Activists Arrested in Asia for Speaking Out on Facebook China Uyghur Social Media
Watched, judged, detained
Leaked Chinese government records reveal detailed surveillance reports on Uyghur families and Beijing's justification for mass detentions
Past Ivan Watson and Ben Westcott
Hong Kong (CNN) — Rozinsa Mamattohti couldn't sleep or swallow for days after she read the detailed records the Chinese government had been keeping on her entire family.
She and her relatives, most of whom live in Cathay's western Xinjiang region, aren't dissidents or extremists or well-known. But in a spreadsheet kept past local officials, her entire family's lives are recorded at length along with their jobs, their religious activeness, their trustworthiness and their level of cooperation with the authorities. And this spreadsheet could make up one's mind if Mamattohti's sis remains behind razor wire in a government detention middle.
Her family'southward records, and hundreds of regime reports similar them, have been leaked to journalists by a patchwork of exiled Uyghur activists.
The certificate reveals for the first time the system used past the ruling Chinese Communist Political party to justify the indefinite detention on lilliputian grounds of not but Mamattohti's family unit merely hundreds -- and possibly millions -- of other citizens in heavily fortified internment centers beyond Xinjiang.
It is the third major leak of sensitive Chinese government documents in as many months, and together the information paints an increasingly alarming picture of what appears to be a strategic campaign by Beijing to strip Muslim-majority Uyghurs of their cultural and religious identity and suppress behavior considered to be unpatriotic.
The Chinese government has claimed it is running a mass deradicalization program targeting potential extremists, but these official records, verified by a team of experts, bear witness people tin can be sent to a detention facility for simply "wearing a veil" or growing "a long beard."
For Mamattohti's sister, 34-year-old Patem, the crime for which she was detained, according to the document, was a "violation of family planning policy," or put just, having also many children. Nether the countrywide policy, which rarely if ever is cause for imprisonment, rural families in Xinjiang are express to iii children. Patem had four.
It was the starting time time since 2016 that Mamattohti had received any concrete news of what had happened to her family.
"I never imagined that my younger sister would be in prison," Mamattohti told CNN, through tears, in her firm in Istanbul. She said she showtime saw the leaked records when they were informally circulated on social media amongst Uyghurs overseas. "As I was reading their names I couldn't concur myself together, I was devastated."
The leak exposes what appears to be a detailed and far-reaching system of land surveillance in the region, run by the local government in Xinjiang, designed to target Chinese citizens for peacefully practicing their culture or religion.
CNN has just been able to independently verify some of the records contained in the document. But a squad of experts, led by Adrian Zenz, senior beau in Mainland china studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington DC, say they are confident that information technology is an authentic Chinese government certificate.
The leaked document is a 137-page PDF file, probable generated from an Excel spreadsheet or Word table. Zenz pointed to the use of similar terminology and language in this certificate, which he refers to as the Karakax Listing, and other records leaked from Xinjiang.
He said the records showed that Beijing was detaining Uyghur citizens for deportment that in many cases did not "remotely resemble a crime."
"The contents of this certificate are actually significant to all of us because it shows us the paranoid mindset of a regime that's controlling the up-and-coming super power of this earth," Zenz told CNN.
CNN sent a copy of the document to both the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Diplomacy and the local government in Xinjiang, to see if they could verify its authenticity. There was no response.
Speaking in Federal republic of germany on Thursday, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that he would gladly welcome any international diplomats or media to visit Xinjiang to meet the truth for themselves.
"(Those who have come) have not seen whatever concentration camps or persecution in Xinjiang. However, what they take seen is that all ethnic groups are able to live peacefully and harmoniously … Their religious freedom is totally protected and they can do their religion without whatever restrictions," he said.
"The so-called concentration camps with and so-called 1 million people are 100% rumors. Information technology is completely fake news. I do not understand why these people are however lying while having the facts. I tin only say that these people are deeply prejudiced against China."
A previous attempt by CNN to visit the detention centers in Xinjiang was blocked by local government regime.
The document: Family, neighbors, faith
Prc's vast western region of Xinjiang has for centuries been home to a big population of predominantly Muslim ethnic groups, the largest of which is the Uyghur. Until recently, there were many more Uyghur citizens in Xinjiang than Han Chinese, the ethnic majority in the balance of the country.
Since 2016, show has emerged that the Chinese government has been operating huge, fortified centers to detain its Uyghur citizens. As many as 2 million people may take been taken to the camps, according to the United states Country Department.
One-time detainees and activists say the facilities are actually designed for the purposes of re-education -- places where inmates are forcibly taught Mandarin and instructed in Communist Party propaganda. Some testimonies from quondam detainees describe over-crowded cells, torture and even the deaths of fellow detainees.
The leaked certificate appears to be a compilation of 667 records of detained Uyghur citizens, all of whom lived within a minor neighborhood of Karakax county, besides known as Moyu, in southwestern Xinjiang. A number of the 667 records announced to be duplicates, merely in total they correspond 311 individuals who were sent to detention centers.
Population figures from 2015 show Karakax was domicile to just over 560,000 people, 97.6% of whom were ethnically Uyghur.
In Dec 2016, v people were killed -- including 3 assailants -- when a group of men allegedly attacked the local Karakax Communist Party office with knives and detonated an explosive device. Chinese state media described it every bit a terrorist assault.
It was a series of deadly attacks like this across Xinjiang and other parts of China which Beijing has used to justify its mass detention of Uyghurs, purportedly as a ways of nullifying the alleged threat of Islamic extremism. The Chinese Strange Ministry building says that since the organisation was put in place three years agone, no one has been killed in terror attacks in Xinjiang.
Few dates are included on the leaked document, but the earliest date of detention listed is in January 2017, suggesting that these Uyghurs began to be put into camps later the December attack.
The leaked evaluations incorporate detailed reports on each of the detained residents and their families, including not simply their national ID numbers and occupations, only descriptions of their neighbors and rigorous assessments of their daily religious activeness.
These elements are referred to in the document as the 3 Circles -- family, social and religious associations. Based on these evaluations, each record besides contains an official judgment on whether the detainee should be allowed to leave their campsite.
How a detainee is judged
I study concludes: "(The detainee's) stay has been less than ane year and it is recommended she continue her training to amend her Mandarin."
The document never refers to detention centers or detainees specifically, referring to them euphemistically as training centers and trainees, in keeping with the Communist Party's practices of referring to the camps every bit places for "vocational training."
The fact that the certificate'southward assessments all question whether or not the people sent to the detention centers should be allowed to leave would announced to indicate their real office.
Information technology isn't clear who has compiled the listing or from which government department information technology comes, merely the level of detail on each detainee'southward daily religious behavior before they were sent away is advisedly recorded and specific.
Editor'southward annotation: this is a recreation of 1 record, not a copy.
One instance study reads: "Information technology is found that before (the detainee) was sent to the training centre, she did namaz (daily prayers) every day in 2014, prayed after meals and prayed at the family graves during festivals. Her religious knowledge came from her grandmother."
Another detainee is recorded as having refused to take off her face veil for years. "She went to Saudi arabia with her husband twice, she insisted on wearing a face veil … with the excuse of rhinitis (allergies), despite committee cadres asking her (non) to do so several times," the report says. The woman took off her veil in 2016, only was still sent to a detention center for existence a "potential threat."
The alleged offenses for which Uyghurs and other ethnic Muslim minorities have been detained appear to be at odds with Beijing's claims of a program of deradicalization.
For case, most 114 of the detainees in the leaked records were sent to the camps for having too many children, 25 for having a passport without having traveled internationally and thirteen for having "potent religious traditions" in their family unit.
Some were detained simply for reading or owning "illegal books" or having a family fellow member who used to be in jail.
Main reasons for detention in the document
Violation of family planning policy
(having more than children than is immune)
Potential threat (various reasons)
Having a criminal record, ex-prisoner
Property a passport without
visiting a strange land
Visiting 1 of 26 "sensitive countries"
Illegal preaching, attention or
allowing room for illegal preaching
Prone to existence radicalized due to
religious traditions in family
Family unit member of a criminal
or ex-prisoner
Wearing a face veil
Having a long beard
Your wife wearing a face veil
Making an unauthorized pilgrimage
"The document clearly shows … that the re-teaching camps are not for people who accept been convicted of anything at all. They are simply for people who fall into some kind of general category of general suspicion or who have simply practiced their own religion," Zenz said.
Uyghur activists who shared the certificate take declined to reveal their source, due to fears of retaliation.
Since receiving the information, academic Adrian Zenz and his team have authenticated the identities of 337 out of the more than 2,800 individual people named in the records.
Through interviews with Uyghurs outside China, CNN was able to verify the cases of eight relatives, friends or acquaintances identified in the certificate.
The certificate also rings truthful with the continued efforts of the Chinese government to bring the culturally disparate Xinjiang in line with state-approved mainstream cultural norms. The steady growth of Han Chinese in the province is a direct result of a policy push by Beijing to encourage migration to the Muslim-bulk region.
Since the authorities launched its "Strike Hard Campaign Against Extremism" entrada in 2014, the local assistants's opinion towards Uyghurs has hardened. The detention centers were synthetic, Uyghur mosques and graveyards take vanished below bulldozers and fifty-fifty loyal Communist Party cadres accept been imprisoned manifestly due to their Uyghur sympathies.
Co-ordinate to Zenz, this newly leaked document appears to exist partially based on information gathered by Chinese government workers who take been sent to live with and monitor Uyghur families in recent years. "This data is being collected by regime workers who visit minorities, who alive with families, who sleep (in their houses), who spend fourth dimension with them, who find out every intimate and private item … And so they enter all of this information into a digital database through a smart telephone app," he said.
Other probable sources of information are the neighborhood committees and cooperative family unit members who are regularly mentioned in the document.
No release dates are recorded for whatever of the detainees, even those who have had their return to the community approved. In some cases, the detainee is recommended to be released from the camp but to continue working in the "industrial park," potentially corroborating allegations that Uyghurs are made to perform forced labor.
If the certificate is extrapolated for the balance of Xinjiang, home to xi million Uyghurs, in that location could exist hundreds of thousands more surveillance records like these.
The family fellow member: 'She is no real threat'
For some Uyghur expatriates, living overseas with no word from their families for months or years, this certificate provides the first official confirmation of the fate of their loved ones. For Rozinsa Mamattohti, information technology was a devastating coda to years of uncertainty and fear.
She moved to Turkey to study as a teenager in 2002, after dropping out of school at an early on age to be a seamstress. Despite the altitude betwixt Xinjiang and Turkey, there are many connections between the two. Uyghurs are considered ethnically Turkic, and speak a language closely related to Turkish. Activists pushing for Xinjiang to become a separate land call it "East Turkestan."
Inside three years Mamattohti had married a local man and they soon started their own family.
At starting time, she regularly kept in touch with her family dorsum in Xinjiang over the phone and later through email and video calls.
She idea she'd have many years to introduce her family unit back in Xinjiang to her children. Simply then things began to alter at dwelling house.
Rozinsa's family tree
In April 2016, while Mamattohti's parents were visiting her in Turkey, the news came that her older sister Rozniyaz Mamattohti had been arrested past the Chinese authorities.
Her parents returned to Xinjiang to find out what had happened, but shortly phone calls from Rozinsa began to ring out. Regularly used family phone numbers were disconnected, without caption.
"I haven't been able to contact my family since June 2016," she said.
In January 2020, she saw Uyghur translations of the leaked certificate distributed on social media past exiled activists and her worst fears seemed to exist confirmed.
"First, I saw the document
with my older sister's proper name on information technology.
It was heartbreaking."Rozinsa Mamattohti
A second undated example study reveals Mamattohti'south older sister Rozniyaz was sent to a different detention middle from their younger sibling, Patem. She was detained for two purported violations: Having too many children and holding an unused passport, which is not an official crime under Chinese law.
According to the evaluation of both sisters, their family had been "cooperative" with the village committee. Despite having been sent to the army camp in March 2018, the undated evaluation of the anonymous assessor is that younger sister Patem didn't pose whatsoever danger. "She is no real threat. It is recommended to stop her training."
But the document doesn't say if Patem was freed from the camps or how long she spent inside.
Rozniyaz had already been released, according to her assessment, although at that place is no tape of the length of her detention. She is recorded as coming to the grouping master to "sign omnipresence every forenoon" and the neighborhood committee "every night after piece of work."
"It is recommended she
proceed her supervised life
in the neighborhood." Rozniyaz's assessment document
Like Mamattohti, many other Uyghurs have moved to Turkey over the years for work or to escape the political tensions back home.
Ipargul Karakas has lost contact with her family unit in Xinjiang. In an interview at her home in Turkey, she told CNN her blood brother and sis were in prison, and during her last phone call with her mother, the older woman claimed not to know who she was.
Karakas said information technology was a shock when she received a translation of the leaked document over social media and quickly recognized the name of her cousin, Mahire Mahmut.
According to the document, Mahmut was put in a detention middle because her parents and two elder siblings took a trip to Turkey in 2016, which the Chinese government claimed was "illegal."
On their way to Mecca in Kingdom of saudi arabia to take role in the Hajj, they had stopped off in Turkey to visit Ipargul and her hubby Hafiz.
"They came hither legally. When they arrived here, we saw their passports, they wanted to go to Hajj. Nosotros saw their passports," Ipragul'south husband Hafiz told CNN in Istanbul.
There is no word on whether Mahmut was released or how long she spent in the facility, although the report does recommend her release. When it was written, she had three children below the age of xiv. It's not clear what became of them.
"When we think near the difficult and harsh atmospheric condition (our family unit) might exist in back in Xinjiang … we just sit and cry helplessly," Hafiz said.
The leakers: 'Nothing is free'
Uyghur hip-hop artist Tahirjan Anwar was jubilant his 32nd birthday in kingdom of the netherlands when, without warning, he received more than a hundred pages of classified Chinese records.
At the time, he had no idea what to practise with the information. Just he knew that it was a "priceless gift."
"Because this is crucial bear witness. Information about indigenous cleansing towards Uyghurs by the Chinese government," he told CNN, speaking publicly for the first time almost his role in the leak of the document.
Anwar has been living in the Netherlands since his father sent him away from Xinjiang in 2005. He was just 17 when he left, but co-ordinate to Anwar his begetter could "feel something was going to happen."
He hasn't seen his parents in person since, and the last fourth dimension they spoke was by telephone in 2016. He said they asked how he was, told him they loved him and so said: "At present, you are not my son."
"The Chinese regime fabricated my male parent say that to me," he said.
Anwar won't reveal the source of this new document, merely saying that they were taken out of China and passed to exiled Uyghur activists. He said if his source'due south identity is made public "that person will die."
Anwar passed on the leaked material to another Uyghur exile in holland, writer Asiye Abdulahad, in the hope she'd know how to spread the word. Betwixt them, Anwar and Abdulahad have been responsible for disseminating 2 of the Chinese government'southward most embarrassing internal leaks in decades. They say neither of them was involved in an before leak of internal Chinese government documents to the New York Times.
Quietly-spoken writer Abdulahad isn't a member of whatsoever formal Uyghur organization, but when the certificate appeared in her inbox, she knew she had to act.
"This document is important evidence that can prove the unjustifiable and illegal measures the Chinese government has taken to arrest these people and send them to re-education centers and prisons." Asiye Abdulahad
The first set of documents the pair distributed to the media was the leak published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which appears to be the operating manual for the Chinese authorities's Xinjiang detention centers.
The documents, mostly from 2017 and published in November 2019, reveal plans to construct a big number of heavily secured facilities in which detainees are forcibly taught in the Chinese language, proper "manners," and "ideological education."
"(Beijing) never really denied that those weren't Chinese authorities documents, never said annihilation about the classified documents' actuality," she said.
Abdulahad said that she believes the Chinese government is aiming to deport out a "political cleansing" of Xinjiang through its detention eye program, to change the character of the Uyghur people in the region. She said the strategy was unlikely to succeed, adding it has been tried before past "many empires in the world."
"(Empires) all terminate eventually. It's impossible for them to last," she said.
Anwar frankly describes the deportment of the Chinese government as "ethnic cleansing."
"We aren't terrorists … Nosotros are
simply humans. We are but Uyghurs.
We are just like you."Tahirjan Anwar
He said that it wasn't a difficult decision to reveal his function in leaking the certificate, as he is certain his family are already in prison. Privately, role of him even hopes that his family unit members will be paraded out past Chinese state media to denounce him publicly.
"I volition be happy (if that happens) considering first of all, I can see that they are alive," he said.
Abdulahad said people demand to await across their own family's safety and speak out for change. "Nothing is free. You take to pay some price in order to pursue the things you desire," she said.
'What is their crime?'
None of the men and women backside the newly leaked document believes information technology is likely to lead to an immediate modify of policy by the Chinese government.
Previous releases of sensitive documents have been rock-walled by Beijing officials, who claimed that they were maliciously misinterpreted.
But in the past six months, the Chinese government has been working hard to try to defuse rising global concern about its detention system in Xinjiang.
Delegations of foreign diplomats and selected media accept been given tours of the fortified facilities. Regime officials have claimed, without providing proof, that the camps are increasingly empty.
"People arrive and exit constantly," said Shohrat Zakir, chairman of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in July. "Well-nigh have already gone back to society."
In any case, the leaked document shows that the Chinese regime knows in detail what its Xinjiang residents are doing, house by business firm, street past street. If the eleven million Uyghurs living in Xinjiang should fall foul of Beijing once more, the Chinese government knows where to find them.
Uyghur exile Rozinsa Mamattohti said she wants the whole earth to know what the Chinese regime is doing to her people.
"To the Chinese I desire to say -- why? What is the reason you have arrested my aging, sick parents? What are you doing to them? What is your purpose? And my innocent sisters, what is their crime?" she said.
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