I knew that BuzzFeed News was trying to expand its reach, but I didn’t think it would take on as complex a project as in-depth reporting on China’s insane genocide of its Uighur Muslims.
Then last week, the site dropped two stories that emerged after Megha Rajagopalan, their Middle East correspondent, spent major time in neighboring Kazakhstan interviewing those Muslims who had managed to get out of China.
The first of a two-part expose starts off with satellite photos of the prison camps of western China and this statement: “China rounded up so many Muslims in Xinjiang that there wasn’t enough space to hold them.” And then:
In the most extensive investigation of China’s internment camp system ever done using publicly available satellite images, coupled with dozens of interviews with former detainees, BuzzFeed News identified more than 260 structures built since 2017 and bearing the hallmarks of fortified detention compounds. There is at least one in nearly every county in the far-west region of Xinjiang. During that time, the investigation shows, China has established a sprawling system to detain and incarcerate hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities, in what is already the largest-scale detention of ethnic and religious minorities since World War II.
How was this done?
BuzzFeed News identified 268 newly built compounds by cross-referencing blanked-out areas on Baidu Maps — a Google Maps–like tool that’s widely used in China — with images from external satellite data providers. These compounds often contained multiple detention facilities.
Adding that it had employed Alison Killing, a licensed architect as one of the reporters on the story, BuzzFeed was able to figure out that these were buildings that could easily hold 10,000 inmates each. This story even went into what these places looked like inside.
Unlike early sites, the new facilities appear more permanent and prisonlike, similar in construction to high-security prisons in other parts of China. The most highly fortified compounds offer little space between buildings, tiny concrete-walled yards, heavy masonry construction, and long networks of corridors with cells down either side. Their layouts are cavernous, allowing little natural light to the interior of the buildings. BuzzFeed News could see how rooms were laid out at some high-security facilities by examining historical satellite photos taken as they were being constructed, including photos of buildings without roofs…
Downloading WhatsApp, which is banned in China, maintaining ties with family abroad, engaging in prayer, and visiting a foreign website are all offenses for which Muslims have been sent to camps…People detained in the camps told BuzzFeed News they were subjected to torture, hunger, overcrowding, solitary confinement, forced birth control, and a range of other abuses.
A companion article tells how BuzzFeed used satellite imagery to locate some 1,200 camps in Xinjiang province with unwitting help from the Chinese themselves. Everywhere that there was a locale of the slightest military importance, the Chinese mapping platform Baidu would show these odd light grey tiles. It was clear the tiles were hiding something and eventually the BuzzFeed team figured that where there was a group of tiles, there was a prison camp.
Do read it for its details on why these prisons are built close to towns instead of in the middle of nowhere, as is the case with America’s supermax prison in Colorado.
The second part of the report concentrates on interviews with the lucky survivors who escaped or somehow got released.
“They asked me, ‘Are you a practicing Muslim?’ ‘Do you pray?’” said Kadyrbek Tampek, a livestock farmer from the Tacheng region, which lies in the north of Xinjiang. “I told them that I have faith, but I don’t pray.” Afterward, the police officers took his phone. Tampek, a soft-spoken 51-year-old man who belongs to Xinjiang’s ethnic Kazakh minority, was first sent to a camp in December 2017 and said he was later forced to work as a security guard…
More than a dozen former detainees confirmed to BuzzFeed News that prisoners were divided into three categories, differentiated by uniform colors. Those in blue, like Parida and the majority of the people interviewed for this article, were considered the least threatening. Often, they were accused of minor transgressions, like downloading banned apps to their phones or having traveled abroad. Imams, religious people, and others considered subversive to the state were placed in the strictest group — and were usually shackled even inside the camp. There was also a mid-level group.
Throughout both parts, you hear accounts of hundreds and hundreds of people being packed into these camps; of there being so little room, people had to share twin beds or sleep in shifts.
Periodically, the detainees were subject to interrogations, where they’d have to repeat again and again the stories of their supposed transgressions — religious practices, foreign travel, and online activities. These sessions were carefully documented by interrogators, they said. And they often resulted in detainees writing “self-criticism.” Those who could not read and write were given a document to sign.
None of the former detainees interviewed by BuzzFeed News said they contemplated escaping — this was not a possibility.
No kidding — the country is an immense jail.
Despite the fact that these detainees were all Muslims, little information about Islam itself made it into the piece — other than listing reasons why these prisoners were detained. I would have liked some details about whether these detainees managed to observe even scraps of their faith traditions and, once they got over the border into Kazakhstan, if they returned to practicing Islam.
Because the article was focused on the geography of the camps themselves, nothing was said about international condemnation of the camps and how Muslim-majority countries like Kazakhstan and Islamic republics like Pakistan and a bevy of Middle Eastern countries have said almost nothing publicly about the closest thing to Nazi internment camps since World War II. Click here for an Ira Rifkin post here at GetReligion on a topic linked to that: “Why Muslim news media have shied away from covering the Uighur persecution story.”
All that’s missing from these horrors are literal killing machines. However, the fact many of the prisoners have not come back suggests darker designs, such as China’s propensity for killing its prisoners after they’ve been used as forced organ donors. (A must-read is this British piece headlined “Forced Organ Harvesting: I’m going to China and they’re shooting my donor.”)
At first it was the Falun Gong. Now it’s the Uighurs, which is why the details in the second part about the blood tests required of each incoming prisoner are so creepy. Unfortunately the articles didn’t go into organ harvesting at all.
Also, note that this website about China’s sordid history on this issue states that Uighurs were targeted first in the early 1990s for their organs until the government found a better harvest with at least 1 million Falun Gong who lost their lives over this practice. The government began going after Tibetans and “house Christians” for their organs starting in 2002, but even their deaths couldn’t keep up with the demand.
So, voilà, China began culling its Muslim population on a mass scale. And so they’re being herded into these camps where their blood types are noted so they can be pressed into service, as it were. Read the full report on this page if you wonder how organ harvesting is done.
So BuzzFeed News joins the ranks of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal in terms of publications that have made serious efforts to report on the carnage among western China’s Muslims. There’s also this BBC story, out earlier this year about the arrest and imprisonment of a male Uighur fashion model who managed to smuggle out video from inside a prison.
The Associated Press has been reporting about how China is bringing back forced abortions, which were supposedly stopped after the country dropped its “one child” policy in 2015, to limit Uighur births.
Fortunately the U.S. Congress passed a bill in June blasting the Chinese for its massive human rights abuses; the first country in the world to do so. AsThe Nation magazine asked, “What took so long?” Instead of the United States focusing its intelligence resources on unveiling the genocide in western China, that task has been left up to journalists and independent researchers.
And so kudos to Buzzfeed for joining the line-up of media outlets that decided that silence is too great a price to pay when it comes to the elimination of several million Muslims.
MAIN IMAGE: Internet screenshot of the BuzzFeed features’s crucial illustration — using MapBox technology — of some of the thousands of prison camps in western China.
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