China’s Uyghur county has highest jail charge on the earth

Nearly one in 25 individuals in a county within the Uyghur heartland of China has been sentenced to jail on terrorism-related prices, in what’s the highest identified imprisonment charge on the earth, an Associated Press evaluate of leaked information reveals.

An inventory obtained and partially verified by the AP cites the names of greater than 10,000 Uyghurs despatched to jail in simply Konasheher county alone, one in every of dozens in southern Xinjiang. In current years, China has waged a brutal crackdown on the Uyghurs, a largely Muslim minority, which it has described as a battle on terror.

The checklist is by far the largest to emerge thus far with the names of imprisoned Uyghurs, reflecting the sheer measurement of a Chinese authorities marketing campaign that swept an estimated million or extra individuals into internment camps and prisons. It additionally confirms what households and rights teams have stated for years: China is counting on a system of long-term incarceration to maintain the Uyghurs in verify, wielding the regulation as a weapon of repression.

Under searing worldwide criticism, Chinese officers introduced the closure in 2019 of short-term, extrajudicial internment camps the place Uyghurs had been thrown in with out prices. However, though consideration targeted on the camps, hundreds of Uyghurs nonetheless languish for years and even a long time in jail on what specialists say are trumped-up prices of terrorism.

Uyghur farmer Rozikari Tohti was generally known as a soft-spoken, family-loving man with three youngsters and never the slightest curiosity in faith. So his cousin, Mihrigul Musa, was shocked to find Tohti had been thrown into jail for 5 years for “religious extremism.”

“Never did I think he would be arrested,” stated Musa, who now lives in exile in Norway. “If you saw him, you would feel the same way. He is so earnest.”

From the checklist, Musa discovered Tohti’s youthful brother Ablikim Tohti additionally was sentenced to seven years on prices of “gathering the public to disturb social order.” Tohti’s next-door neighbour, a farmer known as Nurmemet Dawut, was sentenced to 11 years on the identical prices in addition to “picking quarrels and provoking troubles.”

Konasheher county is typical of rural southern Xinjiang, and greater than 267,000 individuals stay there. The jail sentences throughout the county had been for 2 to 25 years, with a mean of 9 years, the checklist reveals. While the individuals on the checklist had been largely arrested in 2017, based on Uyghurs in exile, their sentences are so lengthy that the overwhelming majority would nonetheless be in jail.

Those swept up got here from all walks of life, and included males, girls, younger individuals and the aged. They had just one factor in frequent: They had been all Uyghurs.

Experts say it clearly reveals individuals had been focused merely for being Uyghur a conclusion vehemently denied by Chinese authorities. Xinjiang spokesman Elijan Anayat stated sentences had been carried out in accordance with the regulation.

“We will never specifically target specific regions, ethnic groups, religions, much less the Uyghurs,” Anayat stated. “We will never wrong the good, nor release the bad.”

The checklist was obtained by Xinjiang scholar Gene Bunin from an nameless supply who described themselves as a member of China’s Han Chinese majority “opposed to the Chinese government’s policies in Xinjiang.” It was handed to the AP by Abduweli Ayup, an exiled Uyghur linguist in Norway.

The AP authenticated it by interviews with eight Uyghurs who recognised 194 individuals on the checklist, in addition to authorized notices, recordings of telephone calls with Chinese officers and checks of tackle, birthdays and id numbers.

The checklist doesn’t embrace individuals with typical legal prices reminiscent of murder or theft. Rather, it focuses on offenses associated to terrorism, non secular extremism or obscure prices historically used in opposition to political dissidents, reminiscent of “picking quarrels and provoking troubles.” This means the true variety of individuals imprisoned is nearly actually increased.

But even at a conservative estimate, Konasheher county’s imprisonment charge is greater than 10 occasions increased than that of the United States, one of many world’s main jailers, based on Department of Justice statistics. It’s additionally greater than 30 occasions increased than for China as a complete, based on state statistics from 2013, the final time such figures had been launched.

Darren Byler, an skilled on Xinjiang’s mass incarceration system, stated most arrests had been arbitrary and outdoors the regulation, with individuals detained for having relations overseas or downloading sure mobile phone purposes.

“It is really remarkable,” Byler stated. “In no other location have we seen entire populations of people be described as terrorists or seen as terrorists.”

The crackdown kicked into high gear in 2017, after a string of knifings and bombings by a small handful of Uyghur militants. The Chinese government defended the mass detentions as both lawful and necessary to combat terrorism.

In 2019, Xinjiang officials declared the short-term detention camps closed, and said that all of whom they described as “trainees” had “graduated.” Visits by Associated Press journalists to four former camp sites confirm that they were shuttered or converted into other facilities.

But the prisons remain. Xinjiang went on a prison-building spree in tandem with the crackdown, and even as the camps closed, the prisons expanded. At least a few camp sites were converted into centers for incarceration.

China is using the law “as a fig leaf of legality” partially to try to deflect worldwide criticism about holding Uyghurs, stated Jeremy Daum, a legal regulation skilled at Yale University’s Paul Tsai China Center.

The secretive nature of the costs in opposition to these imprisoned is a purple flag, specialists say. Although China makes authorized data simply accessible in any other case, virtually 90% of legal data in Xinjiang will not be public. The handful which have leaked present that individuals are being charged with “terrorism” for acts reminiscent of warning colleagues in opposition to watching porn and swearing, or praying in jail.

Abduweli Ayup, the Uyghur exile who handed the checklist to the AP, has carefully documented the continued repression of his neighborhood. But this checklist specifically floored him: On it had been neighbors, a cousin, a highschool instructor.

“I had collapsed,” Ayup stated. “I had told other people’s stories . and now this is me telling my own story from my childhood.”

The widely-admired instructor, Adil Tursun, was the one one in the highschool in Toquzaq who may train Uyghur college students in Chinese. He was a Communist Party member, and yearly his college students had the most effective chemistry check scores within the city.

The names of Tursun and others on the checklist made no sense to Ayup as a result of they had been thought of mannequin Uyghurs.

“The names of the crimes, spreading extremist thoughts, separatism these charges are absurd,” he stated.