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China can lock up a million Muslims in Xinjiang at once
Analysis
| Text | Relevance | Reliability | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| “Imin grew up in a big family, with three sisters and three brothers, though one of his sisters died young. Later, he would look back on those playful childhood years in the countryside with a painful sort of nostalgia. In 2003, Imin married and moved to Korla. Years later, after settling into life in the city, he started a business with a friend importing a bottled health drink from Malaysia. He relished the chance to travel overseas.” | Irrelevant. Not related to core thesis that it is possible to lock 1 million Uyghurs | Not applicable | Only used for propaganda purposes to invoke sympathy early. |
| “But like other Uyghurs, he quickly discovered that having spent time abroad, especially in Muslim-majority countries, made him an object of suspicion for government authorities.” | Highly relevant .. 1) | Reliable | It was unremarkable that ALL governments in SE Australia and Australia took this terrorism seriously. |
| “In October 2015, he was detained by police at the airport in Urumqi and taken to a detention center in Korla. State security officials interrogated him for hours about his contacts overseas and whether he had taken any actions that could threaten the state, he said.” | Highly relevance | Probably reliable | As they would, if they had suspicions. This indicates, withoput a doubt, that Imin knew what was going on |
| The mass detention campaign had not yet come into full swing, and the compound where he was locked up was an old detention center, with space for just over 500 people. | Irrelevant, since “mass detention campaign” presumes we know what this means. | Probably unreliable | The purpose of witness testimony is to enlighten us. Therefore, it cannot be judge beforehand. |
| “Still, life in detention was strange and disorienting. In the mornings before breakfast, the prisoners had to sing patriotic songs, like “Without the Communist Party, There Is No New China.” | Irrelevant | Subjective | Singing songs is not relevant to space. |
| “There were Han Chinese people detained there too, ones who were accused of crimes like embezzling money or assault.” | Questionable relevance | Questionable reliability - how was this information obtained? | It would seem there was a likelihood that he had committed a crime and this was a place where people were detained while a case is made against them. |
| “Imin wondered why he was there, since he had never committed such a crime, and nobody had accused him of having done so. | Relevant | Unreliable, as it contradicts earlier statements directly | Why would he wonder? He had been 'interrogated' about activity outside the country and “whether he had taken any actions that could threaten the state”. So, he can't pretend to not know. |
| “In interrogations, police at the detention center asked if he had watched videos on YouTube or Facebook, platforms that are banned in China. He told them he hadn’t.” | Relevant | Reliable | This directly affirms that this was specifically addressing radicalisation. |
After 43 days, Imin was released. Police gave him a document, which he shared with BuzzFeed News, stating that he had been detained for endangering national security, but that he was being released with all charges dropped. So, despite their suspicions, he is released. He tried to put the experience behind him, and in January, he moved to Turkey with his wife and young children. Why would you move to Turkey? He's not in detention. He's been released. Going to Turkey is an indication of intention to join with ETIM, or at least have ETIM sympathies. Imin kept in touch with relatives and friends in Korla. Everyone knew about the construction of new prisons — and he did too, because it was something that people talked about. But he had been released and had a document to prove it. So it had little to do with him, he thought. Did they say 'prison'. If so, how did they know the nature of these facilities. This is hearsay, not evidence. He is confirming that he considered his case as not criminal.
Imin also figured that Korla’s large Han Chinese population would spare it from the worst of the Chinese government’s excesses. He didn’t think twice about returning from Turkey for a visit. This is at the height of the operations of ETIM and ISIS in the area.
Arriving back in town, he was stunned to see dozens of new checkpoints and mobile police units dotting the streets. He contacted a police officer he knew, who informed him his name was on a government blacklist because he had lived in Turkey. He tried to lie low at his in-laws’ home. So, he is aware now that going to Turkey makes him suspicious.
But almost overnight, it had become impossible to avoid the authorities. “I realized that whether you’re in a bus or a car, when you pass through checkpoints, they only ask Uyghurs to get out of the vehicles so they can check their IDs and search them,” he said. “Han Chinese people stayed in their cars.” This may be true. Nothing to verify it, however.
“I couldn’t even go out to buy a bottle of milk without needing my ID to scan everywhere,” he added. “It was a big change.” He's laying low, but there's police and scanning everywhere and he is not caught? He was detained again in March 2017, just months after the government’s construction campaign had begun, and he was sent to a camp in Korla — another older facility, capable of holding only about 200 people. This time, because so many Uyghurs were being detained, the conditions were much worse. None of the other people detained were Han Chinese — there were only other Muslim minorities like him. To his surprise, he recognized some of his cellmates from his school days. So it would make sense for there to be building to relieve crowding. The cell was crowded, and because the men were seldom allowed to bathe, it smelled so bad that guards would use the collars of their shirts to cover their noses when they came in to open a small window. After a few days, Imin felt a wave of disgust when he realized he had gotten so used to the stench that he hardly noticed it anymore. It was freezing cold, and the guards would give the detainees a bucket of hot water that they would pass between each other, trying to warm their hands by holding it in their laps. On one occasion, Imin and his cellmates were allowed to go outside, to a small balcony. “I didn’t see the sun,” he said, “but I felt it on my face — just that sliver of sun that felt so good. By April 2017, Imin was released from detention for the last time, after about a month. He believes it’s because he agreed to spy on other Uyghurs when he returned to Turkey — something he says he never did. The small detention center where he was held was demolished the following year, satellite images show. But as older facilities in Korla were being destroyed, the government was ramping up construction on newer, more permanent facilities in the area. So, detention for a month. Newer facilities. By summer 2017, satellite images show, a new detention center had been added to a steadily growing complex with multiple facilities on Korla’s eastern outskirts. A high-security prison — recognizable by the double layers of barbed wire fencing on both sides of its perimeter wall and with its status confirmed by tender documents — had, by the end of 2017, grown to the size of 39 American football fields. Altogether, the complex had space for 7,312 people.
The government still was not finished building in Korla.
Construction sequence of the complex east of Korla.
On Feb. 20, 2018, during China’s weeklong Lunar New Year holiday, workers broke ground on the Korla Vocational Skills Education and Training Center, a new purpose-built internment camp at the southernmost end of the area. Satellite imagery from March 2018 shows the site under construction, with eight identical dormitory buildings, offices, a canteen, and a “correction center,” as well as other support facilities. The plans scheduled just 69 days for the construction of the camp, and a budget of 453 million yuan (around $70 million), according to a state media report uncovered by the Canada-based researcher Shawn Zhang. By July, the camp was ready to begin detaining people. A little more than a year later, the entire complex had grown even further, with a second detention center built and a series of new buildings added to both the medium- and high-security prisons. Altogether, the entire complex can now hold nearly 25,000 people without factoring in overcrowding — a ninefold increase compared to 2016. Now in Germany after his final release, Imin finds it difficult to get news about his family because of the Chinese government’s surveillance of digital communications within the country. He often lies awake at night, he says, “psychologically suffering.” His mind frequently travels back to China, wondering about his brothers and sisters. All five have vanished, he believes into prisons or camps. He thinks often about one of his brothers who had become religious, wearing a long beard and praying often. He knew authorities had targeted him for detention. He didn’t know if he’d ever see him, or any of his siblings, again. Considering young Uyghur men didn't often wear beards before 2000, wearing them after 2000 is probably a good indicator of emerging militancy.
