Biodun Iginla, BBC News

Biodun Iginla, BBC News
Showing posts with label Xinjiang. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Xinjiang. Show all posts

Saturday, August 11, 2018

U.N. says it has credible reports that China holds million Uighurs in secret camps

August 11, 2018  11H:08  GMT/UTC/ZULU TIME
GENEVA - A United Nations human rights panel said on Friday that it had received many credible reports that 1 million ethnic Uighurs in China are held in what resembles a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy.”

A police patrol walk in front of the Id Kah Mosque in the old city of Kashgar, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, China, March 22, 2017. REUTERS/Thomas Peter
Gay McDougall, a member of the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, cited estimates that 2 million Uighurs and Muslim minorities were forced into “political camps for indoctrination” in the western Xinjiang autonomous region.
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“We are deeply concerned at the many numerous and credible reports that we have received that in the name of combating religious extremism and maintaining social stability (China) has changed the Uighur autonomous region into something that resembles a massive internship camp that is shrouded in secrecy, a sort of ‘no rights zone’,” she told the start of a two-day regular review of China’s record, including Hong Kong and Macao.
China has said that Xinjiang faces a serious threat from Islamist militants and separatists who plot attacks and stir up tensions between the mostly Muslim Uighur minority who call the region home and the ethnic Han Chinese majority.
A Chinese delegation of some 50 officials made no comment on her remarks at the Geneva session that is scheduled to continue on Monday.

Men install a CCTV camera in a shopping street in the old town of Kashgar, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, China, March 23, 2017. REUTERS/Thomas Peter
The U.S. mission to the United Nations said on Twitter that it was “deeply troubled by reports of an ongoing crackdown on Uighurs and other Muslims in China.”
“We call on China to end their counterproductive policies and free all of those who have been arbitrarily detained,” the U.S. mission said.
The allegations came from multiple sources, including activist group Chinese Human Rights Defenders, which said in a report last month that 21 percent of all arrests recorded in China in 2017 were in Xinjiang.
Earlier, Yu Jianhua, China’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, said it was working toward equality and solidarity among all ethnic groups.
But McDougall said that members of the Uighur community and other Muslims were being treated as “enemies of the state” solely on the basis of their ethno-religious identity.
More than 100 Uighur students who returned to China from countries including Egypt and Turkey had been detained, with some dying in custody, she said.

FILE PHOTO: The United Nations emblem is seen in the U.N. General Assembly hall during the 72nd United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters in New York, U.S., September 22, 2017. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson/File Photo
Fatima-Binta Dah, a panel member, referred to “arbitrary and mass detention of almost 1 million Uighurs” and asked the Chinese delegation, “What is the level of religious freedom available now to Uighurs in China, what legal protection exists for them to practice their religion?”
Panelists also raised reports of mistreatment of Tibetans in the autonomous region, including inadequate use of the Tibetan language in the classroom and at court proceedings.
“The U.N. body maintained its integrity, the government got a very clear message,” Golok Jigme, a Tibetan monk and former prisoner living in exile, told us at Reuters at the meeting.

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Thursday, May 31, 2018

Analysis: Technology and surveillance: China’s digital police state

by Xian Wan and Biodun Iginla, Technology News Analysts, The Economist Intelligence Unit, Beijing

Does China’s digital police state have echoes in the West?

The state can gather more information, more easily, than ever before. Do not underestimate the risks

THEY’RE watching you. When you walk to work, CCTV cameras film you and, increasingly, recognise your face. Drive out of town, and number-plate-reading cameras capture your journey. The smartphone in your pocket leaves a constant digital trail. Browse the web in the privacy of your home, and your actions are logged and analysed. The resulting data can be crunched to create a minute-by-minute record of your life.
Under an authoritarian government such as China’s, digital monitoring is turning a nasty police state into a terrifying, all-knowing one. Especially in the western region of Xinjiang, China is applying artificial intelligence (AI) and mass surveillance to create a 21st-century panopticon and impose total control over millions of Uighurs, a Turkic-language Muslim minority (see Briefing). In Western democracies, police and intelligence agencies are using the same surveillance tools to solve and deter crimes and prevent terrorism (see Technology Quarterly). The results are effective, yet deeply worrying.

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Between freedom and oppression stands a system to seek the consent of citizens, maintain checks and balances on governments and, when it comes to surveillance, set rules to restrain those who collect and process information. But with data so plentiful and easy to gather, these protections are being eroded. Privacy rules designed for the landline phone, postbox and filing cabinet urgently need to be strengthened for the age of the smartphone, e-mail and cloud computing.
I spy with my many eyes
When East Germany collapsed in 1989, people marvelled at the store of information the Stasi security service had garnered on them, and the vast network of informants it took to compile it. Since then the digital revolution has transformed surveillance, as it has so much else, by making it possible to collect and analyse data on an unprecedented scale. Smartphones, web browsers and sensors provide huge quantities of information that governments can hack or collect; data centres allow them to store it indefinitely; AI helps them find needles in the digital haystacks thus assembled. Technologies that once seemed a friend of freedom, allowing dissidents in dictatorships to communicate and organise more easily, now look more Orwellian, letting autocrats watch people even more closely than the Stasi did.
Xinjiang is the nightmarish extreme that the new technology makes possible: a racist police state. Fearing insurrection and separatism, China’s rulers have reinforced techniques of totalitarian control—including the mass detention of Uighurs for re-education—with digital technology. In parts of the province streets have poles bristling with CCTV cameras every 100-200 metres. They record each passing driver’s face and the car’s numberplate. Uighurs’ mobile phones must run government-issued spyware. The data associated with their ID cards include not just name, sex and occupation, but can contain relatives’ details, fingerprints, blood type, DNA information, detention record and “reliability status”. All this and more is fed into the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP), an AI-powered system, to generate lists of suspects for detention.
Totalitarianism on Xinjiang’s scale may be hard to replicate, even across most of China. Repressing an easily identified minority is easier than ensuring absolute control over entire populations. But elements of China’s model of surveillance will surely inspire other autocracies—from Russia to Rwanda to Turkey—to which the necessary hardware will happily be sold. Liberal states have an obligation to expose and chastise this export of oppression, however limited their tools of suasion.
The West must look at itself, too. These days its police forces can also have access to a Stasi’s worth of data. Officers can set up bogus phone towers to track people’s movements and contacts. Data from numberplate-readers can track a person’s movements for years. Some American cities have predictive-policing programs akin to IJOP that analyse past crimes to predict future ones. All this allows the monitoring of possible attackers, but the potential for abuse is great. Hundreds of American police officers are known to have used confidential databases to dig dirt on journalists, ex-girlfriends and others.
Watching the detectives
How to balance freedom and safety? Start by ensuring that the digital world, like the real one, has places where law-abiding people can enjoy privacy. Citizens of liberal democracies do not expect to be frisked without good cause, or have their homes searched without a warrant. Similarly, a mobile phone in a person’s pocket should be treated like a filing cabinet at home. Just as filing cabinets can be locked, encryption should not be curtailed. A second priority is to limit how long information on citizens is kept, constrain who has access to it and penalise its misuse fittingly. In 2006 the European Union issued a directive requiring mobile-phone firms to keep customers’ metadata for up to two years. That law was struck down by the European Court of Justice in 2014. Misuse of police data should be a criminal offence for which people are punished, not a “mistake” absolved by a collective apology.
A third priority is to monitor the use of AI. Predictive-policing systems are imperfect, better at finding patterns of burglary than of, say, murder. Face-recognition may produce lots of “false positive” results. AI trained with biased data—eg, patterns of arrest that feature a disproportionate number of black people—may reproduce those biases. Some sentencing algorithms are more likely to label black defendants than white ones as being at high risk of reoffending. Such algorithms must be open to scrutiny, not protected as trade secrets.
Vigilance and transparency must be the watchwords. They may enhance the technology’s effectiveness: the routine wearing of bodycams by police, for instance, appears to reduce public complaints. Consultation matters, too. A bill recently proposed in California would compel police agencies to disclose what surveillance gear they have, publish data on its use and seek public input before buying any more. If that makes progress slower so be it. Police rightly watch citizens to keep them safe. Citizens must watch the police to remain free.
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Wednesday, September 9, 2015

Bangkok's Erawan Shrine bomb: One suspect 'is Chinese'

by Coco Jiang and Biodun Iginla, BBC News, Bangkok

53 minutes ago


One of the alleged accomplices to the key suspect wanted over the Erawan Shrine bombing in the Thai capital Bangkok last month is Chinese, officials from both countries say.
They say that Yusufu Mieraili was born in Xinjiang, home to China's Muslim Uighur minority.
A Chinese official told the Global Times that the bombing may have been the work of separatists in Xinjiang.
No-one has laid claim to the attack, which killed 20 people.
Thai police say Mr Mieraili is part of a group responsible for the blast.
The Global Times reported a Chinese official as saying that he belonged to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a small Islamist separatist group said to be active in Xinjiang province in western China.
The Bangkok Post reported that he told investigators that his parents still live in the region.
The main suspect - a man wearing a yellow t-shirt who left a rucksack at the shrine moments before the 17 August blast - is still believed to be on the run.

Mr Mieraili was taken to the scene of the explosion on Wednesday morning for a crime scene re-enactment.
Wearing a bulletproof vest and with his hands bound, he was escorted by police to the elevated pedestrian skywalk above the shrine.
Mr Mieraili has confessed to handing a backpack to the suspected bomber at Bangkok's main railway station shortly before the blast, Thai police say.
China is closely watching the investigation in Bangkok, correspondents say, as speculation mounts that sympathisers of the country's Uighur community could be the chief suspects.

China has long faced criticism for the perceived harsh restrictions it places on religion and culture in Xinjiang, where the majority of Uighurs live.
Thailand recently found itself in the spotlight following its forced repatriation of more than 100 Uighurs to China.
Any confirmation that Mr Mieraili is Chinese would throw the spotlight on an ethnic conflict that China has long argued poses an international threat, the BBC's Jon Sudworth in Beijing recently reported.
Thai police arrested Mr Mieraili, 25, at the beginning of this month in Sa Kaeo province on the border with Cambodia. He was holding a Chinese passport but police warned at the time that it could be fake.
Earlier another suspect, Adem Karadag was arrested in a raid on a flat on the eastern outskirts of Bangkok.

Bangkok bomb


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