Formation | September 2018 |
---|---|
Founder | Gene Bunin |
Type | Database |
Purpose | Database of Xinjiang camp detainees |
Website | https://shahit.biz/eng/ |
The Xinjiang Victims Database is a database which attempts to record all currently known individuals who are detained in Xinjiang internment camps in China. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] The database has documented over 16,000 victims. [7] It was founded by Gene Bunin, [8] [9] [10] who started the database in September 2018. [11] [12]
The database contains the names and biographical details of people who are thought to be detained in the camps. Many of the profiles also contain personal testimonies by the families and friends of the detainees. [11] [13]
Gene Bunin is a Russian-American linguistic researcher, who lived in Xinjiang until 2018, when Chinese police forced him to leave. He created the database to “have one place" to store detailed information of people interred in prison camps or disappeared after only "limited attempts" had been made to identify detainees. [13]
In January 2023, following a database's post on Twitter regarding the addition of a large number of police officers to its "Accountability" section, internet users noted that images of two of the Xinjiang police officers were those of Hong Kong actors Andy Lau Tak-wah and Chow Yun-fat. Soon after it drew attention on social media, the Xinjiang Victims Database added a clarification [14] stating that the data were sourced from a file cache of an Urumqi database previously written about in The Intercept , with the police officers occasionally using avatars that were not photos of themselves, including that of Andy Lau, which had not been noticed by the database staff. The photos assigned to police officer profiles also contained a cartoon portrait of police officer Jin Xiaowei, believed to be his likeness [15] , which was also criticized in Chinese media. [16]
Abu Bakker Qassim is a Uyghur from China's western frontier, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region who was held in the United States Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba. His Guantanamo Internment Serial Number was 283.
Adel Abdulhehim or Adel Abdul Hakim is a citizen of the People's Republic of China from the Uighur ethnic group. He was held in extrajudicial detention in the United States-controlled Guantanamo Bay detainment camps in Cuba.Joint Task Force Guantanamo counter-terrorism analysts report he was born on October 10, 1974, in Ghulja, Xinjiang.
The 2008 Kashgar attack occurred on the morning of 4 August 2008, in the city of Kashgar in the Western Chinese province of Xinjiang. According to Chinese government sources, it was a terrorist attack perpetrated by two men with suspected ties to the Uyghur separatist movement. The men reportedly drove a truck into a group of approximately 70 jogging police officers, and proceeded to attack them with grenades and machetes, resulting in the death of sixteen officers.
The Ghulja, Gulja, or Yining incident, also referred to as the Ghulja Massacre, was the culmination of the Ghulja protests of 1997, a series of demonstrations in the city of Yining—known as Ghulja in Uyghur—in the Xinjiang autonomous region of China.
In September 2009, Ürümqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in the People's Republic of China, experienced a period of unrest in the aftermath of the July 2009 Ürümqi riots. Late August and early September saw a series of syringe attacks on civilians. In response to the attacks, thousands of residents held protests for several days, resulting in the deaths of five people. In addition, the arrest and beating of several Hong Kong journalists during the protests attracted international attention.
The 2010 Aksu bombing was a bombing in Aksu, Xinjiang, People's Republic of China that resulted in at least seven deaths and fourteen injuries when a Uyghur man detonated explosives in a crowd of police and paramilitary guards at about 10:30 on 19 August, using a three-wheeled vehicle. The assailant targeted police officers in the area, and most of the victims were also Uyghurs. Xinhua news agency reported that six people were involved in the attack, and two had died; the other four were detained by police.
The Pishan hostage crisis occurred on the night of December 28, 2011, in Koxtag, Pishan/Guma County, Hotan Prefecture, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, China. A group of 15 Uyghur youths kidnapped two goat shepherds for directions. They were soon confronted by a group of five Pishan policemen, who tried to negotiate for the shepherds' release. The group attacked the policemen with knives, killing one and injuring another. The police shot back, killing seven hostage-takers, wounding and capturing four, freeing the two shepherds. The Xinjiang government called the kidnappers "violent terrorists", while a Uyghur exile group claimed the kidnappers' actions were the result of "police repression".
The 2012 Yecheng attack was a terrorist attack by Uyghur separatist extremists that occurred on February 28, 2012, in Yecheng, Xinjiang, a remote town situated about 150 miles from China's border with Pakistan. Details of the attack are disputed: according to Chinese government reports and court documents, at around 6 p.m. that day, a group of eight Uyghur men led by religious extremist Abudukeremu Mamuti attacked pedestrians with axes and knives on Happiness Road. Local police fought with the attackers, ultimately killing all and capturing Mamuti. State-run media reported that one police officer died and four police were injured, while 15 pedestrians died from Mamuti's assault and 14 more civilians were injured. Chinese officials characterized the event as a "terrorist attack."
Chen Quanguo is a Chinese retired politician who was the Chinese Communist Party Committee Secretary of Tibet Autonomous Region from 2011 to 2016 and of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region from 2016 to 2021, making him the only person to serve as the Party Secretary for both autonomous regions. Between 2017 and 2022, he was a member of the 19th Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party and was also Political Commissar of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps concurrently with his position as Xinjiang Party Secretary.
The Xinjiang conflict, also known as the East Turkistan conflict, Uyghur–Chinese conflict or Sino-East Turkistan conflict, is an ongoing ethnic geopolitical conflict in what is now China's far-northwest autonomous region of Xinjiang, also known as East Turkistan. It is centred around the Uyghurs, a Turkic ethnic group who constitute a plurality of the region's population.
The Xinjiang internment camps, officially called vocational education and training centers by the government of China, are internment camps operated by the government of Xinjiang and the Chinese Communist Party Provincial Standing Committee. Human Rights Watch says that they have been used to indoctrinate Uyghurs and other Muslims since 2017 as part of a "people's war on terror", a policy announced in 2014. The camps have been criticized by the governments of many countries and human rights organizations for alleged human rights abuses, including mistreatment, rape, and torture, with some of them alleging genocide. Some 40 countries around the world have called on China to respect the human rights of the Uyghur community, including countries such as Canada, Germany, Turkey, Honduras and Japan. The governments of more than 35 countries have expressed support for China's government. Xinjiang internment camps have been described as "the most extreme example of China's inhumane policies against Uighurs".
In May 2014, the Government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) launched the "Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism" in the far west province of Xinjiang. It is an aspect of the Xinjiang conflict, the ongoing struggle by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese government to manage the ethnically diverse and tumultuous province. According to critics, the CCP and the Chinese government have used the global "war on terrorism" of the 2000s to frame separatist and ethnic unrest as acts of Islamist terrorism to legitimize its counter-insurgency policies in Xinjiang. Chinese officials have maintained that the campaign is essential for national security purposes.
Mihrigul Tursun or Mehrigul Tursun, is a reported former Uyghur detainee from Xinjiang, China. After immigrating to the United States in 2018, Tursun claimed that she was taken into the custody of Chinese authorities several times, including being imprisoned at one of a network of political "re-education camps" for Uyghurs, subject to torture, and that one of her sons died while she was in the custody of Chinese authorities in 2015. Her story was widely reported in international media. In 2019 Hua Chunying of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China denied Tursun's allegations and gave the Ministry's own account of events.
The Chinese government has committed a series of ongoing human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang that is often characterized as genocide. Beginning in 2014, the Chinese government, under the administration of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping, incarcerated more than an estimated one million Turkic Muslims without any legal process in internment camps. Operations from 2016 to 2021 were led by Xinjiang CCP Secretary Chen Quanguo. It is the largest-scale detention of ethnic and religious minorities since World War II. The Chinese government began to wind down the camps in 2019. Amnesty International states that detainees have been increasingly transferred to the formal penal system.
The China Cables are a collection of secret Chinese government documents from 2017 which were leaked by exiled Uyghurs to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and published on 24 November 2019. The documents include a telegram which details the first known operations manual for running the Xinjiang internment camps, and bulletins which illustrate how China's centralized data collection system and mass surveillance tool, known as the Integrated Joint Operations Platform, uses artificial intelligence to identify people for interrogation and potential detention.
Adrian Nikolaus Zenz is a German anthropologist known for his studies of the Xinjiang internment camps and Uyghur genocide. He is a director and senior fellow in China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, an anti-communist think tank established by the US government and based in Washington, DC.
Sayragul Sauytbay is a Kazakh doctor, headteacher and whistleblower from China. In 2018, she fled China and then told the media about the Xinjiang internment camps resembling modern-day concentration camps where people are "re-educated" in China. She became one of the first victims of these camps in the world to speak publicly about the Chinese repressive campaign against Muslims, igniting a movement against these abuses. Sweden offered her political asylum after Kazakhstan refused, and she subsequently emigrated there.
Merdan Ghappar is a Chinese model and a prisoner of Uyghur heritage. He became known for his internment in one of China's Xinjiang re-education camps in 2020. Merdan achieved to smuggle video footage and text messages from his internment camp to family members in Europe, who then passed the material on to the press. As of 5 August 2020, his status was unknown.
Tursunay Ziyawudun, born in Kunes of Xinjiang, is a former Uyghur detainee in one of the re-education camps in Xinjiang, China.
The Xinjiang Police Files are leaked documents from the Xinjiang internment camps, forwarded to anthropologist Adrian Zenz from an anonymous source. On May 24, 2022, an international consortium of 14 media groups published information about the files, which consist of over 10 gigabytes of speeches, images, spreadsheets and protocols dating back to 2018.
Xinjiang Documentation Project, a joint effort between the Institute for Asian Research in the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia and the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Department at Simon Fraser University,