After International Outcry, China Destroying Evidence Of Mass Detention Camps For Muslims
The Xinjiang regional government in China¡¯s far west is deleting data, destroying documents, tightening controls on information and has held high-level meetings in response to leaks of classified papers on its mass detention camps for Uighurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities, according to four people in contact with government employees there.
The world has seen how China has resorted to brutal silencing of its Muslim minority, the Uighurs living in the Xinjiang region. Despite outcry from across the world, China has carried out what it calls the deradicalise programme for the practising Muslims of the country.
Now according to reports by AP, the regional government is deleting data and destroying documents related to the mass detention camps set up for Uighurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities.
The Chinese authorities were rattled by the report published by The New York Times, last month, that featured a cache of internal speeches on Xinjiang by top leaders including Chinese President Xi Jinping.
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Later, some international organisations published secret guidelines for operating detention centres and instructions on how to use technology to target people.
The Chinese government has long struggled with its 11-million-strong Uighur population, an ethnic Turkic minority native to Xinjiang, and in recent years has detained 1 million or more Uighurs and other minorities in the camps.
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The Xinjiang government did not respond to a fax for comment on the arrests, the tightened restrictions on information and other measures responding to the leaks. The Chinese Foreign Ministry did not have an immediate comment.
The authorities, reportedly, had put strict bans on the information in October.
They include orders for community-level officials to burn paper forms containing sensitive personal details on residents in their area such as their detention status, and for various state offices to throw away computers, tighten management of classified information, and ensure all information related to the camps is now stored on databases disconnected from the internet in special, restricted-access rooms to bar hackers, the Uighurs said.
¡°They became much more serious about the transfer of information,¡± one said.
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Restrictions on information appear to be tightening further. Some university teachers and district-level workers in Urumqi have been ordered to clean out sensitive data on their computers, phones and cloud storage, and to delete work-related social media groups, according to one Uighur with direct knowledge of the situation.
With AP Inputs
