According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), a big data program in China’s Xinjiang “arbitrarily selects” Muslims for detention, pointing to behaviors such as wearing a veil, studying the Koran or going on the Hajj pilgrimage.
In a new report on Wednesday, the rights group said it analyzed a leaked list of more than 2,000 detainees in Xinjiang’s Aksu prefecture and found that the program, known as the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP), also targeted women. people because of their relationships, their communications, their travel history, or because they are related to someone who the authorities consider suspicious.
“The Aksu List provides more information on how technology is accelerating China’s brutal crackdown on Turkish Muslims in Xinjiang,” said Maya Wang, senior China researcher at HRW.
“The Chinese government owes answers to the families of those on the list: Why were they arrested and where are they now?”
The United Nations estimates that more than a million Turkish Muslims, most of them ethnic Uighurs, have been detained in camps on the western edge of Xinjiang. Activists say the purpose of the detention was “to erase the ethnic and religious identities of” Turkish Muslims and to ensure their loyalty to the Chinese government.
Beijing denies the allegations, describing the camps as vocational training centers to help stamp out “religious extremism” in the troubled province.
HRW said the Aksu List, which dates back to late 2018, shows more evidence of the role big data and technology play in helping officials select targets for the “transformation of coerced thinking.” Earlier this year, activists documented how officials in Xinjiang’s Karakax used the IJOP to assess whether a person should remain in detention. A Karakax official dismissed that report as an “fabrication”.
‘Pseudoscientific fig leaf’
HRW said it obtained the Aksu list, a spreadsheet titled: IJOP Trainee List, from an anonymous source in Xinjiang and verified the authenticity of the list by checking it against official records, social media records and consulting diaspora communities. Uyghur and two experts who have documented Beijing’s crackdown on Xinjiang.
HRW gave the example of Ms T, who was detained because the IJOP had singled her out for “links with sensitive countries”. The list said that Ms T had received four calls from a foreign number in March 2017, which HRW discovered belonged to Ms T’s sister when they called.
“Ms. T’s sister said that the Xinjiang police questioned Ms. T around the time the Aksu List recorded her arrest date. The police had specifically asked about his sister because she lives abroad, ”HRW said.
Ms. T’s sister told HRW that she has had no direct contact with her family in Xinjiang since then, but she heard that Ms. T now worked in a factory five days a week and was allowed to come home only on weekends.
“Ms. T’s sister believes that Ms. T is being forced to work in a factory against her will, and pointed out that Ms. T had been training for a different career before being detained.”
In a second case, a man was arrested for having studied the Koran in the mid-1980s and “letting his wife wear a veil” in the early 2000s, HRW said. In a third case, a woman was arrested for traveling outside of Aksu, going to Kashgar once, and staying overnight in Hotan once, both in 2013.
Roughly 10 percent, or more than 200, of the Aksu List people were detained for “terrorism” and “extremism,” according to the spreadsheet, but authorities did not allege that these detainees committed, incited, supported or conspired. acts. of violence, HRW said.
Other reasons for detaining a person included the use of software such as a virtual private network (VPN), Skype, or the peer-to-peer file-sharing app Zapya.
Also mentioned was the fact that they “disconnect from the network” by turning off their phones or disappearing for periods of time.
HRW said its analysis of the Aksu List “strongly suggests that the vast majority of people targeted by the IJOP system are detained for legal and non-violent everyday behavior.
Wang said that predictive surveillance platforms such as IJOP “are actually a pseudoscientific fig leaf for the Chinese government to justify the vast crackdown on Turkish Muslims.”
He added: “The Chinese government should immediately shut down the IJOP, delete all the data it has collected and release all those arbitrarily detained in Xinjiang.”
HRW also said there was preliminary evidence that the IJOP system is being used in China outside of Xinjiang.
A procurement document dated January 2020 shows that the China Electronic Technology Group (CETC) that built the IJOP in Xinjiang built the same system in Yinchuan, the capital of Ningxia province.
The region has the highest concentration of the Hui ethnic group, also a Muslim minority.
“While it is unclear how the system is being used, religious restrictions on Hui Muslims (closure of mosques and Arabic-language schools, removal of Arabic scriptures from halal restaurants) have been on the rise in Ningxia and other Muslim areas. I have fled since 2019, “HRW said.
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