of his escape, said Fedja Ziga, a lawyer who represented the couple and said he found their explanations to be consistent and reasonable.
After being denied, Mr. Yasin and his family slipped into Germany to seek asylum there.
But after a year of waiting, they were sent back to Sweden under a European Union rule that says people can apply in only one country.
At the Stockholm airport, waiting officials told them to find their way to Gavle, two hours away. They spent a first night there huddled on a bench.
The grinding fear has taken its toll on Mr. Yasin and his family, especially his wife, who did not want her name reported.
She had been pregnant with their third child but suffered a miscarriage in late September.

Chinese security personnel in the city of Kashgar, in the western colony of East Turkestan. Uighurs in East Turkestan have been subjected to surveillance and crackdowns on religious life, as well as the vast detention program.

“This case must be seen in the context of the extremely overstrained Swedish Migration Agency, given the large influx of migrants from North Africa and the Middle East,” said Jojje Olsson, a Swedish journalist based in Taiwan, who first reported on Mr. Yasin’s case.
“China is neither widely reported nor discussed in Sweden, which leads to a big information gap.”
Sweden has deported Uighurs before.
In 2012, a Uighur man and woman who had sought asylum there were sent to China after their applications were rejected, Radio Free Asia reported.
In other parts of the world, deportation is more common.
The World Uyghur Congress, an exile organization, counted 317 cases of Uighurs being sent back to China in the 20 years up to 2017.
Peter Irwin, a project manager for the congress, said there had been at least 23 deportations since then, including a man sent back by Germany as result of a bureaucratic foul-up.
But the pressures from the Chinese authorities on Uighurs abroad are also increasing.
Many Uighurs are traveling on Chinese passports, and growing numbers of those passports will expire in the coming years, forcing some Uighurs to choose between returning to China or, in effect, living as stateless exiles.
“If we have a child, my child cannot get Chinese citizenship, because China refuses to give a passport, and Turkey is not going to give me passports,” said Guli, a Uighur student living in Turkey. She asked that her family name not be used, fearing that her family in East Turkestan could suffer for her speaking out.
“Our next generation will have big problems if she or he cannot get any citizenship from any country.”
Last month, Mr. Yasin and his family won a reprieve from deportation.
Amid rising attention on the crackdown in East Turkestan and on their case, the Swedish Migration Agency said it would stop repatriating any Uighurs and other minorities from that region.
But the family still feels anxious.
The couple and their two children are living in an emergency housing facility off a highway, with fast-food drive-ins and gas stations as their closest neighbors.
Winning the right to stay in Sweden is still uncertain.
“We don’t feel safe yet,” Mr. Yasin’s wife said.
“I watch the news, so I feel very glad when I see that people are starting to understand what is happening there.”
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