In recent years, manipulated and encouraged by the anti-China forces in the United States, some truth-bending “academic institutions”, rumor-mongering “experts and scholars” and “amateur actors” with no moral scruples have created a chain of lies to defame Xinjiang and mislead international public discourse, often through dirty funding, fact-twisting stories and massive smear campaigns.
Truth shall not be tainted, the world should not be deceived and narrative about Xinjiang mustn’t be distorted. The recent reports by independent US news website thegrayzone.com and Australian publication Australian Alert Service, and a series of press conferences held by the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region have revealed the truth about the fraudulent Xinjiang-related “databases” and the so-called “witness testimonies” and, with abundant facts and figures, exposed the real mastermind behind them. Let us get to the bottom of what’s going on and reveal the ins and outs of the lies about Xinjiang.
- As early as in the last century, the United States and other Western countries started to support separatist and terrorist activities in Xinjiang out of geopolitical purposes in order to destabilize China and contain its development.
◆During the Cold War, British scholar Bernard Lewis concocted the theory of “arc of crisis” aiming to fracture countries from the Middle East to India based on ethnic lines to divide the Soviet Union. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the National Security Adviser to President Carter, argued that the United States must prevent the realization of “the age-long dream of Moscow to have direct access to the Indian Ocean”. The United States then launched Operation Cyclone, which lasted from 1979 to 1989 and cost up to US$630 million each year. Together with Saudi Arabia and Britain, the United States provided funding, equipment and training for Muslim guerrillas fighting against the Soviet Union.
◆Right after the Cold War ended, the United States and Britain started to use Xinjiang as a leverage to contain China, by supporting separatist and terrorist forces. The neoconservative forces in the US pivoted from the Soviet Union to containing China’s influence in Central Asia. US and British intelligence agencies supported Pan-Turkism in order to weaken Russia and China and serve their agenda of maintaining a unipolar world. Over the years, there emerged a number of anti-China institutions and extremist groups seeking a state of “East Turkistan” or “independence” of Xinjiang, including the World Uyghur Congress and the East Turkistan Government-in-Exile. Since 2004, the National Endowment for Democracy has funneled US$8.76 million to Uyghur diaspora groups campaigning against China’s policies in Xinjiang.
The above-mentioned factors have caused the rapid spread of radical ideas in Xinjiang. Terrorists entered Xinjiang from the battlefields in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria. Some violent terrorist organizations overtly clamored for targeting and attacking Chinese nationals. Between 1997 and 2014, the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) frequently plotted and carried out terrorist attacks, which claimed more than 1,000 civilian lives.
◆The CIA suggested in 2003 that should the US find itself in a crisis or confrontation with China in the future, the option of using the “Uyghur card” as a means of exerting pressure should not be taken off the table. Under this strategy, the United States, Britain and their allies, latching on to the Cold War mentality, have directed their intelligence establishments and anti-China scholars to mobilize Uyghur diaspora groups in spinning out misinformation about the so-called severe oppression of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang,which was spread by mainstream Western media in a coordinated manner. Here are what they seek to achieve:
First, a false impression that Muslims in Xinjiang support “independence”. This is often done by instigating certain groups to carry out separatist activities to make the public believe people in Xinjiang all want an independent state.
Second, the illusion that the ETIM is for peace. Nothing has been said about relevant groups’ close ties with Al-Qaeda and their violent and terrorit rhetoric. In November 2020, former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo even removed the ETIM from the US list of foreign terrorist organizations.
Third, the false claim of human rights violations in Xinjiang. Some organizations including Human Rights Watch have fabricated reports on Xinjiang, but their sources are just a small group of extremely anti-China overseas Uyghurs. The baseless accounts in those reports were further hyped up and spread by institutions such as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).
◆In January 2017, then US Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard noted that under US law, it is illegal for anyone to provide funding or support for the Al-Qaida, ISIS or other terrorist organizations. However, the US government has long been, directly or indirectly, providing funds, weapons and intelligence support to these organizations through certain countries in the Middle East.
◆Lawrence Wilkerson, Chief of Staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell and retired US Army Colonel, when speaking at the Ron Paul Institute in August 2018 on the threefold purposes of the US presence in Afghanistan, stated unabashedly that “the third reason we were there [in Afghanistan] is because there are 20 million Uyghurs [in Xinjiang]. The CIA would want to destabilize China and that would be the best way to do it to foment unrest and to join with those Uyghurs in pushing the Han Chinese in Beijing from internal places rather than external”.
◆In a video interview in 2015, Sibel Edmonds, a former interpreter with the FBI, talked about how the US had planned and acted to destabilize Xinjiang. She said that “Xinjiang is the entry artery of energy. We want to, gradually and internally, play the gender card and the race card. For that part of the world, we want to play the minority without land. We say we are going to help them and they are being oppressed, Chinese are gunning them down and torturing them.” The plan of the US is to copy the tactics used in Afghanistan, Ukraine and Iraq to Xinjiang, making an issue out of thin air and exploit it. “We hope Xinjiang to be the next Taiwan. As Western nations, we never cared about people. That is not within our interest area, unless it can be utilized, capitalized upon to get our objective.”
- Adrian Zenz, by piecing together dubious information, irresponsibly claimed that millions of Uyghurs in Xinjiang are under detention. He is a far-right fundamentalist Christian, who bases his research on radical media reports and speculations.
◆Zenz is a so-called “senior fellow for China studies” with the far-right Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, an organization established by the US government in 1983 and is known for preaching regime change. The Foundation trumpets the “double genocide” theory that seeks to rewrite the history of the Holocaust and portrays communism as evil akin to Hitler’s fascism. Zenz’s politically-charged research on Xinjiang has been regarded by the Foundation as an important weapon.
◆The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation is an outgrowth of the National Captive Nations Committee founded by the Ukrainian nationalist Lev Dobriansky. Its co-chairman, Yaroslav Stetsko, was a senior leader of the Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B), a fascist militia. Both helped found the World Anti-Communist League, which was described by journalist Joe Conason as “the organizational haven for neo-Nazis, fascists, and anti-Semitic extremists from two dozen countries”.
◆Zenz is a Christian evangelical eschatologist who believes that he is “led by God” on a “mission” against China. He is a lecturer at the European School of Culture and Theology, the German branch of the Columbia International University of the United States. This University considers the “Bible [to be] the ultimate foundation and the final truth in every aspect of our lives”, and its mission is to “educate people from a biblical worldview to impact the nations with the message of Christ”.
◆Zenz does not truly care about the Muslim community. A search of his Twitter profile returns no tweets concerning the rise of Islamophobia in the West, or US wars and drone strikes against Muslim-majority countries. His only Tweet concerning Muslims that is unrelated to China is a denial that there is a double standard in how violence is judged when committed by whites and by Muslims.
◆In September 2018, Zenz published an article in the Central Asian Survey journal, claiming that “Xinjiang’s total re-education internment figure may be estimated at just over one million.” This conclusion comes from a single report by Istiqlal TV, a Turkey-based Uyghur exile media organization. The report released an unverified table of “re-education detainee figures” allegedly “leaked” by the Chinese government, according to which a total of 892,000 individuals from 68 counties in Xinjiang had been detained as of spring 2018. The inflated figure was cited from a report by Radio Free Asia (RFA), a US-funded news agency formed by the CIA during the Cold War for anti-China propaganda. In addition, Istiqlal TV is no neutral media outlet. It advocates separatism and attracts various extremist figures. Abdulkadir Yapuquan, leader of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), a UN Security Council listed terrorist organization, is a regular guest of it.
◆By cobbling together dubious sources, Zenz extrapolates an extremely broad estimate “at anywhere between several hundred thousand and just over one million”. While admitting that “there is no certainty” to this estimate, he insisted that it is nevertheless “reasonable to speculate”. He attempted to shirk responsibilities for the reliability of the numbers. As time moves on, Zenz continued to pump up his speculative estimate of Uyghur detainees. Speaking at an event organized by the US mission in Geneva in March 2019, he stated that “although speculative, it seems appropriate to estimate that up to 1.5 million ethnic minorities [have been interned in Xinjiang].” Zenz mentioned his estimate again in a November 2019 interview with RFA, claiming that China has detained 1.8 million people.
◆Western governments and media have accepted or even propagated the narratives of Zenz, instead of questioning his research based on irresponsible speculations. He became a US-recognized “pundit” on Xinjiang and wrote commentaries for mainstream US media outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and Democracy Now!. On 3 December 2019, the US House of Representatives adopted the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2019, calling on the Trump administration to impose sanctions on China over the alleged internment of over one million Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities in China. Testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on 10 December, Zenz took a victory lap of sorts to celebrate the passage of the Act at the Congress, and used the occasion to call for opening up a new front against China and starting a US investigation into “involuntary labor in relation to Xinjiang.”
III. The so-called research findings published by Zenz and others are full of blatant data faking and fraudulent claims. They confuse speculation with hard facts, blur the lines between propaganda and academic research, and fabricate anti-China narratives based on ideology.
◆Zenz’s “paper” on “forced sterilization” in Xinjiang was quoted by former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who cited Zenz’s name and “paper” to level his genocide allegation. This “paper” was also cited by the Associated Press, CNN and others, who apparently did no reality check at all on his research. The “paper” has never been published by any academic journals, or gone through any peer review. It was only released by the Jamestown Foundation founded under the direction of former CIA Director William J. Casey as an extra-governmental channel to pay Soviet dissidents and, in essence, as a front-line tool of the CIA.
◆Zenz’s “research” based on no academic contexts, and his “paper” fraught with loopholes and data misuse, would fail to pass any academic publication review. His “major finding” was the claim that in 2018, “80 percent of all net added IUD placements in China… were performed in Xinjiang.” It sounds like 80 percent of China’s IUD insertions were carried out in Xinjiang.
The original source of Zenz’s claim, the 2019 China Health Statistics Yearbook, shows that the number of new IUD insertion procedures in Xinjiang in 2018 accounted for only 8.7 percent of China’s total. (The total number of IUD insertion procedures in 2018 nationwide was about 3.77 million, among which about 330,000 were in Xinjiang.) Zenz then coined the phrase “net added IUD insertions”, and found that the number of “net added IUD insertions” in China was around 300,000 (IUD added minus those removed), while the number in Xinjiang was around 239,000. He then concluded that the number of “net added IUD insertions” in Xinjiang accounted for about 80% of the national total.
According to his logic, and take Henan Province for example, it registered a “net added IUD insertions” of 206,000, accounting for 69% of the national total. Adding the percentage of Xinjiang (80%) and that of Henan (69%) would be more than 100%, which makes no sense at all. Through this cunning trick, Zenz got the incendiary figure of 80%, but still he could not make out a good case. He manipulated data to produce a false impression that the majority of women in Xinjiang were forcibly or even compulsively sterilized.
◆A chart in Zenz’s “paper” claims that new IUD placements in Xinjiang average between 800 and 1,400 per capita each year, which means each woman in the region would have to undergo 4 to 8 IUD insertion surgeries every day. The figures simply make no sense.
◆Zenz interpreted a photograph as part of an “effort to enforce the thorough implementation of increasingly intrusive birth control efforts”. But those in the center of the photograph don’t look like people of childbearing age. As a matter of fact, the photo is taken from an article by China News Service about a local poverty alleviation program in Xinjiang. The two elderly people in the photo were seeing the doctor for free, as part of the free health check-ups and medical consultation offered to local residents under the program. The mix-up shows that Zenz either does not understand the Chinese language or knows little about the basic situation in Xinjiang.
◆In his “paper”, Zenz tried to distort facts and framed any government spending on public health as part of the “genocide” policy, such as the US$5 billion funds provided by the Chinese central government between 2013 and 2017 to support healthcare and family planning programs in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. When citing figures to make his argument, Zenz left out data on maternal and infant mortality reduction in Xinjiang. If China were really intending a “genocide” against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, there would have been no need to work so hard to reduce maternal and infant mortality.
◆When a “scholar” like Zenz was asked for opinion by public relations companies or think tanks in Washington, no one questioned his qualifications. It was only after an independent media investigation that it was found he didn’t have the right academic credentials. Zenz blatantly misused data in order to draw biased conclusions about “genocide”, which were then used by the US government and some of its hardliners to disrupt diplomacy between China and the US. For political elements who want Sino-US relations to deteriorate further, Zenz happened to be of great use.
◆The academic community in the US is facing tremendous pressure of censorship and self-censorship. Speaking the truth or questioning Zenz’s claims in the media often comes with a price. Zenz once threatened to sue Joshua M. Landis, a well-known American expert on Syria, because Landis retweeted an article on the thegrayzone.com exposing Zenz. Landis’ tweet was later deleted.
◆During the Bush administration, the US State Department used the media and Congress to manipulate public opinion and make up a story about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Now on Xinjiang, the same trick is being used to manipulate the media, Congress and even the public.
◆The US intervention campaign against Xinjiang actually started in the 1990s. The House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs, backed by its then chair and Congressman Tom Lantos, a supporter of subverting foreign governments, received some “Uyghurs in exile” who made similar testimonies about forced abortion and so on. The organizers of this campaign tried to stop Bill Clinton and his administration from granting China most favored nation (MFN) status, but they failed.
- A “report” released by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) in March 2020 claims that “more than 80,000 Uyghurs were transferred out of Xinjiang to work in factories across China between 2017 and 2019”. In fact, this “report” is full of loopholes and lacks the minimum factual basis.
◆The ASPI is not an independent, impartial research institute. It receives funding from the Australian Department of Defence, NATO, the US State Department, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and arms producers such as Lockheed Martin from the US.
◆The lead author of the “report” is Vicky Xiuzhong Xu, an anti-China individual who has defended the Falun Gong cult and described Chinese-Australians who oppose the violent rioters in Hong Kong as being “brainwashed” by the Chinese government.
◆The “report” is self-contradictory and does not add up. For example, on the one hand, it decries the “isolation” of the minority workers who “speak almost no Mandarin” and whose “communication with locals is largely non-existent.” On the other hand, it denounces Mandarin language classes offered to workers as insidious “political indoctrination”.
◆The “report” presents no original evidence on “forced laborers”, but cites anonymous “testimonies” from an obscure, far-right online blog called “Bitter Winter”. The blog is a project of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an Italy-based organization that supported various cult organizations such as Falun Gong, Aum Shinrikyo, and the Church of Almighty God (Eastern Lightning).
◆The Australian media has suppressed the criticism of the “report” and attempted to manipulate public opinion. Shortly after the release of the “report”, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation aired a program on the lead author, Vicky Xiuzhong Xu. According to a Chinese-Australian interviewed by the program, the interviewer pushed him to praise Vicky’s research on Xinjiang and made it clear that they were not looking for negative comments. A Chinese Muslim living in Australia revealed that Australian media outlets often attempt to manipulate Chinese-Australians into echoing the official narrative on China, and said that an interviewer from SBS, a television network funded by the Australian government, “wanted me to confirm her narrative that the Chinese government had operatives following me and were actively suppressing me in Australia”.
- When the slanderous claims against China were ready for use, instead of verifying their veracity, some Western media outlets rushed to hype them up. To create fake news, the BBC even went so far as to pay for “evidence”.
◆Barrie VVeiss, a former British media professional, revealed in detail on social media the entire process of Western media concocting fake news about Xinjiang. He pinpointed an important source of the fake news to be the anti-China activist Adrian Zenz. Zenz, who had initially rejected the BBC invitation to look for “evidence” against China, changed his mind after receiving a commission from the BBC.
◆In July 2019, Zenz tweeted: The BBC commissioned my research. They asked the first time whether it could be done. I said “no”, too hard, too little evidence. They asked again. I said: “let me see what I can find”. Well, the resulting findings now total 17,000 words and 163 footnotes.
◆After Zenz published his so-called “The Karakax List: Dissecting the Anatomy of Beijing’s Internment Drive in Xinjiang”, Western media outlets such as CNN, BBC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Deutsche Welle rushed to cite the so-called “conclusions”, without any investigation or verification, to badmouth and spread lies about Xinjiang’s counter-terrorism and de-radicalization measures. Some even tagged their coverage as “exclusive” to steal public attention. However, when China released documentaries on fighting terrorism in Xinjiang, these same media outlets all went into silent mode and turned a blind eye.
◆On 10 February 2021, at the fourth Press Conference on Xinjiang-related Issues co-hosted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Xu Guixiang, Deputy Director General of the Publicity Department of the CPC Committee of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, commented on BBC’s habitual practice of fabricating stories and creating troubles on Xinjiang-related issues. “I had taken an interview by BBC in Xinjiang myself,” said Xu. “We showed our greatest sincerity by making the best possible arrangements for their visit. We were open and candid in our conversation, and met all their interview requests. The coverage they produced later, however, completely distorted the facts,” Xu added. “Not long ago, the journalists from BBC took videos of the local residents in Aksu Prefecture without their consent. And without interviewing even one Uyghur, they claimed to have obtained solid evidence of ‘massive forced labor’ in Xinjiang. What they had was nothing but a few non-live-action satellite images and the so-called reports churned out by anti-China elements. They even publicly pressed foreign companies that have invested and built factories in Xinjiang to pull out their investment.” “Such moves trampled the ethics of journalism, deviated from the principles of objectivity, impartiality and fairness, and ran counter to facts. They have fully exposed BBC’s vicious intention of spreading lies and rumors against Xinjiang to serve political purpose, and ruined its reputation as a well-known international media outlet.”
◆On 6 August 2020, “China Uighurs: A model’s video gives a rare glimpse inside internment”, a news report edited by BBC Beijing correspondent John Sudworth based on a video clip shot by a drug dealer and several text messages, alluded that the Chinese government held large numbers of Uyghurs in detention camps and put them under torture and abuse. Merdan Ghappar, the man appearing in the video, is a criminal arrested and convicted in accordance with the law for drug trafficking. According to Chinese laws and regulations, it is a normal procedure for him to return to his place of origin and report to local authorities after being released from prison. However, Sudworth purposefully misinterpreted it as the government’s attempt to send Ghappar into the internment camp. As in other Sudworth-made stories, the report is filled with disinformation such as separation of families in Xinjiang, forced sterilization of Uyghur women, and millions of Uyghurs and ethnic minorities held in internment camps. Citing unverified document urging for repentance and surrender, text messages from Ghappar and radical views of the criminal’s exiling uncle Abdulhakim Ghappar, pseudo-scholar Adrian Zenz and anti-China elements such as James A. Millward, this ideologically biased report made groundless accusations against China’s ethnic and religious policies.
◆On 12 January 2021, The New York Times published Amelia Pang’s article “It Took a Genocide for Me to Remember My Uighur Roots” in its Opinion section. Using her 1/8 Uyghur origin, Pang portrayed herself and her family as victims of the so-called “genocide” by the Chinese government. The truth is, Pang has never been to China, yet she claimed that “China’s pressured assimilation insurance policies nonetheless reached me”. During her five years of service at The Epoch Times, the mouthpiece of the Falun Gong cult, Pang published at least 17 articles to promote the cult organization and fabricated a large number of exaggerated and unfounded anti-China reports. In October 2020, The New York Times published an article on the true face of The Epoch Times, calling it “a force in right-wing media”, “pushing dangerous conspiracy theories” and “feed[ing] the online fever swamps of the far right”. Yet only a few months later, the newspaper took a totally different position, which puts its professionalism, authenticity and motives in serious question.
◆At the webinar “Genocide in Xinjiang? — A Discovery Zoom Panel”, Daniel Dumbrill, a famous Canadian YouTuber, pointed to the inconsistent statements given by a “genocide survivor” widely-reported on CNN and BBC in different interviews. It was also found that the Chinese government renewed her passport when she claimed to be under arrest. The date of renewal is the only pixelated information on her passport that appeared in the CNN footage.
- The Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) is the first organization to propagate that China has detained millions of ethnic Uyghurs in Xinjiang. With the support of the US government, the organization used crude and clumsy research methods and the conclusions produced are seriously flawed.
◆The CHRD is a Washington-based NGO backed by the US government. It is directly funded by the US government and receives a large amount of financial support from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), an organization controlled by the US government to promote regime change. Over the years, the CHRD has been working on behalf of far-right opposition figures who have glorified colonialism and appealed for the “Westernization” of China.
◆In 2018, the CHRD submitted a report to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination — which was often falsely cited by Western media outlets as a UN-authored report. The CHRD claimed that the figures in the report were “based on interviews and limited data”. But in fact, they interviewed only eight Uyghurs. (The Uyghur population in Xinjiang was 12,718,400 in 2018.) Based on these few samples, the CHRD extrapolated estimates that “at least 10% of villagers […] are being detained in re-education detention camps, and 20% are being forced to attend day/evening re-education sessions in the villages or townships, totaling 30% in both types of camps”. Then, by applying the estimated ratio to the total population of Xinjiang, the CHRD absurdly concluded that one million ethnic Uyghurs have been detained in “re-education detention camps” and two million more have been “forced to attend day/evening re-education sessions”.
◆Taking the groundless CHRD report as reliable data, the US government accused China of “arbitrary detention” of “at least 800,000, and possibly more than 2 million, Uighurs and members of other Muslim minorities in internment camps”. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2018, State Department official Scott Busby stated that this “is the US government assessment, backed by our intelligence community and open source reporting.”
VII. The “First Independent Report” on Xinjiang which was widely reported in Western media actually came from an institution funded by a sham university.
◆In March 2021, the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, a self-styled think tank, published the so-called “first independent report” on Xinjiang. The report claims that China has breached “each and every act” of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in its treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjinag. The report and the Institute received extensive coverage by mainstream media outlets such as CNN, The Guardian and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
◆Founded in 2019 and based in Washington D.C., the Newlines Institute purportedly aims to “enhance US foreign policy based on a deep understanding of the geopolitics of the different regions of the world and their value systems”. Its founder and president once served as a member of the advisory board for the US military’s Africa Command. Anti-China scholar Adrian Zenz is also on its team.
◆Tom Fowdy, an Oxford graduate and East Asia specialist, revealed in Chollima Report, a website he runs, that the Newlines Institute is actually a front for the Institute of Islamic Thought, an Islamist neo-conservative organization in the US linked to Egypt’s Muslim brotherhood, whose members have pleaded guilty to sponsoring terrorism.
◆In April 2021, Thore Vestby, former mayor of Norway’s Frogn municipality, worked with Dutch and Danish scholars and published a special paper titled “The Xinjiang Genocide Determination As Agenda” through the Transnational Foundation for Peace & Future Research. The special paper points out that the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy is highly consistent with the official position of the United States. The institute’s members who drafted the Xinjiang-related report are anti-communists and anti-China elements who have long been influenced by Christian fundamentalism and extreme conservatism, and the institute’s independence is suspicious. The timing of formulating and releasing of the report highly coincides with the time when the then US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused China of “genocide” in Xinjiang. The report blindly backs up Pompeo, but does not give any valuable evidence; there is an obvious bias in the selection of original materials, and it quotes a large number of falsified data and misinterpreted information; a large number of valuable, real information is deliberately ignored by the writers. The report clearly supports the US adopting a hardline foreign policy toward China as well as the use of human rights issues to contain and suppress China, which is seriously inconsistent with the position of the “Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy” as a neutral academic institution to seek mutual understanding and peace. The mainstream media in the West have collectively ignored the serious loopholes in the report and rushed to cite it without verification, reflecting that the military industry-media-think tank interest consortium in the United States enjoys a great power, and that the relevant institutions have been completely reduced to accomplices of interest groups.
◆The Newlines Institute is funded by Fairfax University of America (FXUA), an unaccredited sham university formerly known as Virginia International University. In 2019, state regulators of Virginia found the academic quality and rigor of FXUA’s online education “patently deficient” and the university’s certificate to operate was almost revoked. Data from the US Department of Education show that between 2020 and 2021, the university has 153 registered students, and its official Twitter account has only 13 followers.
◆The advisory board of the FXUA is composed of heads of military contractors. The Consolidated Analysis Centers Incorporated (CACI), which was involved in the Abu Ghraib prison incident in Iraq, is one of them.
◆According to a report carried by Xinhuanet in 2007, lawyers from the US Center for Constitutional Rights note that a group of more than 250 former Iraqi prisoners filed a lawsuit against CACI for torture during interrogation in Iraq.
VIII. The World Uyghur Congress (WUC) is an international separatist network. One of WUC’s affiliate organizations, the right-wing Uyghur American Association (UAA), advocates a hardline China policy, and believes in violent activities to achieve its goals. The US government has supported and subsidized Uyghur extremist organizations through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). In the name of promoting and protecting Uyghur human rights, these organizations attempt to stoke Western hostility against China, with the aim of subverting China and establishing an “East Turkistan” nation-state in Xinjiang.
◆The WUC is a far-right, anti-communist,ultra-nationalist organization made up of Uyghur separatists in exile; its mission is to subvert China and establish an “East Turkistan” nation-state. Headquartered in Munich, the WUC is an international umbrella organization with 33 affiliates in 18 countries and regions, including the Uyghur American Association, the Uyghur Human Rights Project, and Campaign for Uyghurs.
◆Under its cover as a “human rights organization”, the WUC is in fact a separatist network funded and directed by the US, and a key organization in Washington’s attempt at a new Cold War against China. In collusion with the NED and Radio Free Asia (RFA), an anti-China media outlet, the WUC is tightly aligned with Washington’s foreign policy agenda which seeks to contain and impede the rise of China.
Many leading members of the WUC have served in senior positions in anti-China media outlets, including the RFA and Radio Liberty. For example, Omer Kanat, Chairman of the WUC Executive Committee, was RFA’s senior editor from 1999 to 2009.
◆The WUC relies heavily on US funding. Since its inception, the WUC has received support from the NED.
Since 2016, the NED has provided the WUC with as much as US$1.284 million, and millions of dollars of additional funding to WUC affiliates.
In 2018, NED funding to the WUC and its affiliates reached nearly US$665,000, and in 2019, US$960,000, up by almost 50%.
In 2020, the NED boasted that it had given Uyghur groups US$8.758 million since 2004, and claimed to be “the only institutional funder for Uyghur advocacy and human rights organizations”.
◆In addition to funding from the NED, the WUC and its affiliates have other means to collect money. For instance, on the WUC website, there is a donation portal allowing two types of donation: one-time donation and monthly recurring donation. One only needs to enter bank card information and the money will go immediately to the WUC.
◆In recent years, the WUC and its affiliates have used these funds to churn out fabricated stories such as “alleged concentration camps that detain millions of people” and “The Karakax List” in collaboration with Western media outlets hostile to China. They have worked with pseudo-scholars such as Adrian Zenz to clamor for a new Cold War against China and to label China’s Xinjiang policy as “genocide”. And they have called on countries to impose sanctions and boycott China.
◆Although claiming to be “peaceful and nonviolent”, the WUC and its affiliates have established connections with the far-right Turkish group Grey Wolves, which has engaged in violent activities from Syria to East Asia.
In July 2015, the ETIM instigated large-scale anti-China demonstrations in Ankara and Istanbul. Hundreds of demonstrators chanting religious slogans attacked in front of the Topkapi Palace a group of Asian tourists, who turned out to be South Koreans. Devlet Bahçeli, leader of the Turkish MHP, a party closely connected to the Grey Wolves, defended the attacks with extremely racist comments: “How are you going to differentiate between Korean and Chinese? They both have slanted eyes.”
In August of the same year, the Grey Wolves and “East Turkistan” forces carried out a bomb attack at the Erawan Shrine in Bangkok, Thailand, killing 20 people. The attack was allegedly in retaliation for “the Thai government’s decision to repatriate a group of Uyghurs to China”. These “East Turkistan” elements were trying to travel illegally through Thailand to Turkey and Syria to join the ETIM or other extremist groups in those regions.
◆While establishing ties with far-right organizations in Turkey, the main representatives of the WUC called on Turkey to take “interventionist actions” against China, similar to what it did in Libya and Syria.
Wearing Turkish military uniforms, Uyghur militants released a video on the Turkish side of the Turkish-Syrian border in which they threatened to “wage war against China”. Some militants held up guns and threatened in the Chinese language to “kill all the Chinese people”, and then chanted jihadist slogans.
◆The UAA was founded in 1998 and has received millions of dollars in funding from the NED. In recent years, the UAA has worked closely with Washington and other Western governments to promote hostility toward China.
“The National Endowment for Democracy has been exceptionally supportive of the UAA,” stated Nury Turkel, former UAA President, in 2006, “providing us with essential funding”. The goal of the UAA is to exploit Washington’s support to promote regime change in China.
Many important allies of the UAA are anti-Muslim, far-right elements in Washington, including Republican Congressman Ted Yoho, the Family Research Council, as well as the FBI.
◆While the UAA claims to represent the interests of China’s Uyghur and other Muslim minorities, many of its closest allies are in fact anti-Muslim, far-right forces and figures, such as ultra-conservative Republican Congressman Ted Yoho, the Family Research Council that practices Christian fundamentalism, and the FBI that is notorious for spying on American Muslims, deliberately concocting terrorist plots, and entrapping Muslim-American youths.
Kuzzat Altay, the current president of the UAA, often makes pro-American and anti-China statements on social media, supporting the launch of a new Cold War against China, applauding the Trump administration’s trade and technology war with China, and saying that all countries should treat China as a criminal.
During the pandemic, the UAA and members of its affiliate organizations spread far-right rhetoric, incited hatred against Asians, called COVID-19 the “China virus”, and slandered China as waging a “virus war” on the world and “purposefully, intentionally exporting the virus to cause the pandemic.”
On 21 March 2021, organized by the UAA, some US-government-funded Uyghur extremists disrupted a gathering against anti-Asian racism in Washington D.C. They barked anti-China slogans such as “Wipe out China!” and drove vehicles adorned with signs bearing slogans such as “Boycott China” and “CCP killed 80 million Chinese people.” Their heckling of anti-racist demonstrators was heavily criticized and widely condemned on social media in the United States. The UAA then tried its best to distance itself from extremism and racism, but refused to retract its slogans such as “Wipe out China!”
◆Many key members of the UAA set up a military training organization called “Altay Defense” and arranged for US military instructors to conduct weapons training for members of Uyghur separatist movement. The UAA claims that all the training was provided by former US special forces officers, such as James Lang, a US Defense Department weapons trainer and former US Army Ranger who served in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Faruk Altay, the head of Altay Defense, is brother of UAA president Kuzzat Altay and nephew of former WUC president Rebiya Kadeer. He is also a right-wing, anti-communist, ultra-nationalist, as shown by his remarks on social media.
Participants in Altay Defense training sessions also included UAA’s incumbent president Kuzzat Altay and Bahram Sintash, a member of the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP), who was a key player in lobbying the US Congress to pass the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2019.
◆The UAA’s leadership consists of employees of the US government, Radio Free Asia, and the military-industrial complex.
Nury Turkel, former president (2004-2006), co-founded the UHRP with the NED. In 2020, Turkel was appointed a commissioner on the US Commission on International Religious Freedom by Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi.
Rebiya Kadeer, former president (2006-2011), is a longtime figurehead of overseas “East Turkistan” forces. Kadeer’s husband, Sidik Rouzi, worked for US government media outlets Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. Under Kadeer’s leadership, the WUC and the UAA forged close ties with the Bush administration.
Ilshat Hassan Kokbore, former president (2016-2019), has worked with Booz Allen Hamilton, a notorious private US military and intelligence contractor, since 2008. Edward Snowden was employed at the firm when he decided to blow the whistle on its invasive, all-encompassing system of mass surveillance.
Omer Kanat, former vice president, serves as WUC’s Chairman of the Executive Committee. He has a lengthy history of working with the US government, from serving as senior editor of Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur Service from 1999 to 2009, to covering the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and interviewing the Dalai Lama for the network.
Rushan Abbas, former vice president, is the US National Security Agency’s favorite human rights activist and became the first Uyghur journalist and Uyghur news anchor when the US Congress funded the establishment of the Uyghur department of Radio Free Asia in 1998. She went to the United States in 1989 to study genetic engineering. After graduation, she married a Turkish-American and stayed in the United States, and was later employed by the CIA. She often boasted in her biography of her “extensive experience working with US government agencies, including Homeland Security, Department of Defense, State Department, and various US intelligence agencies”. She served as a “consultant at Guantanamo Bay supporting Operation Enduring Freedom” during the Bush administration’s so-called war on terror. Following a disastrous publicity appearance on Reddit’s “Ask Me Anything” Q&A forum, during which participants blasted Abbas as a “CIA Asset” and US government collaborator, she has attempted to scrub her biographic information from the internet. Abbas currently heads the Campaign for Uyghurs, a WUC affiliate organization.
The current leadership of the UAA includes:
President Kuzzat Altay. Nephew of Rebiya Kadeer, Kuzzat Altay is fervently anti-communist and pro-US. He is known to have glorified the “East Turkistan” separatist movement, comparing it to the founding of the State of Israel.
Secretary Elfidar Iltebir. Her sister, Elnigar Iltebir, was appointed under the Trump administration as Director for China in the White House National Security Council. Their father, Ablikim Baqi Iltebir, worked for US government-funded media outlet Radio Free Asia from February 2000 to August 2017.
Treasurer Arslan Khakiyev. Khakiyev worked for Radio Free Asia for 18 years. His wife, Gulchehra Hoja, has been with Radio Free Asia since 2001.
◆In 2004, the NED helped the UAA to found the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP), and became its primary funder. Between 2016 and 2019 alone, the NED granted the UHRP US$1.2447 million. UHRP-affiliated projects such as Advocacy and Outreach for Uyghur Human Rights and Advocating for Uyghur Human Rights through Artistic Interaction have also received considerable funding. The UHRP has brought in main leaders of the WUC such as Nury Turkel and Omer Kanat. Many holding senior management positions in the NED have joined the UHRP, such as former NED Vice President Louisa Greve, now serving as Director of Global Advocacy for the UHRP.
- The so-called “Xinjiang Victims Database” poorly put together by anti-China forces is an ill-motivated and baseless project designed purely for political manipulation.
In recent years, anti-China forces have concocted the “Xinjiang Data Project”, “Xinjiang Victims Database” and “Uyghur Transitional Judicial Database” by gathering made-up “witness accounts” to misrepresent Xinjiang to the world. Research and verification shows that, of the 12,050 names listed in the three “databases”, 1,342 are simply non-existent. Among the 10,708 real names, 6,962 are people living a normal life; 3,244 are convicted for crimes of endangering public security, violent terrorism or other criminal offences; 238 are dead of causes such as illness, and 264 are living outside China. Here is the truth about some of the much reported cases in the so-called “databases”.
鈼員he first category of those cases involve people who fabricated personal experiences.
Some of the “witnesses” in the “databases” are, in fact, hired by Western anti-China forces. These “witnesses” act out the made-up stories to smear Xinjiang abroad and make a living out of it. They choose to be the pawns of Western anti-China forces in exchange for refugee status and material benefits, making up one lie after another about their so-called experience in the vocational education and training centers only to be busted by the truth time and again.
- Sayragul Sauytbay
Sayragul Sauytbay, female, born in 1976, is from Zhaosu County of Xinjiang.
(1) Activities outside China
Sayragul Sauytbay claimed to have been an instructor at a “rehabilitation class” and accessed classified documents before leaving China, and to be able to prove that 2,500 people were interned where she worked.On 12 December 2019, Sayragul Sauytbay claimed in a video clip released by the BBC that during her days at the “detention camp”, she had been beaten on the head by an electric baton and her personal freedom was restricted, and that surveillance cameras were installed in all the classrooms, dormitories and bathrooms in the “camp”.
On 4 March 2020, Sayragul Sauytbay received the US State Department’s annual International Women of Courage Award. Mike Pompeo said at the awards ceremony, “Today we also honor Sayragul Sauytbay. Formerly a medical doctor, she was separated from her family, tortured, imprisoned, and faced execution because of her courage to simply speak the truth.”
On 20 April 2020, Japanese manga artist Tomomi Shimizu drew cartoons telling a story of “persecution” from the perspective of Sayragul Sauytbay, picturing her as the “survivor of re-education camp”.
(2) Reality check
In April 2016, Sayragul Sauytbay was appointed head of the Central Kindergarten of Chahanwusu Town, Zhaosu County, Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture. On 19 March 2018, she became an elementary school teacher in Chahanwusu. Half a month later, on 4 April, she asked for leave from the school. The next day, she left China illegally.To set the record straight, first of all, Sayragul Sauytbay lied about her experience. She claimed to be a medical-university graduate who had worked as a doctor, but the truth is she only attended nursing course at a vocational school in Ili and has never been a doctor. She initially said she was an instructor at an education and training center, but later claimed to be a victim interned and tortured, subjected to medical experiment and forced to eat pork in the “concentration camp”. As a matter of fact, she has never worked or studied at any education and training center, still less been subjected to any compulsory measure. Her whole account of the center is nothing but smear and slander.
Second, Sayragul Sauytbay is a criminal suspect. On 5 April 2018, she left China illegally carrying a Chinese border pass. Her conduct violated the provisions of Article 322 of the Criminal Law of China on illegal border crossing. In June 2015 and December 2016, she obtained two loans totaling 470,000 yuan from the rural credit cooperative of Chahanwusu Town with forged real estate purchase contract and guarantor’s signature and fake documents. To this day, she has yet to repay 398,000 yuan worth of debt. Her conduct violated the provisions of Article 193 of the Criminal Law of China on loan fraud. Due to her criminal offences, she has been listed online as a wanted person by the public security authorities according to legal procedures.
Third, Sayragul Sauytbay has a record of dishonest behavior. When she was head of the Central Kindergarten of Chahanwusu Town, she took advantage of her position and appropriated performance bonuses, which hurt the interests of her fellow colleagues. As a result, she was removed from office by the local education authorities in accordance with laws and regulations. Before illegally crossing the border, she talked her younger sister Panar into obtaining a loan worth 45,000 yuan and buying her car, but she never transferred ownership of the vehicle to Panar, much to Panar’s resentment. - Mihrigul Tursun
Mihrigul Tursun, female, born in 1985, is from Qiemo County of Xinjiang. In August 2010, she registered for marriage with an Iranian in China, and in January 2012, with an Egyptian in Egypt. In April 2015, she gave birth to triplets in Egypt. Two of her children were registered for permanent residence in China in October 2015, and another was entrusted to the care of her husband’s cousin. On 22 April 2018, Mihrigul Tursun left China with her husband and two children.(1) Activities outside China
Mihrigul Tursun went to the United States in April 2018. There, she attended a hearing of the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China as a witness, and gave false testimony citing her so-called “personal experience”. In her interviews with CNN and other media outlets, she claimed that she was detained by the police in a “concentration camp”, and was forced to take or get injected with unknown medicines. She claimed that people detained there were suffering from torture everyday, and she herself witnessed the death of nine women. She said that one of her sons died in the Urumqi Children’s Hospital, and nobody told her why he was admitted for treatment.(2) Reality check
First, Mihrigul Tursun was fully free in China except for the 20 days under criminal detention. On 21 April 2017, she was criminally detained by the Public Security Bureau of Qiemo County on suspicion of inciting ethnic hatred and discrimination. She was confirmed to have infectious diseases. The Bureau revoked the compulsory measures on 10 May 2017 out of humanitarian considerations. Between 2010 and 2017, she made 11 trips between China and countries including Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Thailand and Turkey.
Second, Mihrigul Tursun had never studied in any vocational education and training center, nor had she ever been forced to take any medicine. She claimed that the drugs and medicine she was injected with in the “concentration camp” caused her infertility. As verified by investigation, there was no sterilization record, and her parents said that she was fertile.She also lied about her younger brother, claiming that he was abused to death in a vocational education and training center. When hearing this, Akbar Tursun, her “dead” brother, stated publicly that Mihrigul was a habitual liar, and that she had not only lied about his death, but also rumored about watching others die.
Third, Mihrigul Tursun’s son did not die when receiving treatment in Urumqi. One of her sons, due to illnesses such as pneumonia, hydrocephalus and right-side indirect inguinal hernia, was taken to Urumqi Children’s Hospital by Mihrigul Tursun herself and her family. The boy was hospitalized for treatment from 14 to 19 January, from 6 to 12 May and from 4 to 8 November in 2016. In April 2018, Mihrigul Tursun and her husband left China with this child.
- Zumrat Dawut
Zumrat Dawut, female, born in 1982, is from Urumqi of Xinjiang. She left China in January 2019.
(1) Activities outside China
Since 20 September 2019, in interviews with Radio Free Asia and other media outlets, Zumrat Dawut claimed to have been interrogated by the public security departments in Xinjiang and detained in a vocational education and training center for reasons including being married to a Pakistani. She alleged that she had been brutally persecuted, forced to take contraceptives with other women detained there, and forced to undergo sterilization with her uterus resected. She also asserted that she was served a pork dish in the Han family that her family was paired up with. On 24 September and 2 October 2019, she attended as a witness and gave false testimony at a panel discussion on “international religious freedom” and a seminar on “human rights crises in Xinjiang” held by the US State Department. On 12 October, she said that her neighbor in Xinjiang told her that her father had died after multiple rounds of police interrogations.(2) Reality check
First, Zumrat Dawut had never studied in any vocational education and training center. This was confirmed by her fifth eldest brother Abduheili Dawut in an interview.Second, Zumrat Dawut had never undergone any forced sterilization. Before she gave birth to her third child in the Urumqi Maternal and Child Health Hospital in March 2013, she had signed a delivery consent form, agreeing to a cesarean section and tubal ligation, and she received the surgeries at the hospital. She never had a forced sterilization, not to mention any hysterectomy.
Third, the so-called “pork dish” was a sheer fabrication. The paired-up family she referred to is the family of Zhao Qilin, the paired-up family of her fifth eldest brother Abduheili Dawut. In January 2018, Zhao Qilin invited Abduheili Dawut, his wife Horqiz Ahmat and his sister Zumrat Dawut over to his home. Zhao’s mother cooked for the guests. There is no chance that Zhao’s mother, an ethnic Hui herself, would ever prepare a pork dish. The two families took a picture when having dinner together.Fourth, Zumrat Dawut’s father had never been detained. According to her fifth eldest brother Abduheili Dawut, their father had been living with his children all along, and had never been investigated or detained. Their father passed away due to coronary heart disease. Zumrat Dawut’s claim that her father died after police interrogations was a complete lie.
- Gulzira Auelhan
Gulzira Auelhan, female, born in 1979, is from Yining County of Xinjiang.
(1) Activities outside China
In an interview with the BBC on 15 January 2020, Gulzira Auelhan claimed that she had been detained for 15 months, during which she was tortured and injected with unknown medicine. She purported that she had worked in a glove factory after being released and had to report to the police on her whereabouts, and that her husband was also under surveillance after he was released.(2) Reality check
First, Gulzira Auelhan defaulted on a bank loan. It was found out that she, along with four others in her village as co-guarantors, borrowed 40,000 yuan from the Yining County Rural Credit Cooperative. She never paid back the interest of the loan even after it had matured, and was blacklisted by the bank.
Second, she has a record of dishonest behavior. In her interview with The Globe and Mail, she said that her life goal was to bring up her children. Yet facts proved otherwise. She has no biological child, and has been indifferent to her three stepdaughters of her third husband. After she left China, she even asked her stepdaughters to pay her debts. - Tursunay Ziyawudun
Tursunay Ziyawudun, female, born in 1978, is from Xinyuan County of Ili Prefecture of Xinjiang.
(1) Activities outside China
After leaving China on 26 September 2019, Tursunay Ziyawudun had several interviews by the BBC and other foreign media outlets, during which she claimed that women detained at the education and training centers had to either undergo surgical sterilization or take medicine to stop menstruation, and that she was forced to undergo irreversible tubal ligation and sterilization. In an interview with the BBC on 2 February 2021, she said she had “experienced and seen sexual abuse”.(2) Reality check
First, Tursunay Ziyawudun has never had any medical record of contraceptive operation.
Second, what she said in the interviews is inconsistent. In an interview with the BBC this year, she said that police at the center knocked her on the floor and kicked her in the abdomen, and she almost passed out. However, in an interview with the American website Buzzfeed last year, she said “I wasn’t beaten or abused.” She claimed that she was under house arrest from January to June 2019. But her passport was issued on 13 March 2019, and passports must be applied in person at government agencies. If she were under house arrest, how could she go out to apply for her passport? - Rahman Shanbay
Rahman Shanbay, female, born in 1987, is from Tekes County of Xinjiang.
(1) Activities outside China
After leaving China on 19 December 2018, she was interviewed by The Globe and Mail and other foreign media outlets. She claimed that she was interned in a room with 24 women, and was chained with handcuffs and shackles for one week because the application “WhatsApp” was installed on her cell phone.(2) Reality check
First, Rahman Shanbay underwent investigation in accordance with the law. She was inquired by local police after being reported to have stored terrorist and extremist audios and videos on her cell phone and watched them frequently. Given the minor nature of her crime, her confession and remorse, she received only admonition as required by law.
Second, Rahman Shanbay was never interned. Her mother Danishban Musa said “my daughter indeed went to a police station and was subjected to inquiry because she was influenced by religious extremism and was suspected of committing a crime. However, she came back only three hours later, and since then she has stayed at home, helping me and my husband take care of the cattle.”
◆The second category of those cases involve people who fabricated stories about their relatives.
Some anti-China individuals staying abroad fabricated lies about their relatives being arrested, persecuted or missing, in an attempt to garner sympathy from the international community and serve their schemes. Such unfounded claims are seriously misleading to the international community. Even their relatives in China have spoken out to debunk their lies.
- Ferkat Jawdat
Ferkat Jawdat, male, born in 1992, is from Yining City of Xinjiang.
(1) Activities outside China
After going to the United States on 23 January 2011, Ferkat Jawdat organized “collective testimony” in several other countries, pieced together information of trainees at the so-called “concentration camps” and led the allegation campaign “Me Too Uyghur”. He claimed that his mother was detained in a “concentration camp” for 12 months and imprisoned for three months. In March 2019, he was “received” by Mike Pompeo as one of the so-called “survivors of internment camps” and their family members.
(2) Reality check
Ferkat Jawdat and his father, brother and two sisters live in the United States. His mother Minawar Tursun leads a normal life in China. As Minawar Tursun said, she has video calls with her son almost every day. - Kuzzat Altay
Kuzzat Altay, whose real name is Kuzzat Mamat, is nephew of Rebiya Kadeer, former head of the World Uyghur Congress. Born in 1984, he is from Urumqi of Xinjiang and now lives in the United States. On 26 October 2019, Kuzzat Mamat became president of the Uyghur American Association.
(1) Activities outside China
At a press conference at the US Congress held by the Coalition to Advance Religious Freedom in China, an anti-China organization, as well as in interviews since February 2019, he claimed that his father Mamat Qadir was arrested and probably had died.
(2) Reality check
It has been verified that Kuzzat Altay’s father Mamat Qadir lives a normal life in Urumqi. - Guljahra Qeyum
Guljahra Qeyum, female, born in 1973, is from Urumqi of Xinjiang. She is a journalist and news presenter of the Uyghur language department of Radio Free Asia and a member of the Uyghur American Association. On 8 May 2017, she was listed online as a wanted person by the public security authorities on suspicion of joining a terrorist organization.
(1) Activities outside China
In July 2018, Guljahra Qeyum attended a meeting of the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China and said that her parents were detained in an internment camp. In March 2019, she was “received” by Mike Pompeo as one of the so-called “survivors of internment camps” and their family members.
(2) Reality check
Guljahra Qeyum’s parents lead a normal life. Her 79-year-old father Abduqeyum Ghoja suffers from paralysis caused by cerebral infarction. Her mother Chimangul Zikir, aged 73, has several medical conditions including cardiac disease, hypertension and varicose veins in calves, and she needs to take care of her husband at home. They expressed no interest in traveling abroad due to poor health. - Yiminjan Sadul
Yiminjan Sadul, male, born in 1965, is former associate professor of the History Department of the Xinjiang Islamic Institute.
(1) False story by foreign media
Yiminjan Sadul’s daughter Samre Yiminjan claimed that her father was arrested by the authorities in Xinjiang for publishing an Arabic grammar book in 2014, and that she learned in November 2019 that he was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment for the “crime of inciting and advocating extremist ideology”. On 13 February 2020, a Washington Post journalist published an article entitled “Boston Uighur Woman Champions Her Father’s Release”, claiming that Samre Yiminjan’s father Yiminjan Sadul was detained by Chinese officials and arrested over charges of extremism.
(2) Reality check
It has been verified that Yiminjan Sadul lives a free life.5. Arpat Arkin
Arpat Arkin, male, born in 1997, is from Yining City of Xinjiang. On 29 October 2015, he travelled abroad and joined the World Uyghur Congress.
(1) Activities outside China
In February 2019, Arpat Arkin tweeted that his mother had been put in a “concentration camp” since late 2017, and his father Arkin Tursun was arrested on March 2018 and sentenced to 7 or 11 years in prison. In March 2019, he was “received” by Mike Pompeo as one of the so-called “survivors of internment camps” and their family members.
(2) Reality check
Arpat Arkin’s mother, younger sister and younger brother are all living a normal life. His father Arkin Tursun was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment by the People’s Court for inciting ethnic hatred and discrimination and for cover-up. Arkin Tursun confessed to all the charges and is now in good health and serving his time in prison. - Reyhan Asat
Reyhan Asat, female, born in 1981,is from Urumqi of Xinjiang.
(1) Activities outside China
On 9 May 2020, The New York Times published an article claiming that Reyhan Asat, a Uyghur in the United States, said in an interview that her younger brother Akbar Asat was arrested in Xinjiang when he returned to China for participating in the activity of the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) held by the US State Department in 2016, and was then sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment by the Chinese government for inciting ethnic hatred. She called on the IVLP organizers to pay attention to this case and urge the Chinese government to release her brother Akbar Asat.
(2) Reality check
Reyhan Asat’s younger brother Akbar Asat was sentenced to 15 years in prison for inciting secession by the People’s Court in accordance with the law. He confessed to the charge and is now serving his sentence and is in good health. He was sentenced for violating China’s law. It has nothing to do with whether he had participated in relevant activities in the US. - Mamut Abdureyim
Mamut Abdureyim, male, born in 1978, is from Urumqi of Xinjiang, and is now living in Australia.
(1) False story by foreign media
Mamut Abdureyim said in a CNN interview that he had “lost contact” with his wife Arem Ablat and his children since April 2017, and that he couldn’t go back to China for fear of his own safety.
(2) Reality check
Mamut Abdureyim has long indoctrinated his wife Arem Ablat with religious extremist and violent terrorist ideologies. After leaving China on 30 November 2012, she took part in religious extremist activities many times, and incited other people in China to travel abroad to prepare for terrorist activities.
On 6 December 2015, tasked by terrorist organizations, Arem Ablat returned to China, where she instigated and coaxed other people into leaving the country to join terrorist organizations abroad and launching terrorist activities. On 19 June 2020, she was sentenced to nine years in prison for instigating ethnic hatred by the People’s Court in Kashgar. She is now serving her sentence.
Mamut Abdureyim’s daughter now lives with his father Abdureyim Mamut and attends the No.1 Primary School of Kashgar. His son lives with his mother-in-law Patima Abdurusul and attends a kindergarten in Kashgar. Mamut Abdureyim has never returned to China to take care of his children and family since he left the country on 14 September 2012.
◆The third category of those cases involve the so-called “witnesses” whose experiences were in fact fabricated.
There are a large number of people whose identities have been fabricated, distorted and exploited in the so-called Xinjiang-related “databases”. For instance, Tayir Asan, a doctor of the Gastroenterology Department of the People’s Hospital in Kuqa of the Aksu Prefecture; Aysham Sadik, a retired teacher; Gulbahar Mamat, a kindergarten teacher in Zepu County, Kashgar Prefecture; Tayir Talip, a writer and retired editor of Kashgar Daily; Anwar Dawut, Omar Ali and Abdukeyum Dawut in Pishan County, Hotan Prefecture, and so on. All of them were allegedly “detained” according to the Western anti-China forces, when, in fact, all of them are living a normal life. Among them, Yilpan Yezmujan, a football player, is training at the Suning football club in Jiangsu Province; Isak Payzulla, an editor of Hami Daily, and the Zaram Talips, retired officials from the Committee of Ethnic and Religious Affairs in Hami, attended in person the fifth press briefing on Xinjiang-related issues on 2 March 2020 to debunk the rumors.
◆The fourth category of those cases involve people who have been prosecuted on criminal charges in accordance with the law.
In the so-called Xinjiang related “databases”, there are some who were sentenced in accordance with the law for violating China’s laws. They are by no means the “victims”. For example, Sami Bary from Turpan was sentenced to life imprisonment for organizing, leading and joining terrorist organizations and for murder; Akbar Yimin from Urumqi was sentenced to 25 years in prison for organizing and leading organized crime of a gangland nature, forced transaction, robbery and unlawful detention; Ahat Wuji from Baicheng County in Aksu was sentenced to 20 years in prison for attempted murder and provocative and disturbing acts; Abdurehman Abdukerem from Zequ County in Kashgar was sentenced to four years in prison for child molestation. It is simply preposterous that the Western anti-China forces should “cry foul” for these criminals.
