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Recent Activities Suggest Xinjiang Authorities Anticipate International Inspection

Recent Activities Suggest Xinjiang Authorities Anticipate International Inspection

The Epoch Times, 3 January 2019

By Isabel Van Brugen – Xinjiang officials are drastically ramping up efforts to conceal evidence of the scale and true nature of the “vocational re-education centers” where at least 1 million predominantly Uyghurs are believed to be held ahead of an expected international inspection, according to sources in the region.

Evidence of the mass detention facilities, such as barbed wire fencing, is being removed and a source in Xinjiang confirmed with the Chinese-language Epoch Times in September 2018 that local police officers have signed confidentiality agreements not to reveal that they are transporting Uyghurs elsewhere. According to the source, about 1,500 Uyghurs in the area where he resides were being sent to other locations.

Sources told Radio Free Asia (RFA) in October that they believed as many as 300,000 Uyghurs have been secretly transferred from Xinjiang to prisons in Heilongjiang province and other parts of China since relocations began at the beginning of 2018.

Local residents are now also being intimidated as local officials make efforts to clamp down on ways information can leak to the outside world about the camps, an anonymous source told RFA. In the hopes that they will remain silent, residents have been forced to sign confidentiality agreements which threaten imprisonment for “three generations of their family blacklisted” if they make “any negative comments” when inspectors arrive, RFA reported in December 2018.

A copy of a CCP confidentiality agreement obtained by online magazine Bitter Winter demanded that residents not “spread rumors,” give media interviews, or disclose information through social media or SMS messaging “that contradicts the policies of the Party and the government.”

Xinjiang residents must say “only good things about the government,” and “praise the [Communist] Party’s policies,” a businessman from Ghulja city in Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture, who is currently trading in neighboring Kazakhstan, told RFA.

“People are taught what to say, and they were warned not to mention the difficulties they are facing.”

Another confidentiality agreement for prisoners was obtained by The Epoch Times. The agreement from Awat County stated that prisoners must not “reveal the study, life, number of people, and internal workings of the training centers,” or they will be held accountable “according to the relevant laws and regulations of our country.”

CCP confidentiality agreement distributed to prisoners in Xinjiang

A photo of the CCP confidentiality agreement distributed to detainees of Awat County, Xinjiang. (Supplied)

Translation of CCP confidentiality agreement distributed to prisoners in Xinjiang

Translation of CCP confidentiality agreement distributed to detainees of Awat County, Xinjiang

An international visit to China’s northwestern region is expected within weeks, according to the report.

Several U.N. member states called on China to allow observers into the region during the U.N. Human Rights Council’s universal periodic review on Nov. 6 last year amid growing international awareness and mounting evidence of rapidly built mass detention facilities in Xinjiang facilities like satellite imagery compiled by online researchers.

Numerous testimonies from former Uyghur detainees have also revealed the widespread human rights abuses suffered by those detained within the camps, which the Uyghur diaspora is calling genocide of their people by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Uyghurs, alongside other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang and Tibet, as well as religious believers who remain outside state control, have long been targeted by the ruling CCP for thought transformation through “re-education”—what outsider observers call brainwashing.

In October, Xinjiang authorities moved to legalized the detention facilities, saying they were to “educate and transform” those whom the CCP deems at risk of the “three evil forces” of “extremism, separatism, and terrorism.”

The facilities were renamed as “vocational training centers” and now, mounting evidence suggests that detainees are being worked against their will in forced labor facilities within the camps turned training centers.

https://m.theepochtimes.com/recent-activities-in-xinjiang-suggest-authorities-anticipate-international-inspection_2755764.html