Wed, Feb 19, 2020 page4

• Leaked data show China targets Islam

  DISCRIMINATION: The database shows the Chinese government focused on praying, attending a mosque or even growing a long beard as reasons for detention

  • AP, BEIJING
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  Uighur imam Memtimin Emer was for decades the bedrock of his farming community in China’s Xinjiang region. On Fridays, he preached Islam as a religion of peace. On Sundays, he treated the sick with free herbal medicine. In the winter, he took coal to the poor.

  However, as Beijing’s mass detention campaign engulfed the Xinjiang region three years ago, the elderly imam was swept up and locked away, along with all three of his sons living in China.

  A newly revealed database exposes in extraordinary detail the main reasons for the detentions of Emer, his three sons and hundreds of others in Karakax County: their religion and their family ties.

  

  Security personnel patrol near the Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar in China’s Xinjiang region on Nov. 4, 2017.

  Photo: AP

  The database profiles the internment of 311 individuals with relatives abroad and lists information on more than 2,000 of their relatives, neighbors and friends.

  Each entry includes the detainee’s name, address, national identity number, detention date and location, along with a detailed dossier on their family, religious and neighborhood background, the reason for detention, and a decision on whether or not to release them.

  Issued within the past year, the documents do not indicate which government department compiled them or for whom.

  Taken as a whole, the information offers the fullest and most personal view yet into how Chinese officials decided who to put into and let out of detention camps, as part of a massive crackdown that has locked away more than 1 million ethnic minorities, most of them Muslims.

  The database emphasizes that the Chinese government focused on religion as a reason for detention — not just political extremism, as authorities claim, but ordinary activities such as praying, attending a mosque or even growing a long beard.

  It also shows the role of family: People with detained relatives are far more likely to end up in a camp themselves, uprooting and criminalizing entire families such as Emer’s in the process.

  Similarly, family background and attitude is a bigger factor than detainee behavior in whether they are released.

  “It’s very clear that religious practice is being targeted,” said University of Colorado researcher Darren Byler, who studies the use of surveillance technology in the Xinjiang region. “They want to fragment society, to pull the families apart and make them much more vulnerable to retraining and re-education.”

  The Xinjiang government did not respond to faxes requesting comment.

  Asked if the Xinjiang region is targeting religious people and their families, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Geng Shuang (耿爽) said: “This kind of nonsense is not worth commenting on.”

  Beijing has said before that the detention centers are for voluntary job training and that it does not discriminate based on religion.

  China has struggled for decades to control the Xinjiang region, where the native Uighurs have long resented Beijing’s heavy-handed rule.

  With the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in the US, Chinese officials began using the specter of terrorism to justify harsher religious restrictions, saying that young Uighurs were susceptible to Islamic extremism.

  After militants set off bombs at a train station in the region’s capital, Urumqi, in 2014, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) launched a so-called “People’s War on Terror,” transforming the Xinjiang region into a digital police state.

  The leak of the database from sources in the Uighur exile community follows the release in November last year of a classified blueprint on how the mass detention system really works.

  The blueprint obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists showed that the centers are forced ideological and behavioral re-education camps run in secret. Another set of documents leaked to the New York Times revealed the historical lead-up to the mass detention.

  The latest set of documents came from sources in the Uighur exile community, and the most recent date in them is March last year. The detainees listed come from Karakax County, a traditional settlement of about 650,000 on the edge of the region’s Taklamakan Desert, where more than 97 percent of residents are Uighur.

  The list was corroborated through interviews with former Karakax residents, Chinese identity-verification tools, and other lists and documents.

  Detainees and their families are tracked and classified by rigid, well-defined categories. Households are designated as “trustworthy” or “not trustworthy,” and their attitudes are graded as “ordinary” or “good.”

  Families have “light” or “heavy” religious atmospheres, and the database keeps count of how many relatives of each detainee are locked in prison or sent to a “training center.”

  Officials used these categories to determine how suspicious a person was — even if they had not committed any crimes.

  “It underscores the witch-hunt mindset of the government and how the government criminalizes everything,” said Washington-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation senior fellow Adrian Zenz, who is an expert on the detention centers.

  Reasons listed for internment include “minor religious infection,” “disturbs other persons by visiting them without reasons,” “relatives abroad,” “thinking is hard to grasp” and “untrustworthy person born in a certain decade.”

  “Born in a certain decade” seems to refer to younger men. About 31 percent of people considered “untrustworthy” were aged 25 to 29 years, an analysis of the data by Zenz showed.

  When former student Abdullah Muhammad spotted Emer’s name on the list of the detained, he became distraught.

  “He didn’t deserve this,” Muhammad said. “Everyone liked and respected him. He was the kind of person who couldn’t stay silent against injustice.”

  Even in Karakax County, famed for its intellectuals and academics, Emer stood out as one of the most renowned teachers in the region.

  Muhammad studied the Koran under Emer for six years as a child, following him from house to house in an effort to dodge the authorities.

  Emer was so respected that the police would telephone him with warnings ahead of time before raiding classes at his modest, single-story home of brick and mud, Muhammad said.

  Although Emer gave Chinese Communist Party-approved sermons, he refused to preach communist propaganda, Muhammad said, eventually running into trouble with the authorities.

  Emer was stripped of his position as an imam and barred from teaching in 1997, amid unrest roiling the region.

  When Muhammad left China for Saudi Arabia and Turkey in 2009, Emer was making his living as a doctor of traditional medicine. Emer was growing old, and under heavy surveillance, he had stopped attending religious gatherings.

  That did not stop authorities from detaining the imam, who is in his 80s, and over 2017 and 2018 sentencing him on various charges for up to 12 years in prison.

  The database cites four charges against Emer in various entries: “stirring up terrorism,” acting as an unauthorized “wild” imam, following the strict Saudi Wahhabi sect and conducting illegal religious teachings.

  Muhammad called the charges false.

  Emer had stopped his preaching, practiced a moderate Central Asian sect of Islam rather than Wahhabism and never dreamed of hurting others, let alone stirring up “terrorism,” Muhammad said.

  “He used to always preach against violence,” Muhammad said. “Anyone who knew him can testify that he wasn’t a religious extremist.”

  None of Emer’s three sons had been convicted of a crime, but the database shows that over the course of 2017, all were thrown into detention camps for having too many children, trying to travel abroad, being “untrustworthy” or “infected with religious extremism,” or going on the Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca.

  It also shows that their relation to Emer and their religious background was enough to convince officials that they were too dangerous to be released from the camps.

  “His father taught him how to pray,” notes one entry for his eldest, Ablikim Memtimin.

  “His family’s religious atmosphere is thick. We recommend he [Emer] continue training,” another entry for his youngest son, Emer Memtimin, says.

  Even a neighbor was tainted by living near him, with Emer’s alleged crimes and prison sentence recorded in the neighbor’s dossier.

  The database shows that much of this information is collected by teams of cadres stationed at mosques, sent to visit homes and posted in communities. The information is then compiled in a dossier called the “three circles,” encompassing their relatives, community and religious background.

  It was not just the religious who were detained. The database shows that Karakax County officials also explicitly targeted people for activities that included going abroad, getting a passport or installing foreign software.

  Pharmacist Tohti Himit was detained in a camp for having gone multiple times to one of 26 “key” countries, mostly Muslim, the database shows.

  Former employee Habibullah, who is in Turkey, recalled Himit as a secular, kind and wealthy man who kept his face free of a beard.

  “He wasn’t very pious. He didn’t go to the mosque,” said Habibullah, who declined to give his first name out of fear of retribution against family members still in China. “I was shocked by how absurd the reasons for detention were.”

  The database shows that on March 10, 2008, Himit attended his grandfather’s funeral at a local mosque; that later that year, he went to the same mosque again, once to worship and once to celebrate a festival; and that in 2014, he went to Anhui Province to get a passport and go abroad.

  That was enough to show that Himit was “certainly dangerous,” and Himit was ordered to stay in detention and “continue training,” the database shows.

  Muhammad said he heard that Emer is now under house arrest due to health issues.

  It is unclear where Emer’s sons are.

  It was the imam’s courage and stubbornness that betrayed him, Muhammad said.

  Although deprived of his mosque and his right to teach, Emer quietly defied authorities for two decades by staying true to his faith.

  “Unlike some other scholars, he never cared about money or anything else the Chinese Communist Party could give him,” Muhammad said. “He never bowed down to them — and that’s why they wanted to eliminate him.”
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