Rahile Omer pulls up the corners of her mouth slightly as if trying to achieve an impossible smile while staring at the camera with unblinking eyes. It’s March 20, 2018, and this Uyghur teenager, now 14 years old, poses for a photo at a police station or detention center in Konasheher County, west China’s Xinjiang Region. She has committed no crime, but authorities consider her potentially dangerous because of her family ties: Both her parents were arrested months ago, also on conflicting grounds. The image of this minor is one of 2,884 photos of detained and detained ethnic Uyghurs that have come to light in the Xinjiang Police Archives, a leak that has made it possible for the first time to give a face to Beijing’s systematic oppression of these Chinese Muslims.
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The documentation, obtained by hacking into the computer systems of the Konasheher and Tekes County Public Security Bureau, China’s police force, by an outside source who prefers to remain anonymous for security reasons, includes 454 spreadsheets containing information shared between Around 301,000 people registered in 2017 and 2018. According to ID numbers, 286,000 reside in Konasheher, which is practically the entire population in 2018. A total of 282,492 of all these police-registered citizens are Uyghurs – including 97,689 minors – according to research by a team led by German researcher Adrien Zenz, member of the Foundation commemorating the victims of communism, and verified by 14 media outlets from 11 countries, including EL PAÍS.
[Consulta de forma íntegra en este enlace las fichas de los reclusos junto al resto de documentos de la filtración]
Among adults, 22,762 have at least two records related to their placement in some type of detention center or prison, mostly between 2017 and 2018, such as: B. The date or reason for the arrest, the name or location of the facilities where the arrested were arrested, or the length or type of sentence imposed. In other words, the leak’s first conclusion is that at least 12.3% of Konasheher’s adult population during the period they were analyzed experienced some form of detention in re-education centers, detention centers (intended for inmates awaiting sentence ) or prisons have suffered files.
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The leak also includes 5,074 portraits taken at police stations or detention centers between January 6 and July 25, 2018, of which 4,989 were attributed to an individual whose information appears in Xinjiang police files. Dozens of these images were corroborated by relatives in exile who were interviewed by the media participating in this investigation. This article analyzes the cases of Uyghurs detained in a center in Konasheher between 2017 and 2018 whose portraits taken by the Chinese authorities appear in the leak. They are 2,884 people. His pictures form the album of the victims of the repression against the Uyghurs.
Rahile Omer and Memetreshit Memettursun, both aged 15 in 2018, are the two youngest individuals listed in this file, which includes 13 other minors and 86 citizens over the age of 60. The oldest are Aniham Hamit and Meryemnisa Ismayil, both 73 years old. The first, who poses with a straight face and appears with two cotton swabs over her ears, was awaiting trial at the time of the photo. Meryemnisa Ismayil, on the other hand, had already been sentenced to “obtaining education” in what China euphemistically calls “Centers for Ideological Education and Vocational Training.” According to Beijing, these are dormitories that students can leave whenever they want. However, the information contained in the Xinjiang police archives confirms that these are detention camps where Beijing culminates the indoctrination and assimilation of the Uyghur minority. Most of these 2,884 citizens were held in one of these re-education centers.
Most of the detainees are under 30 years old (69%), a total of 2,001 people – including the 15 minors. Males also predominate, 2,490 (86%), compared to females, 394 (14%). Although it is difficult to trace the full profile of all of them due to the lack of information, the data confirm that the detainees include people of all ages (between 15 and 73) and educational levels (never having received a college education ).
The comparison between the information contained in the written documents and the metadata obtained in the images leads us to conclude that some of the individuals included in this analysis were photographed long after their incarceration. One possible explanation is that the time the portraits were taken — between January 6 and July 25, 2018, according to the metadata on the files — coincided with a campaign by the Chinese government “to collect biometric data from a large segment of the population received,” says AdrianZenz. In fact, in the records of 1,435 people (49.7%), the blood type is detailed.
Beyond the metadata and annotations by Chinese officials, simple visual inspection of the images reveals many other details: the women were observed at the moment the photograph was taken by female personnel in plainclothes while they emerged along with the men, police officers with riot gear such as batons. Some of the detainees have their arms behind their backs, “possibly indicating that they are handcuffed,” according to Adrian Zenz. Around 40 photos of women show the same vigilante in the same civilian clothes and with a card that reads “Konasheher County Vocational Skills Education and Training Center.” It is a generic term that does not clarify the specific center of the region where the women were interned. However, according to the information in the files, all but one were arrested at the Konasheher Industrial Park Education Center.
Arbitrary Arrests
A detailed analysis of the reasons given by the Chinese authorities to justify the arrests reveals the arbitrary nature of the arrests and an attempt to coerce the Uyghurs’ links to Muslim religious extremism. In some cases, arrests are recommended by the IJOP (Integrated Joint Operations Platform), a big data program that combines automatically obtained data with information entered by Chinese officials via an app. The cause may simply be the imprisonment of a family member. In other cases, generic accusations such as “disturbing social order” or religious pretexts such as reading the Koran, wearing a long beard or covering the head with a veil are used.
The case of Rahile Omer is one of the cases that best demonstrates the inconsistency of the arrests. Her arrest was recommended by the IJOP, which had labeled the teenager a “Type 12 person,” a category that refers to those who present “evidence of dangerousness” because they are in some way connected to a police case. The young woman was found guilty because of her family ties: According to other documents attached to the leak, she is the young daughter of an officer who was arrested during a police operation in Xinjiang. For no other reason. In reality, her father, who was arrested on July 3, 2017 and sent to the same re-education camp his daughter would end up in, was also labeled a “Type 12 person.” In his case, the compound that made him guilty was his wife and mother of Rahile Omer, who was also arrested on July 3 of the same year. The woman had been sentenced to six years in prison for “disturbing social order,” a common charge by Chinese authorities against people in the state’s crosshairs.
Tunsagul Numermet was also reported by IJOP alerts on June 25, 2017. His father, Numermet Bakr, had already been sentenced to prison. According to the documents, the authorities then decided to release this Uyghur woman as a nursing mother. However, she was arrested two months later. That same year, on December 24, she was sentenced to 16 years in prison on the general charges of “assembling a crowd to disrupt social order” and “provoking fights and troubles,” a crime committed, according to Adrien Zenz, for a young woman is unlikely . mother breastfeeding a baby. Interviewed by British news channel BBC in Istanbul, Turkey, her husband Aburahman Hasan has confirmed that the portrait appearing in the Xinjiang Police Department archives is that of his wife. According to her statement, she was arrested along with Hasan’s mother. “How could he gather a crowd? His life was based on his family,” he asserts, in order to refute the accusation from the Chinese authorities.
The religious motives aimed at portraying the Uyghurs as extremists are very numerous. An example is Emetjan Yolwas, whose crime consisted of living in “a family with a strong religious atmosphere” where no smoking and no alcoholic beverages were drunk. According to the leaked data, further evidence supporting this alleged religious extremism is that “his three little sisters” wore veils.
Tohti Emet, one of 20 elderly people whose detention details appear in the file at a Konasheher facility, was also arrested on similar grounds. He was found guilty of overhearing speeches “against tobacco and alcoholic beverages” and about the obligation for women to cover their heads with a veil.
On other occasions, the allegations are more than 30 years old, as in the case of Asiygul Yusup. According to Chinese authorities, in 1984 he “bought a religious book from a bookstall” near a mosque for one yuan “to learn to pray”. And in 1992, she “violated national family planning policy because of religious extremism and gave birth to another child.”
In addition to these religious convictions, the Xinjiang Police Archives contain another document with information and pictures of 330 men arrested for what are considered illegal religious activities, such as studying the Koran. Four of them were later photographed in Konasheher. This is the case of Tursun Kadir, who was arrested on April 2, 2017 and sentenced to 13 years in prison for using “religious extremism to undermine law enforcement” and “crowding and disrupting social order”. The archive has been collecting information about Qadir since the 1980s, when he was “illegally studying the scriptures,” according to Chinese authorities. Among the charges against him are that he “grown his beard from August 2014 to April 2017 due to the influence of religious extremism,” an accusation that appears in cases against other men. The comparison between the two images of Qadir present in the leak confirms that the man stopped wearing his beard after his detention in Konasheher. He had embarked on the path the Chinese state is taking to “wash brains,” “cleanse hearts,” and “cast out the devil,” as confirmed by earlier leaked documents.
The 2,884 photos of the leak analyzed by EL PAÍS have not been treated. They have only been cropped to show the face. The person who hacked into the Chinese police system and provided the files was able to decrypt most of the documents, but not all. Because of this, some images contain visual errors such as wrong colors or mismatched orientations.
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