China has built 400 internment camps in Xinjiang

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For the past year, the Chinese government has said that almost all the people in its vocational training program in Xinjiang, ostensibly aimed at deradicalizing the region’s mostly Muslim population had graduated and been released into the community. This shows that the statements made by the government are patently false. There had merely been a shift in style of detention.

China has built nearly 400 internment camps in Xinjiang region, with construction on dozens continuing over the last two years, even as Chinese authorities said their re-education system was winding down.

The Kashgar site is among dozens of prisonlike detention centers that Chinese authorities have built across the Xinjiang region, according to the Xinjiang Data Project, an initiative of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), despite Beijing’s claims that it is winding down its internationally denounced effort to reeducate the Uighur population after deeming the campaign a success.

The 45 foot high walls and guard towers indicate that this massive compound next to a vocational training school and a logistics center south of Kashgar is not just another bureaucratic outpost in western China, where authorities have waged sweeping campaigns of repression against the mostly Muslim Uighur minority. It is a new detention camp spanning some 60 acres, opened as recently as January. With 13 five story residential buildings, it can accommodate more than 10,000 people.

This video shows the construction of a detention center near the western Chinese city of Kashgar from 2017 to 2020. (Maxar/Airbus via Google Earth)

A recent visit to Xinjiang by The Washington Post and evidence compiled by ASPI, a ­Canberra-based think tank, suggest international pressure and outrage have done little to slow China’s crackdown, which appears to be entering an ominous new phase.

The new compound, one of at least 60 facilities either built from scratch or expanded over the past year, has floodlights and five layers of tall barbed-wire fences in addition to the towering walls.

Other, existing sites have been expanded with higher-security areas. New buildings added to Xinjiang’s largest camp, in Dabancheng, near Urumqi, last year stretched to almost a mile in length

Satellite imagery reveals a tunnel for sending detainees from a processing center into the facility, and a large courtyard like those seen in other camps where detainees have been forced to pledge allegiance to the Chinese flag. Some 14 facilities are still being built across Xinjiang, the satellite imagery shows.

The findings support recent reporting from BuzzFeed News that China has built massive new high-security prison camps to create a vast and permanent infrastructure for mass detention.

According to the James Millward, a professor of inter-societal history at Georgetown University who has been tracking the plight of the Uighurs, These detention camps are the backdrop to all Chinese government efforts to control the population in Xinjiang. They exist as a threat.

Attempt to visit the detention centers

When a Post reporter tried to visit the detention center half an hour’s drive south of Kashgar this month, her vehicle was quickly surrounded by at least eight cars that had previously been tailing at some distance. This site was clearly sensitive.

When The Post’s reporter and two European journalists headed toward another new camp in Akto, south of Kashgar, they were stopped repeatedly, made to register their passports and drive behind police cars, only to be turned around at a county border. Covid-19 precautions were given as the reason.

Conversely, when they visited several compounds that previously held local Uighurs, authorities didn’t bother much with trying to obstruct the reporters.

Those facilities appeared empty. Windows swung open at one former “vocational training” center. Bunk beds lay in piles in the yard at another. Litter rolled past ping-pong tables and over lonely soccer fields.

About eight camps appear to have been decommissioned, and 70 more, almost all of them lower-security facilities, have had their internal fencing or perimeter walls removed, according to ASPI’s database. But there are no signs of soccer fields, factories or vocational facilities at the new compound south of Kashgar that would indicate a rehabilitative purpose.

Source:- Washington Post