CHINA’S DATABASE REVEAL THOUSANDS OF UYGHUR MUSLIMS DETAINED IN XINJIANG

Fri 13 May 2022:

According to a leaked list from China’s previously unreported database obtained by the news agency AFP, over 10,000 Uyghurs have been imprisoned in the Xinjiang region of China.

According to academics, the disputed region, which is highly guarded by China’s Communist government, has a hidden network of detention centers and prisons where over one million Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities are imprisoned.

The leaked list, which includes information about each prisoner’s name, birth date, ethnicity, ID number, charge, address, sentence length, and prison, sheds light on the whereabouts of some families’ missing members.

It shows data from 2014 to 2018 during which the number of people sentenced by Xinjiang courts, for broad charges including “gathering a group to disrupt social order”, “promoting extremism” and “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”, soared from around 21,000 to over 133,000.

Although the West has repeatedly slammed China’s treatment of the Uyghurs as genocide, Beijing has defended itself by calling the camps as “vocational training centres.”

This month, UN human rights director Michelle Bachelet will visit Xinjiang to probe China’s alleged abuses.

In 2017, China intensified its ideological campaign against Islamic radicalism, dubbed “Strike Hard.”

Most cases were decided behind closed doors, with the proportion of prison sentences of more than five years virtually tripling from the previous year.

“This is not clearly targeted anti-terrorism,” says David Tobin, lecturer of East Asian Studies at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom.

“It’s going to every door and taking a number of people away. It really shows they’re arbitrarily targeting a community and dispersing it across a region,” he added.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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