BBC: China's hidden camps:What's happened to the vanished Uighurs of Xinjiang?

[China]

China's hidden camps

 

China is accused of locking up hundreds of thousands of Muslims without trial in its western region of Xinjiang.

 

The government denies the claims, saying people willingly attend special “vocational schools” which combat “terrorism and religious extremism”.

 

The first reports that China was operating a system of internment camps for Muslims in Xinjiang began to emerge last year.

 

The satellite photograph was discovered by researchers looking for evidence of that system on the global mapping software, Google Earth.

 

It places the site just outside the small town of Dabancheng, about an hour's drive from the provincial capital, Urumqi.

 

To try to avoid the suffocating police scrutiny that awaits every visiting journalist, we land at Urumqi airport in the early hours of the morning.

 

But by the time we arrive in Dabancheng we're being followed by at least five cars, containing an assortment of uniformed and plain-clothes police officers and government officials.

 

It's already clear that our plan to visit a dozen suspected camps over the course of the next few days is not going to be easy.

 

Like a mini-city sprouting from the desert and bristling with cranes, are row upon row of giant, grey buildings - all of them four storeys high.

 

With our cameras rolling we try to capture the extent of the construction, but before we can go much further one of the police cars swings into action.

 

Our car is stopped - we're told to turn off the cameras and to leave.

 

But we've discovered something of significance - a huge amount of extra activity that has so far gone unnoticed by the outside world.

 

An October 2018 Sentinel image shows just how much the site has grown compared with what we'd expected to see.

 

What we suspected to be a big internment camp, now looks like an enormous one.

 

And it is just one of many similar, large prison-type structures that have been built across Xinjiang in the past few years.

 

Before our attempt to visit the site, we'd stopped in the centre of Dabancheng.

 

It was impossible to speak openly to anyone - minders lurked menacingly close by and would aggressively debrief anyone who even exchanged a greeting with us.

Instead, we telephoned random numbers in the town.

 

 

What was this large complex with its 16 watchtowers that the authorities were so desperate to stop us filming?

 

“It's a re-education school,” one hotelier told us.

 

“Yes, that's a re-education school,” another shopkeeper agreed.

 

“There are tens of thousands of people there now. They have some problems with their thoughts.”

 

This giant facility would of course fit no objective definition of a school.

 

Click on the link for the full article

 

[TheGreatBuzz]

How the **** is this not a bigger story???

[No Excuses]

2 minutes ago, TheGreatBuzz said:

How the **** is this not a bigger story???

 

The Chinese government is great at supressing what they do within borders. Journalists don’t have access to do investigative work, and thus no one really knows the full extent of what’s happening in Xinjiang.

 

My girlfriend is Uyghur and she has no contact with her family back home. They have either been interned in a re-education camp or too afraid to speak to their families outside of China out of fear that they will be arrested. 

 

I believe for most Uyghurs who live outside of China, this is now their reality. They don’t have contact with anyone in their families still in China. The Chinese government all but restricts foreign travel for Uyghurs.

 

Every city street is monitored by surveillance cameras with facial recognition. There are LED billboards that publicly shame people who go against the arbitrary rules set up by the communist government. 

 

China is the dystopian nightmare envisioned in every sci-fi movie.

[Dan T.]

Excellent reporting on a chilling story. 

 

And how how sad for your girlfriend, No Excuses.  Just awful.

 

 

[China]

In other news...

 

‘The SOS in my Halloween decorations’

 

Inside a notorious Chinese labour camp, a dissident smuggled an SOS letter into the Halloween decorations he was forced to manufacture. Years later, a woman in the US opened a box of fake tombstones and found his note. It seemed impossible at that moment that they would ever meet.

 

A few years ago, as the evenings began getting colder and darker, Julie Keith remembered the graveyard kit in her loft.

 

She'd picked it up for $29.99 from the supermarket chain, Kmart, a couple of years before that. It contained polystyrene headstones, fake skulls and bones, black spiders and a cloth drenched in imitation blood.

 

It had been gathering dust in the loft ever since. But when her daughter told her she wanted a Halloween-themed fifth birthday party, Julie, then 42, thought of the kit and went upstairs to fetch it.

 

Then, as she opened the box in her living room, a sheet of lined paper fell out.

 

On it was a message, neatly hand-written in blue ink. Julie's daughter picked it up and asked her to read it. The English was broken and frequently mis-spelt, but its meaning was clear enough.

 

"Sir," it began. "If you occassionally buy this product, please kindly send this letter to the World Human Right Organization. Thousands people here who are under the persicution of the Chinese Communist Party Government will thank and remember you forever."

 

Julie read on. The note said that the graveyard kit had been produced in unit eight, department two of Masanjia labour camp in Shenyang, China. Inmates there had to work there for 15 hours a day seven days a week: "Otherwise, they will suffer torturement, beat and rude remark. Nearly no payment (10 yuan/1 month)." Today 10 yuan is roughly equivalent to £1.10 or US$1.44.

 

Prisoners were detained on average for one to three years without a formal court sentence, the note continued. Some of them belonged to the spiritual movement Falun Gong. "They often suffer more punishment than others," the note said.

 

 

Click on the link for the full article

[Cooked Crack]