New Delhi: New details about the life of Uyghur Muslims in the internment camps of Xinjiang province in China have emerged after the contents of a government document were leaked Monday.
The 137-page spreadsheet, accessed and published by the BBC, is an exhaustive record of the personal details of over 300 people residing in the western part of China’s autonomous Xinjiang region — Karakax. The record is being referred to as the Karakax list.
From being detained for wearing a veil to being sent for “re-education” after unintentionally clicking on a foreign website, the document provides insight into how the people of the region pray, dress, contact others, and their behaviour around family members.
The list was reportedly accessed by the same source that leaked another set of highly sensitive documents to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in November 2019, which revealed that millions of Uyghur Muslims were detained without trial in Xinjiang.
Uyghur Muslims are a Turkic-speaking ethnic minority from Xinjiang. Despite living in an autonomous region, Uyghurs have been persecuted and are forced to live in “camps” in Xinjiang for the past several years.
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The Karakax list
According to the BBC, the database contains personal details of 311 individuals from the Karakax county, including their “backgrounds, religious habits, and relationships with many hundreds of relatives, neighbours and friends”.
The list also contains a column with verdicts deciding whether those imprisoned should be released or kept back, and whether those previously released need to be imprisoned again.
This raises fresh doubts on the Chinese government’s official claim that these camps offered “voluntary education and training” to allegedly combat terrorism.
Dr Adrian Zenz, senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington said, “This remarkable document presents the strongest evidence I’ve seen to date that Beijing is actively persecuting and punishing normal practices of traditional religious beliefs.”
The database suggests many cases of arbitrary punishment. For instance, it revealed the case of a 38-year-old woman who was sent to the “re-education camp” because she used to wear a veil a few years ago.
Another case revealed that a 28-year-old man was put into re-education for “clicking on a web-link and unintentionally landing on a foreign website.”
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‘Guilt by association’
The Chinese government has also found ways to penetrate into the homes of Uyghur Muslims. The Karakax List reveals “how China has used the concept of ‘guilt by association’ to incriminate and detain whole extended family networks in Xinjiang,” reports BBC.
For instance, the record of Yusup, a 65-year-old man, shows that his daughter “wore veils and burqas in 2014 and 2015”, and that his son displayed Islamic political inclinations. Therefore, the entire family, including Yusup, showed “obvious anti-Han sentiment”.
According to Dr Zenz, the document reveals “the witch-hunt-like mindset that has been and continues to dominate social life in the region”.
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And down came the punishment from Allah