#Chine : le drame ouïghour
La politique que mène la Chine au Xinjiang à l’égard de la population ouïghoure peut être considérée comme un #génocide : plus d’un million de personnes internées arbitrairement, travail forcé, tortures, stérilisations forcées, « rééducation » culturelle des enfants comme des adultes…
Quel est le veritable objectif du parti communiste chinois ?
▻http://www.film-documentaire.fr/4DACTION/w_fiche_film/64324
#Ouïghours #Xinjiang #camps_d'internement #torture #stérilisation_forcée #camps_de_concentration #persécution #crimes_contre_l'humanité #silence #matières_premières #assimilation #islam #islamophobie #internement #gaz #coton #charbon #route_de_la_soie #pétrole #Xi_Jinping #séparatisme #extrémisme #terrorisme #Kunming #peur #état_policier #répression #rééducation #Radio_Free_Asia #disparition #emprisonnement_de_masse #images_satellites #droits_humains #zone_de_non-droit #propagande #torture_psychique #lavage_de_cerveau #faim #Xinjiang_papers #surveillance #surveillance_de_masse #biométrie #vidéo-surveillance #politique_de_prévention #surveillance_d'Etat #identité #nationalisme #minorités #destruction #génocide_culturel #Ilham_Tohti #manuels_d'école #langue #patriotisme #contrôle_démographique #contrôle_de_la_natalité #politique_de_l'enfant_unique #travail_forcé #multinationales #déplacements_forcés #économie #colonisation #Turkestan_oriental #autonomie #Mao_Zedong #révolution_culturelle #assimilation_forcée #Chen_Quanguo #cour_pénale_internationale (#CPI) #sanctions
]]>#Taïwan, #Ouïghours : les dérives nationalistes de la #Chine de #Xi_Jinping
Xi Jinping se prépare à un troisième mandat de cinq ans et à une démonstration de force au cours du 20e #congrès_du_Parti_communiste_chinois. Alors que son nationalisme exacerbé se traduit à la fois à l’intérieur des frontières, avec la répression des Ouïghours, et dans son environnement proche, en #Mer_de_Chine_du_sud, avec une pression accrue sur Taïwan, nous analysons les enjeux de ce congrès avec nos invité·es, Laurence Defranoux, journaliste et autrice des Ouïghours, histoire d’un peuple sacrifié, Noé Hirsch, spécialiste de la Chine, Maya Kandel, historienne spécialiste des États-Unis, et Inès Cavalli, chercheuse en études chinoises.
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4wiIwCaSY8
#nationalisme #constitution #révision_constitutionnelle #pensée_Xi_Jinping #paternalisme #colonialisme #Xinjiang #colonialisme_Han #déplacements_de_population #exploitation_économique #limitation_des_libertés #enfermement #rééducation_politique #emprisonnement #répression #Nouvelles_Routes_de_la_soie #ressources #ressources_naturelles #Tibet #surveillance #surveillance_de_masse #terreur #camps_de_rééducation #folklore #assimilation #folklorisation #ethnonationalisme #supériorité_de_la_race #Han #culture #camps_de_concentration #réforme_par_le_travail #réforme_par_la_culture #travail_forcé #peuples_autochtones #usines #industrie #industrie_textile #programmes_de_lutte_contre_la_pauvreté #exploitation #paramilitaires #endoctrinement #économie #économie_chinoise #crimes_contre_l'humanité #torture
Décembre 2021, le retour de #Klaus_Kinzler dans les médias...
Klaus Kinzler, enseignant : « #Sciences_Po_Grenoble est devenu un camp de rééducation »
« On entend désormais dans les amphis des profs remettre en cause tout le système dans ses bases universalistes, démocratiques, laïques. C’est fait sans aucun complexe »
Professeur d’allemand et de civilisation allemande à l’Institut d’études politiques de Grenoble, Klaus Kinzler est au centre d’une polémique qui empoisonne l’établissement depuis un an. Accusé d’être islamophobe dans une campagne lancée par des étudiants sur les réseaux sociaux, il a vu son nom et celui d’un de ses collègues placardés sur les murs de l’établissement avec la mention : « Des fascistes dans nos amphis. L’islamophobie tue ». Klaus Kinzler n’est pas retourné à l’IEP depuis les faits. En mars, il publiera le récit de cette affaire aux Editions du Rocher.
Vous avez été, selon vous, la cible d’une « cabale » instrumentalisée par un syndicat étudiant (l’Union syndicale) de l’IEP de Grenoble, avec le silence complice de la direction et du corps enseignant. Pourquoi les choses se sont-elles envenimées à ce point ?
Tout a commencé par des échanges de mails avec une collègue historienne en décembre 2020. Je contestais le titre d’une journée de débats dans lequel « racisme, antisémitisme et islamophobie » étaient mis sur le même plan. Cela me paraissait un scandale alors qu’existe un vrai débat sur la pertinence du terme islamophobie. La discussion s’est vite envenimée, ma collègue affirmant la « scientificité » du mot. Les ennuis ont débuté. Dès janvier, la campagne s’était déjà déchaînée sur Facebook. On nous accusait d’être « islamophobes » et on exigeait notre démission, tout en lançant des appels à témoignages anonymes contre nous. En mars dernier, mon nom, ainsi que celui d’un collègue politologue, spécialiste de l’islam en France, ont été placardés sur la façade de l’établissement. J’ai été mis sous protection policière pendant un mois.
(#paywall)
▻https://www.lopinion.fr/politique/klaus-kinzler-enseignant-sciences-po-grenoble-est-devenu-un-camp-de-reeduca
Toute l’affaire, dans ce fil de discussion :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/905509
Rwandan ‘#peace_camps’, persecution and the struggle to be believed
S is a Hutu-Tutsi girl who, like many young Rwandans was called to go to the #Ingando camps. Described by the Rwandan government as “programmes for peace education” for Rwandan youth and as aiming to be a form of “education for good governance”, the idea of the Ingando camps seems in line with the stance that Rwanda has taken on grassroots, community led transitional justice. However, despite this description, there is strong evidence that Ingando camps are highly militarized. S, being of mixed descent was ascribed Tutsi identity by her community, yet still found herself in a position of inbetweenness. Upon arrival at the Ingando camp she was subject to high levels of #violence, #discrimination, and repeated abuse, experiencing sexual harassment and multiple episodes of rape. She found herself pregnant twice by the same aggressor and was forced to abort the first of her children. Rejected by her family, unheard by her school principal and afraid to denounce the facts to the police, she fled to Cameroon in 2006, where she later married a Rwandan refugee of Hutu origin – causing her further marginalisation and rejection by her family.
When the weighted words, “peace education” are used to describe a programme of transitional justice, assumptions are formed in the mind. Hailed by local and international media as a progressive and locally based method of dealing with the atrocities, grief and suffering left behind by genocide, the Ingando programme fits into a story of long awaited good following a gruelling period of tragedy. Despite the lifetime of persecution faced by S, when she applied for asylum in Europe the authorities were not immediately convinced of her need for protection.
After the initial rejection, S’s legal representative came to Asylos requesting information on the reality of the Ingando camps and for information to substantiate her claim. Using a variety of research techniques for data collection, such as academic sources and (social) media analysis, Asylos’ researchers were able to uncover and highlight the highly politicised nature of the Ingando programme as well as the sometimes violent and abusive behavior of the authorities involved in the camp. The research meant the context of S’s story, with all its nuances and the power dynamics involved could be more clearly seen, thus adding a layer of credibility to a complicated story. After a long and difficult struggle, S was granted asylum in France. It is because of the hard work and dedication of Asylos’ volunteers and the legal representative, that stories such as S’s, are given a chance at equal access to justice based on proof and not upon prejudice.
▻https://www.asylos.eu/blog/asylum-stories-rwandan-peace-camps?omhide=true
#Rwanda #viols #harcèlement #harcèlement_sexuel #paix #rééducation #FPR #Front_patriotique_rwandais
#COI #asile #réfugiés #réfugiés_rwandais
Le «#navi_bianche», quando i profughi dall’Africa erano italiani
«Donne smunte, lacerate accaldate, affrante dalle fatiche, scosse dalle emozioni… Bimbi sparuti che le lunghe privazioni e l’ardore del clima hanno immiserito e stremato fino al limite». Si presentavano così i coloni dell’ormai “ex Impero” agli occhi di #Zeno_Garroni, regio commissario della missione speciale che avrebbe rimpatriato 28mila tra donne, anziani, bambini e ragazzi sotto 15 anni dall’Etiopia, dall’Eritrea e dalla Somalia, paesi di quell’Africa orientale italiana facilmente conquistata all’inizio del 1941 dalle truppe britanniche. Un’ondata di profughi “bianchi” che ricevette un’accoglienza diversa da quella destinata oggi ai naufraghi ma che, come loro, si lasciavano alle spalle la esperienza drammatica della prigionia nei campi alleati.
Alla missione umanitaria si arrivò dopo una lunga trattativa tra il governo britannico e quello italiano. Furono allestite quattro navi (“Saturnia”, “Vulcania”, “Caio Duilio” e “Giulio Cesare”), dipinte di bianco con grandi croci rosse, alle quali fu imposto il periplo dell’Africa, dal momento che non fu permesso loro di passare attraverso il canale di Suez. Il viaggio, così, diventava molto lungo: circa cinquanta giorni. E pericoloso: la prima spedizione salpò nell’aprile del 1942 da Genova e Trieste, la terza e ultima attraccò a Taranto nell’agosto del 1943. Tutto in piena guerra, quella che si combatteva anche lungo le rotte e i porti del Mediterraneo.
«Costretti ad abbandonare case e averi, concentrati dai britannici in campi provvisori e da lì inviati a Berbera direttamente per l’imbarco - scrive lo storico Emanuele Ertola che alla vicenda delle “navi bianche” ha dedicato un saggio - affaticati e storditi dopo un lungo viaggio attraverso l’Etiopia in treno e camionetta, i rimpatrianti dovevano quindi sopportare la lunga attesa per salire a bordo». Qui venivano subito assistiti dal personale sanitario (c’erano medici e infermieri) ma affrontavano da subito il problema del sovraffollamento. Durante l’imbarco e il viaggio - soprattutto della prima spedizione - molti bambini, già provati e sofferenti per vita nei campi di concentramento britannici e sfiancati dalle condizioni climatiche, morirono. «Ricordo benissimo, giorno per giorno, la vita a bordo, che è durata circa un mese e mezzo - racconta una testimone, Maria Gabriella Ripa di Meana, citata nel libro di Massimo Zamorani Dalle navi bianche alla linea gotica (Mursia), inviato del Giornale di Indro Montanelli che era uno dei tanti bambini italiani d’Africa -. Ricordo i bambini più piccoli che morivano per infezione diarroica; ricordo l’epidemia di tosse convulsa che imperversava tra i bambini più grandi. Ricordo la madre disperata che aveva assistito alla fine del suo piccolo; ricordo che le donne in stato di gravidanza erano terrorizzate e ricordo che non c’erano più letti disponibili nell’infermeria strapiena».
Ma oltre che umanitaria, nelle intenzioni del governo fascista, quella delle “navi bianche” doveva essere anche una missione politica. Aveva lo scopo di preparare i profughi che avevano vissuto nelle colonie al reinserimento nella vita della madrepatria e a “rieducarli” ai principi «della gerarchia e dei valori sociali » soprattutto dopo il periodo di prigionia nei campi britannici. Tra i “ragazzi d’Africa” c’era anche il futuro fumettista Hugo Pratt, all’epoca del rientro appena quindicenne. Come altri suoi coetanei si arruolò volontario appena compiuti diciotto anni, convinto che quella della fedeltà al regime fosse l’unica scelta possibile. Tra i bambini sopravvissuti c’era anche Luciano Violante (è nato a Dire Daua nel 1941) che, magistrato e politico ex comunista, molti anni dopo nel suo discorso di insediamento da presidente della Camera invitò a riflettere sui «vinti di ieri» per capire «senza revisionismi falsificanti» anche chi si schierò «dalla parte di Salò».
▻https://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/le-navi-bianche-quando-profughi-dall-africa-erano-italiani-AE3GxU5E
#réfugiés #réfugiés_italiens #décolonisation #Afrique #Corne_d'Afrique #Ethiopie #Erythrée #Somalie #navires #Saturnia #Vulcania #Caio_Duilio #Giulio_Cesare #Berbera #colonialisme #camps_de_concentration #réinsertion #rééducation #Hugo_Pratt
Open-source #satellite data to investigate #Xinjiang concentration camps
The second part of this series discusses techniques on how to analyse a dire human rights situation in and around Xinjiang’s re-education and detention facilities.
A pressing need to investigate characteristics of Xinjiang’s detention camps
The story has been widely covered. Calls by human rights advocates to define China’s practices as ‘genocide’ grow louder. Hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslims detained in internment camps. Many still are.
“Inmates undergo months or years of indoctrination and interrogation aimed at transforming them into secular and loyal supporters of the party”, the New York Times wrote and published documents that unmistakably prove a dire human rights situation in the west of China.
First China denied the camps ever existed. Then the Chinese consulate doesn’t bother anymore to play a smoke and mirror game and admits: “Xinjiang has set up vocational education and training centres in order to root out extreme thoughts…”. Their purpose: ‘compulsory programs for terrorist criminals’.
Now, the language changed again. China’s President said the ‘strategy for governing Xinjiang in the new era is completely correct.’
Unacceptable (and unwise) of some to deny it. Social media commentators, some who are frequently quoted by large media organisations, keep casting doubt on the tragic story. Margaret_Kimberley tweeted — after an ITV news report emerged — “These are lies. There is no evidence of Uighur concentration camps. More hybrid war against China” (it received 2,000 likes).
While there is no room left to doubt that these camps do exist, there remains vast uncertainty whether investigative journalists and human rights advocates located all facilities spread out across the province.
Researchers/journalists who made it their beat to find them, like Nathan Ruser at Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), says “we don’t believe that we have found them all”, after posting 380 facilities online.
Germany’s chancellor last week said China’s President Xi offered delegates to send envoys to visit Xinjiang province [and camps] to see for themselves. Chances increase to see more of the so-called ‘show camps’ for a short period of time or as long as the visits take (the BBC encountered it when it visited last time). Xi also ensured that there will be an ‘ongoing human-rights dialogue’. But Ursula von der Leyen tweeted “a lot remains to be done .. in other chapters of our relations”.
Satelite investigations exposing more and more evidence. OSINT journalists rely on them. It’s one reason why some open-source intelligence journalism colleagues keep hearing rumours that some of the camps may have moved underground (e.g. detention in under-surface facilities) to hide from the spying eyes and scrutiny of satellite data analysts (we don’t have proof for this thesis but I encourage you to reach out if you have evidence).
Mounting number of facilities
The number of confirmed facilities steadily grew. A 2018 BBC investigation looked at 101 campsites, which got pinpointed via various media reports and academic research, the author says.
Most recently, Buzzfeed investigated 268 compounds, many from previous lists I worked on too. In February, the list of ‘confirmed re-education camps’, so lower-security sites, mainly for indoctrination purposes, was limited to mere 50 facilities. ‘Confirmed’ in this context means they have been validated by eye-witness reports. Back then, there were another 170 that had yet to be confirmed.
It is of vital importance to keep this investigation rolling. This means to forensically document the changes in these camps and to spend more time on characterizing each detail. ASPI just dropped a new list and we are going to work with that one instead of the original 50 we received (the list can be downloaded here and geodata that can be simply dragged and dropped into QGIS and Google Earth Pro, it is available here).
Finally, news broke via Reuters (and research by Adrian Zenz) that evidence of forced labour is mounting also in Tibet (we will look into this later, too).
List of ‘expanded camps’ extended
Earlier in the year US-based Uighure group ETNAM shared a list with around 50 confirmed sites. We and others scrutinised this list on increased activity on the ground via aggregated satellite remote sensing data (link). The list was shared as klm. file. It helped enormously with going through them one by one. All the coordinates as well as the Chinese names of the places are accessible via Google Earth Pro. Now that ASPI dropped a new list with coordinates and updated 2020 records, some of the work we have started can be extended and match.
Because we are most interested in the camps that got expanded (so buildings or features were added), we will concentrate on the list of facilities that were developed. It includes a list of 61 sites.
Why is the onus on expanded camps? In addition to the characteristics ASPI added as classifiers, the extended camps might tell us where the local administration invests and where forced labour in the firm of Uighur prisoners went. We added a few more details for each facility that we thought was worth looking at (see sheet above).
We will go through various ways to characterise/investigate facilities and their surroundings
First significant markers includes the size of the camps. That includes quantitative details such as the number of buildings on the premise and adjacent to it. We will go through how to compare them. There are the walls of camps that are usually quite straight-lined. Their height, which we will define and validate, and the walls’ thickness may tell us something about recent developments (e.g. how secure the sites are, or were meant to be).
Guard towners are also a quantifiable element. ASPI and others counted them. Because they can be seen from outside they may act as a signal to local residents. That is also likely the reason why those facilities that have some or all of their towers removed recently tend to locate closer to residential buildings (see my stats below).
These changes are further revealing as they may tell us something about how the local government in various parts of the region varied in their response to international pressure (or not, by keeping them in place). ‘A lot [camps] had their security features removed in the second half of 2019’, Zenz explained. Some remained in place (important to add here, it remains doubtful that conditions improved inside of the camps, even if towers or security features were removed).
Zenz has an explanation for some of the changes: “On the same time they invited all these delegations and visitors, they released a lot of people. If you release a lot of people, you can afford to run with fewer security features. That can still be run like an internment camp, I’m sure”. We will look closer at what has changed ourselves.
Including those features above, there are a number of other aspects to take into account. We put them into the list below — each will be discussed separately:
What blue factory buildings in and around camps can tell us
What typical ‘prison features’ tell us
What cars in parking lots tell us about personnel working at the facilities during Covid-19
What walls can tell us
What guard towers can tell us
What sports facilities can tell us
What the shapes/types of buildings and location can tell us
What agricultural space (e.g. fields) around the camps can tell us
What potential crematory sites reveal
What Xinjiang’s export tell us
What population/urbanisation numbers tell us about internment and surveillance
What Baidu maps can tell us
Blue-roofed factory buildings
In satellite images, they are very pronounced with their blue coating. They may also heat up in the summer.
Most of them are factory buildings, has been reported. You can see them added in and around camp facilities, whether they are low or high security premises.
We can quantify them by counting them or via quantifying the space they take up. ASPIT decided to count them, though some buildings are smaller and other are massive. Google Earth has a polygon area measuring tool. A third option is to write a statistical model to calculate square meters factory floor space. If you are lazy you can consult a service that helps you with that via a visual detection algorithm — it calculates the area and records the number of blue roof buildings for a given satellite image.
One of the camps that expanded in the past two years is the tier 1 low-security re-education facility in Bugur in Bayingolu (41.808855284.3005783). It has a dense network of factory buildings nearby (around 23) and within its own walls there are eight. We used ASPI’s data to confirm this that noted: ‘considerable room for expansion’.
Let’s run the classification system over it and classify how much blue-roofed buildings that scatter around the camp can we count (importantly not all are factory spaces but many will be).
On the AI model: I downloaded the images with their highest resolution from Google Earth. To make the image a bit clearer for the model, I adjusted the brightness, upped the contrast and tinkered with the exposure. We can see the blue buildings, roughly in a radius of 1.5 to 2 miles (see image), account for about 1,464.9 m² (0.15ha). The number of little blue buildings expanded considerably since 2014 where they accounted for 1,022m2 (0.10 ha) — sadly we only have an image for 2014 and one for 2019.
Short intersection on the availability of images available in Google Earth:
Some of the important images to document the progression of these camps are missing. Some camps have a mere handful of publically available images (as in the case above). This is appalling and private satellite image companies need to be nudged to make more images public. Especially for the latest developments, this is urgently needed. Researchers noted down the latest dates for which images are available at the time of writing. Below we see them grouped by months, and then by facility category (tier 1 to 4).
What about bias to provide fewer updates on higher-security facilities? We don’t have much to go in here (there is no direct evidence that western satellite companies are being pressured into not publishing their images for camps on Google). Despite only a few camps that didn’t get updated at all over the past two years, we can see at the time of writing that Google and others hold more images for lower tier facilities (1 and 2) than for higher-security facilities (tier 3 and 4):
Continuing on the factories, another example is the facility in Maralbeshi County (39°49’7.84"N, 78°31’4.37"E). It was erected around 2017/2018. In Google Earth, you can see how the blue-roofed buildings surround the internment complex. Note, how the larger blue factory complexes to the left and right were there before the camp was erected.
In other words, the camp was planned and embedded into existing factory operation. It further corroborates a thesis that factory work by prisoners (in the form of forced labour), was part of a grander plan all along (though, to be certain, looking at satellite images alone does not suffice).
Adrain Zenz thinks blue roof factories is something that warrants looking into in more detail. A bunch of these blue roof factory building were erected in 2018, especially in the second half. Zenz explains it’s important timing because the policy documents on forced labour, as explained in his post from last December, shows that a lot of this kind of policy was released in the first half or mid of 2018.
A recent Buzzfeed investigation did mention blue roofs but surprisingly didn’t pay more attention to the matter. The factories grow in importance as the forced labour of imprisoned groups is being increasingly ‘commercialised’.
ASPI’s data recorded the distance (measured in km I assume) between the 380 facilitates and the local/nearest industrial parks — where some of the forced labour could have moved to put to work. The data categorizes facilities in four areas of security (ranging from Tier 1= re-education camp to Tier 4= prison facility). Tear two and tier three camps tend to be located more closely to the industrial centre of the towns, the data suggests (see chart below):
Zenz adds: “what’s significant is the sudden increase of blue roof, single story, flat type factory buildings. It’s consistent with policy, and also release, the Karakax list also talks about people being released into forced labour. A lot of that took place in 2019.”
The blue metal barracks found in Dabancheng shining light yellow in the sentinel IR images as they are being reflected. Low res Sentinel 2 data also suggests that these metal-like structures in the south of the Payzawat camp (Payzawat County, 39.538372, 76.713606) may also heat up in the summer. SWIR (short-wave infrared imagery) and NIR can be used for heat monitoring.
Prisons features: camps that imprisoned people become more ‘secure’ not less:
Among the around 60 camps that have expanded recently, half of it are tier 3 or tier 4 facilities —detention centers and prisons with high security features.
While it is true that some camps removed some of the towers and other security features (labelled ‘desecuritisation’ by ASPI’s records), others increased theirs. Those happened to be facilities that are detention centres and prison. In the context that Chinese authorities moved prisoners to these more secure facilities with less transparency and harsher treatments, this is cause for concern.
Let’s look at an example. From the list of expanded camps, there is the camps Yarkant Facility in the Kashgar prefecture (38.351531177.3055467). Since 2018, we saw a nearly 10,000 m2 large factory compound built (compare images from 5/8/2018 with 1/21/2018). Then, a year later, watch downers got added. There are now 8 towners. For such a small facility that’s quite conspicuous. The reason it’s a high-security prison facility.
Newly built detention/prison facilities created between 2018 and 2020 are of special interest. Camps like the tier 3 (detention) camp of Sanji Facility (#3, 44.102764,86.9960751), a with several watchtowers and an external wall is important as we can follow the progression of each step of the building process with high-resolution images.
The location was probably chosen because of a lower-security area nearby, north of the facility (3/7/2018). Building must have started in the summer. A couple of months after the last shot (8/11/2018) the blue-roofed factory gets built-in the north-west of the camp (a reason to assume a direct relationship there) and within two weeks in August the main building takes shape. At the same time, the walls get erected and we can make out the layout of the facility with its heavy concrete structures.
We can see, those are fundamentally different from building built in other lower-security camps. Then two months later it’s almost completed.
The speed of building is noteworthy (better trackable if we had access to a more continuous stream of images). From the few images we have above and those from Sentinel 2, below, we can assume that it took the developers between three to four months in pure building time to pull it up — an astonishing pace. China is renowned for its fast building pace. For many other areas, such as coal plants and artificial island-building its cookie-cutter approach — where blueprints are being re-used over and over again - it permits building more quickly.
Other who looked at the situation in Xinjiang reported that many Uighurs held in lower-tier facilities could have been moved/transferred to higher-tier prisons. In other words, despite some re-education camps have experienced ‘de-securitisation’, half of the camps that expanded are higher security facilities, so tier 3 (detention) or tier 4 (prison) camp facilities.
What parking lots tell us about the camps during Covid-19
I believe this topic has largely remained unexplored. Busy parking lots are one way to tell how many staff members are on site. Especially interesting it this for the recent month that were affected by coronavirus. We dont know much about the conditions inside of the facilities.
But with fewer staff members around (and fewer visitors allowed — previous reporting has revealed that detention centres have ‘small visitor centres’), the lives of inmates may have worsened. There was some reporting that Covid-19 cases spiralled in the province of Xinjiang and some expressed concern that cases could spread within camps. It’s possible, no doubt. With only a few cases in the whole region, though, the risk is lower.
Pandemic related fears may have affected the material and food supply. Sick imprisoned detainees may go without healthcare treatment for weeks or months. All these are assumptions for which we have little evidence. But the possibility alone raises concerns. If it is true that prisoners remained in the facilities during Covid, they could have suffered from the absence of staff and proper care.
From satellite images, it is hard to know — though there is some evidence from an eyewitness account shared by a historian, a Georgetown professor on his Medium page.
We might be able to tell how many temporary people were on sites (those that use their car to leave for the night). Counting vehicles at nearby car parks is one way.
At some facilities, we can clearly see the parking lot. An example is Ghulja City (43°58’37.52"N, 81° 8’18.98"E). It’s a fairly large car park. We can use Picterra system (there is a 10 day free trial version) to check the satellite images for May 23 — thought there isn’t much to count, the car park is empty.
Seven months earlier, on October 24th of 2019, we count around 120 cars (with some false positives, but that’s good enough for us). The algo gives you a count so you don’t have to count the red boxes one by one. Once trained, we can run it on subsequent images.
Let’s walk you through how to train and count the cars. I simplify here (a more complete tutorial can be found here and in their platform). First, we use one of the images to train the algorithm on the cars in the car park. Then we run it on the other pictures. It’s neat and simple (and quick if you don’t have time to run your own statistical model in python).
The number of vehicles dropped during the heights of Covid-19.
We could do this for other confirmed location such as the facility in Chochek City (Tǎchéng Shì, 46°43’3.79"N, 82°57’15.23"E) where car numbers dropped in April. We see this in many other facilities (for those that expanded).
Hotan City Facility #1 (37.1117019, 79.9711546) with 81 cars in the parking lot at the end of 2019 dropped to 10 during the height of the pandemic. Similar developments have been perceived at Hotan County Facility 1 (37.2420734 79.8595074), Ghulja Facility 1 (43.9756437 81.5009539) and a number of others.
Calculating rooms and capacity
How many people fit in a facility. If we take the example of the re-education camp in Chochek City ( 46°43’3.79"N, 82°57’15.23"E), we have high res Google images for the end of March and end of April of 2020. We can see the thin middle part is three stories high and in earlier images (Jul 18, 19) we can see the southern part is four stories high. In 2018, we got an image of the foundation when it was built. This provides enough detail to calculate that the facility has around 367 rooms — for the total t-shaped building with the arms.
https://miro.medium.com/max/221/1*fPdg5J77tRB5Pvsqhp5R1g.png https://miro.medium.com/max/221/1*Ynvczj4fJblMg1wM-6dn-A.png https://miro.medium.com/max/221/1*Efn3UW8tkdzU2q6lIeMriw.png –—
https://miro.medium.com/max/401/1*SmSx-QVYcgNaAVTCqwm_Jg.png https://miro.medium.com/max/400/1*48Ub5y5Ooa1rJDN8hTmbBw.png –—
In the example above, we shouldn’t be too sure that alls detainees were kept in the facility during Covid. Some reports claim that some of the other lower security re-education centres kept people ‘only during the day for indoctrination classes’ (it’s certainly different for the high-security prison facility that is also on the premise of the Payzawat facility, see in the south, with their towers).
Comparing camp sizes
The total size of the camps matters, especially when they get extended. Most of the camps have clear wall frames build around them. It’s one of the most important and simple characteristics. The wall frames makes it relatively easy to draw shapes in your geolocation system of choice (the sheer size of the walls, might be less ideal to gauge the number of prisoners).
Some have vast empty space in between might suggest that other faculty sections or factory buildings are due to be added. Some are cramped with building.
Tracing and calculating the area of wall frames in Google Earth for some of the largest camps, we get what we already knew:
To emulate the work ASPI’s data was posted here. A number of track and trace tutorials for Google Earth (one here on measuring property space) are available on YouTube.
Staking out camp size:
The Qariqash County/قاراقاش ناھىيىسى /墨玉县(Mòyù Xiàn, 37° 6’44.88"N, 79°38’32.71"E) sits in the South of the large stretch of desert.
We use the polygon tool in Google Earth to stake out the clearly marked walls. You usually end up with a rectangle. Under measurements (right-click on the item) you can see the perimeter is around 1.65 km and the area is roughly 16.7 hectares (0.17 square km).
Now we can compare it with another one on the list, the camp in Aqsu City (41°11’27.12"N, 80°16’25.08"E). It’s markedly smaller, with a perimeter of 1.1km and only an area of 5.65 hectares. There are other ways to do this in QGIS, a geoinformation system more efficiently.
What can walls and towers tell us?
How tall are walls at some of the camps? The answer varies across the vast variety of facilities. Height may tell us something about who built the camp and the level of security. It’s unsurprising to find different heights at different camps built by different planners.
https://miro.medium.com/max/358/1*LN9hQAvya-KKpbAFCctGVg.png https://miro.medium.com/max/442/1*DtXxS0VG124QXxOzb5DD2g.png Where we don’t have shades available, we can check the two images above and reference them with the people in the image and define the height this way. Another standard way to calculate height is using the shades by the walls and towers and calculate the height via Google Earth and SunCalc.
The shade of the southern wall in the satellite image from 03/19/2020 for the Dabancheng camp is around 7.62 meters long. The towers on the southern wall for those dates result in a height of around ~8meters.
But the images in the Reuters shots look different. That’s why they were taken a year or two earlier. Satellite images from 4/22/2018 show clearly the octagonal shapes of the tower shades. If we calculate again, the shade of the tower is around 9 meters long, translating into around 14 meters in height.
We do this for the wall as well. What we find is that, although the towers disappeared (though, some are still there, just not protruding so visibly), the only thing that really changed is the height of the walls — now around 13.5m tall, compared with 9.5m in 2018. The same towners, removed from one Dabancheng camp, then re-emerged half a kilometre south-east at the other newly built one (2019).
Why are we even bothering measuring height? On one hand we want to answer how security changed across the camps. Are walls getting higher? Do they change in their layout. It helps to classify the type of camps. The higher the walls, the more secure they probably were meant to be. Higher wall might mean higher chance that prisoners are held at facilities over night. It also may help to disprove claims by XJ denialists.
We can verify the Suncalc analysis with images. Cherchen County, for which we reviewed images for 12/14/19 shows roughly the same height. Explainer how to measure the height of an object from satellite image available here and here.
https://miro.medium.com/max/390/1*w966ytQRxTQndRJNLKj3mg.png https://miro.medium.com/max/411/1*KnK07bJ9utenI9N5EZMHSg.png The number of press images of the camps is limited. Most are by Reuters or AFP/Badung Police. It is this one here (37°14’29.78"N, 79°51’35.00"E). More local street footage, though not of camps, might be obtainable via Mapillary.
Buildings shapes/outlines and location of camps
Let’s start with the location of the facilities first. ASPI recorded the type of security for its 380 odd facilities, and for many the distance to populated areas such as residential buildings. When local administration planned on where to place the facilities they might have taken into account how the neighbouring public should (or shouldn’t) perceived them. More secluded camps are more hidden from public scrutiny. Those near people’s homes or schools may be placed there to have the opposite effect.
What’s immediately apparent when running a few inferential statistics on the records is that the more secure detention centres tend to be kept further away from buzzing residential areas — meaning, further away than for instance Tier 1 re-education camps, which are often nestled between residential parts of cities, or occupying old schools.
Agriculture/fields around the camps — investigating forced labour by detainees
Identifying agricultural fields near or around facilities may reveal some potential aspects of how forced labour in the camps were used in close vicinity.
Especially for secluded faculties, with not much else urban life going on (so reducing the possibility that other local farmers were involved in working the them), the chance increases that Uighurs detained were used.
One example is the facility near Yingye’ercun, in Gulja, with a 0.16km2 large campground (43°58’37.52"N, 81° 8’18.98"E). The farming area that was developed since 2018 (shortly after the multistorey buildings was built in the core of the facility) spans 1.7km2 and is clearly marked (which includes the facility itself, see in red below).
https://miro.medium.com/max/396/1*tm2mCrmEbYIiU1RptO8pYg.png https://miro.medium.com/max/405/1*GJsUmszsbgtTZNga3B8HBA.png In other words, once the camp was built the fields surrounding it got worked and developed— unlikely to be only a convenient coincident. The nearby factory complex was also extended.
Often it warrant also checking with Sentinel 2 images on EO browser. In this case, it’s useful because it allows us to visualise agricultural development via its invisible light remote sensing capabilities. Additional bands (which Google images lack) give access to the invisible spectrum and shows the agricultural expansion (here shown in red via the false colour composite, commonly used to assess plant density and health, “since plants reflect near-infrared and green light, while they absorb red”. Exposed ground are grey or tan, vegetation is red).
Image for post
https://miro.medium.com/max/387/1*W8HuUrDLZuf87WY0PdvXZg.png https://miro.medium.com/max/414/1*rclOaepqRPkN2LiGTu_8iw.png Another camp in this regard is the Maralbeshi Facility (#6) in Kashgar (39.7406222 78.0115086) with lots of fields surrounding it.
https://miro.medium.com/max/512/1*zXjMho5Dt2kwxOg8PKfjug.png https://miro.medium.com/max/798/1*bFvBvngkYKBKKzOk1mctag.png https://miro.medium.com/max/309/1*KJ4Nv58gHNXootzpv_ovyQ.png https://miro.medium.com/max/309/1*-oGp4_VHi7sk4nff4hX_Tg.png https://miro.medium.com/max/512/1*-lPdA0MpMWykQkTsur0uPg.png Why is the forced labour aspect in Xinjiang’s agriculture so important in this debate? For one, it’s part of the human rights abuse that more and more governments and industry leaders recognise (such as Swedish company H&M, who profited from cotton supplies and other kinds within their supply chain). Some decided to cut ties with suppliers in the region. It may the answer for the short term. In the long run, western businesses much apply pressure to get suppliers on their own to dissuade local forced labour practices (see example on ads that emerged to sell Uighur forced labour online).
According to the ILO Forced Labour Convention from 1930, forced or compulsory labour is defined as ‘all work or service which is exacted from any person under the threat of a penalty and for which the person has not offered himself or herself voluntarily’.
Sports grounds: (basketball and other sports courts)
Some found value in observing their development. BBC’s John Sudworth found that just before a press tour organised for his press teams two years ago the appearance of recreational areas altered. In some of the places they were taken to, satellite images and the internal security fencing — and what looked like watchtowers- where taken down shortly before the tours for journalists began. Specifically on sports grounds, they noticed that empty exercise yards have been transformed into sports facilities.
The reporters asked: if the journalists have been presented with mere ‘show camps’, what may this say about the places they were not taken to. Sport facilities are quite easy to spot from satellite. The BBC travelled to Kaxgar in the very east of the region, about 100km south of Kazakhstan’s border. Their footages shows how the camp put up courts shortly before the press trip. But they didn’t last long. We found evidence that these very courts disappeared again in early 2020 (see below).
In one of the camps in Qariqash (37°15’32.54"N, 79°44’52.08"E) the sports facilities were made unavailable as recently as July. Now big brown sheets, what looks like blankets with knobs on them, cover them. Those have never appeared on satellite images before and extend to the soccer field in the north and the big parking lot next to the sports courts.
https://miro.medium.com/max/412/1*M_b84vrOOk5kK9I6FcJcaw.png https://miro.medium.com/max/389/1*jeaZ5U02DvzVvB3UDJzD6A.png I have mixed feelings about recreational activities. We must strongly doubt that they benefit people held for indoctrination. So are they only a smoke and mirror game to show the friendliness of re-educational camps? Or are they actually benefiting the imprisoned? It is hard to say. In recent time, they are more likely to be added than removed. In around 37 facilities on the ASPI list basketball courts, running tracks or other sports fields were noted to have been added or extended.
When we compare the average distance of residential building for these places (1.2km) with the average distance of all the places where we have a record on the distance to buildings (1.8km), we find the recreational activities might be used as an element to signal the locals that the facilities have those recreational features.
Dabancheng has one court in the western block and a number of other ones in the centre part. In the eastern wing, there is nothing. We haven’t got any further high res satellite images on Dabancheng (other than those until March 2020, that leaves only checking Sentinel 2 images or commercial images).
I am going to stop here. The analysis of recreational areas yielded rather little, for me and the folks at ASPI. “I don’t think the sports grounds mean much in the detention regime”, Nathan Ruser says. If you have more info do reach out or leave a comment.
Crematories
The New York Times followed the lead of findings (that emerged last year, also mentioned in the state.gov report) and check the extent of description of religious sites and burial grounds. In September, the team reported that ‘thousands of religious sites’, such as mosques, shrines and other sites were bulldozed or replaced.
As many burial grounds disappeared and people within camps families have never heard from again, the question of how Uighurs’ life proceeded became more pressing. Crematories may be one aspect. Some anecdotal evidence by a source spoke of a nascent growth of crematory sites in the areas near camps. This appears important in the context of how prisoners are treated in facilities and what happens if they die and at what rates.
High prevalence of tuberculosis in facilities worries insiders. TB is spread via droplets through the air by someone who is infected. It’s especially deadly when the immune system of those who caught it, can’t cope with it. With the conditions reported by some of the eyewitnesses, it is feasible that the hard conditions prisoners are being subjected to, could enhance the deadliness of TB.
The think tank which produced a previous list of facilities searched and found a handful of crematories (I don’t think they concluded the research and it continues, perhaps with your help of OSINT research).
The reason why crematories are of interest is that Uighur are Muslim, Muslims don’t burn the bodies of their dead. They bury them (creation is strictly forbidden). Seeing more crematories pop up might be a first clue on whether dead bodies from detention facilities are being burned. We have to stress here, we have to be extremely careful with drawing quick conclusions, the base of evidence is thin. One would need to check local statistics and cross-examine them with other data source.
We will concentrate only on the sites itself. The ‘unconfirmed sample of crematory’ consists of ten sites. These are listed below. Just a word of warning. Feel free to investigate them further — either via additional satellite footage or on-site visits. Nonetheless, these get us started. The first three are confirmed by eyewitness accounts or local records (as far as I was told, this is sadly only secondary research).
Cr_Gholja_01 (Existed, 44° 0’17.86"N, 81°13’40.43"E); Cr_Artush_01(Existed, 39°44’35.47"N, 76°12’7.49"E); Urumchi 2 Funeral Parlor (Existed, 43°54’55.20"N; 87°36’9.01"E)
Cri_Hotan01_(Suspected)
Cr_Artush_02 (Suspected)
Cr_Hotan_02(Suspected)
Cr_Urumqi_02 (Suspected)
Cr_Urumqi_01 (Suspected)
Cr_Urumqi_01(Suspected)
CrArtush_02 (Suspected)
https://miro.medium.com/max/512/1*0LjzPAS0T-ZiXKJKVlrqNQ.png https://miro.medium.com/max/512/1*aVpzKvOmo8geLdrepUlJLQ.png Now let’s take a look at the characteristics of the confirmed crematories. They have some distinctive shapes, including a rectangular architecture, walls or a treeline that fence the premises (framed in black). Where marked ‘burial grounds’, I was unable to confirm this but checked with a few other sites mentioned in the coverage that was exposed in 2019 and it looked similar (in short, more time needs to be spent on this).
What helped the researchers identify the confirmed ones? According to the source, the Chinese called them ‘burial management facilities’. It’s apparently a euphuism for ‘crematories’. The Chinese government bulldozed some burial grounds with the justification that they would take up too much space which was covered in the 2019 reporting.
The other aspect is whether relatives receive the body of loved ones that die in the camps. Salih Hudayar (now Prime Minister of the East Turkistan Government-in-Exile) says he had a relative who died in a facility (he don’t know whether in the camps or the prison) and his family was not able to have his body returned. He thinks that many other Uighurs have not had the body of a deceased family members returned to them. He assumes they are being cremated as no record exists of a burial site.
More crematories are only possible if you have employees who staff and run them. The Chinese government tried to find those employees online. “We assume they are being cremated because the government ran job ads and offering high salaries to work on these [crematory] sites”, he added.
The suspected crematory facilities were then modelled upon the layout of the existing/confirmed ones — e.g. compared with buildings in and around the area. “We found a couple, but we are not 100% sure”, the source admits. Here OSINT journalists could become useful (let me know if you have intel on this matter to follow up with).
On the description in 2019: evidence surfaced that 45 Uighur cemeteries have been destroyed since 2014, including 30 in just the past two years (research was carried out by AFP and satellite imagery by Earthrise Alliance, here reported by the SCMP).
What population/urbanisation numbers tell us about internment
Salih Hudayar explained that what worries him is that population statistics don’t square. An often-cited figure of 7 million Uighurs in the province is much lower than the official estimates of the Uighur people.
The number often used is 12 million Turkic-speaking Muslim Uighurs. The number could be higher. Especially in the villages — Uighurs are allowed to have only three kids — some families have more than that and don’t register their offspring, as a result, many kids lack birth certificates. Other figures on the number of Uighur population is much taller (larger than twice of the 12 million figure, but remains hard to confirm that. The closes figure the Chinese government will have internally after the government’s extensive and invasive security and surveillance campaigns, in part to gain information regarding individuals’ religious adherence and practices).
The rising number of orphanages and kindergartens is also of interest. A satellite and local administrative data analysis should track them. The premise here: the more aggressive the detention of families are in XJ (moving Uighurs from low to higher security facilities), demand for places that house children increases. More orphanages and child-caring facilities could be revealed.
What can exports tell us about forced labour?
The type of exports of a region can help to figures out what to look for when it comes to forced labour. Increasingly, the international textile and fashion industry wakes up to reputational damage if supply chains incorporate Xinjiang forced labour. EU leaders held a meeting with China’s president Xi last week where Xi ‘rejected’ foreign [political] meddling in his nation’s affairs. But businesses have more leverage. Xinjiang is busy trading with foreign powers. The Chinese province accounted for a large part of the world’s supply in cotton. Exports amounted to $19.3bn according to export documents (export data for the west of China can be found in China’s official data stats, Stats.gov.cn, customs.gov.cn, or mofcom — this might be useful. Comparing what the government reports and what’s happening on the ground might reveal discrepancies, as it did before).
Exports (to Europe, across the silk road to the west) is directly connected at A busy train station connecting to the neighbouring country of Kazakstan in the northeast (the export route is called Ala Pass. A short promotional video here). Given the rebound of the Chinese economy, the shipments/trainloads must have increased in May after the effects of the pandemic subsided. What’s unclear is to what extent and whether that matches what the government said.
Satellite images might reveal discrepancies when train containers at the Dzungarian Gate (the Dzungarian Alatau mountain range along the border between Kazakhstan and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region) are analysed. It’s the main connection between China and the west.
The main railway station in Xinjiang for the Alataw pass is the Alashankou railway station (situated here: 45°10′13″N 82°34′13″E). It’s the last resort for export containers before entering Kazakhstan.
https://miro.medium.com/max/402/1*4rnDAkLPTHT_FeywEtmQ5Q.png https://miro.medium.com/max/399/1*0zV7WkgTWZfPEgkPJjkbRg.png OSINT journalists may be able to gauge Xinjiang export traffic by counting the number of containers on rail tracks. It might be laborious effort, not sure if it yields anything.
More useful would it be to monitor the use of agriculture and factories in the nearby vicinity of camps, as shown before. Or perhaps they can be linked up.
Baidu maps: Checking what the Chinese tech companies are ‘hiding’:
The Chinese government may have little interest to showcase their human-rights violations which they deem as justified (Xi’s statement). Satellite images on Baidu Maps show maps that hide most of the facility. What to make of it? Google Earth lets you upload so-called ‘overlays’. If you stretch them to the right size you can compare the uploaded screenshot (we took from Baidu) with those present in Google Earth. For Tumshuq City/تۇمشۇق شەھىرى/图木舒克市(Túmùshūkè Shì) (39°54’40.02"N, 79° 1’26.09"E), see below.
Why is Baidu’s involvement increasing relevant? On one hand, it is important to see the connection between private sector companies and the government. Chinese satellites are able to update and provide high-resolution images to the maps on Baidu. But they don’t. We had a similar debate on Twitter, that some government used to press companies to blur our images. But because images are available on other platforms ‘unblurred’, the practice was largely discontinued (there are still examples but they are getting fewer). One reason is that if a blurred area appears, it signals others to be extra vigilant and look out for other images. Instead, what increasing happens is that companies with private satellite are ordered not to release them (read more about the debate here).
Baidu map’s decision to not show images on certain facilities have backfired. It can be reverse-engineered. Areas where images are unavailable became extra interesting. In this way Buzzfeed used Baidu Maps to their advantage. They located/confirmed some of the camps because of it. This way, they turned shortcoming into an opportunity. You may want to be quick in replicating this principle for other parts of the country where forced labour/detention camps are expected (e.g. Tibet). Such loopholes will usually be fixed swiftly.
Bit more on the tech. According to a 2019 report by Human Rights Watch, Baidu’s map function used in the IJOP app, a controversial system used by the police and the state that generates “a massive dataset of personal information, and of police behaviour and movements in Xinjiang (it is not known how the authorities plan to use such data): The IJOP app logs the police officer’s GPS locations and other identifying information when they submit information to the IJOP app. The IJOP app uses a map functionality by Baidu, a major Chinese technology company, for purposes including planning the shortest route for police vehicle and officers on foot, according to the app’s source code.
▻https://miro.medium.com/max/653/1*umOMbKghZDqPPiy0TpGZ7w.png
What can the camps in Tibet tell us about the camps in Xinjiang?
Reuters reported just last week that forced labour expanded to Tibet (south of XJ). Reuter’s own reporting corroborated the findings obtained by Adrian Zenz. It would take another post to go into how to investigate the state of transferred Tibetan labourers. The quick and dirty check on the situation shows the merit of using satellite images to investigate grows as foreign journalists are being barred from areas, such as entering the Tibet region (foreign citizens are only permitted on government-approved tours). OSINT lessons from investigating XJ should be applied to Tibet too.
How does Xinjiang link to Tibet? The former Tibet Communist Party Secretary Chen Quanguo was chosen for the same job in Xinjiang in 2016 and headed the development of Xinjiang’s camp system, Reuters reported.
Mass incarceration started before Quanguo came onto the scene: A fanghuiju work team was dispatched to a village in Guma wherein 38 individuals were allegedly detained in a government campaign, in early 2016 — it’s true however that Party Secretary Quanguo, appointed in August 2016, who waged a ‘Strike Hard Campaign’ against violent activities and terrorism increased repression.
In an article last year, The Print used satellite images to prove that at least three Tibetan “re-education camps” are currently under construction. The author of the survey was Vinayak Bha, an ex-colonel retired from the Indian military intelligence unit.
Col Vinayak Bhat (@rajfortyseven on Twitter) found three camps in 2018/2019 and share them. One of them is the one in Botuocun (see below). Bha writes about Chinese military deployment dynamics. The temple of Tibetan Buddhism is a ‘concentration camp’ that is surrounded by high walls and guard towers and has the same structural design as a prison. It is feasible that China’s mass detention to spread to Tibetans. Methods will likely base on the model executed in XJ.
▻https://miro.medium.com/max/221/1*ln7TsCnetV75EKNcv4LBJg.png
▻https://miro.medium.com/max/221/1*DtJKKnYJUH1K7p1_Pyyicw.png
▻https://miro.medium.com/max/221/1*4dU7K9DK9agNbitNmLBT4g.png
The reports of the three camps emerged in 2019. “Small-scale versions of similar military-style training initiatives have existed in the region for over a decade, but construction of new facilities increased sharply in 2016, and recent policy documents call for more investment in such sites”, one report stated. Looking at the three sites, some of them are quite old but the one below is less than three years old.
▻https://miro.medium.com/max/221/1*xFr73HSkbxVqDGNgicuVCQ.png
▻https://miro.medium.com/max/221/1*Ylxp6Hk1Nj8AAkvvxXI21Q.png
▻https://miro.medium.com/max/278/1*a4UgMAeLCBp9LvRfOuf6Tw.png
The allegation is that these facilities are now be used as detention centres for political indoctrination. “The detainees are allegedly used as forced labour in government factories and projects during the day time or as per shift timings”. It is something that rings true under the light of camps in Xinjiang but we lack evidence from the satellite images.
There is some evidence that additional factory buildings were added. For the facility above, buildings in the upper east wing, with red roofing was added recently. Their layout reminds us of the blue-roofed buildings in and scattered around Xinjiang facilities, which we also have present: “This architecture is bang on a XJ prison, [though] with a different style roof”, Ruser said.
▻https://miro.medium.com/max/512/1*GL1DwZmaqVdgUtaWsZHWdA.png
▻https://miro.medium.com/max/303/1*Jr03h6ADK4_iNNfYP5YLkA.png
▻https://miro.medium.com/max/328/1*RyzDtEa9SjE0WsBSwUaMfA.png
The prison layout from the older prison facility above — with its long and vertically arranged wings and the rippled features — is similar to prisons seen in Xinjian, such as the two portrayed below (one at Qariqash County at 37° 6’44.88"N, 79°38’32.71"E and the other facility in 39°25’54.60”N, 76° 3’20.59"E).
▻https://miro.medium.com/max/389/1*w01GGfJZZlcNCWm5MR4csQ.png
Closing remarks:
There is a mountain of stuff not included here. This is a training post and not an investigation with full-rested conclusion. This post should encourage other open-source investigative journalists to look into the facilities, follow their own reporting and help monitor developments/details that others may have missed.
At present there are only a handful of OSINT journalists looking into it. Even fewer have the time to continuously keep this rolling, e.g. analysing the camps as other stories press them to move on.
We need more eyes on this. The alleged human right abuse must receive all the international scrutiny it can get. People like Shawn Zhang and others with Nathan Ruser and APSI) started the journey. Other journalists must continue and expand on it.
Also, the more open we are about sources and the analysis (hopefully) the fewer people might try to cast doubt on the existence of the camps (good thread here)
OSINT techniques used must master the skill to help others to replicate the findings, step by step. That’s the reason this post resulted more in a hands-on tutorial than an explanatory post. I encourage anyone to start looking into the human rights abuse (though, I must stress, be careful to draw quick conclusions. Instead, share what you see on satellite images with the community of serious journalists and OSINT investigators).
One last thought on commercial satellite imagery companies. It is crucial to get their support on this. For more than 100 camps mentioned in the latest update of the ASPI list (nearly 80 of them high-security detention facilities — classified as tier 3 or 4), we have no updated record of satellite images. This leaves researchers and journalists only to low-resolution devices, by Sentinel 2 images, or beg for images from Maxar or Planet Labs. That’s not good enough. Transparency requires companies inc to make those high-resolution images available, to anyone. Intelligence services should also consider making their high-resolution images available to the public for scrutiny, though, that unlikely to happen.
▻https://medium.com/@techjournalism/open-source-satellite-data-to-investigate-xinjiang-concentration-camps-2713c
#camps_de_concentration #architecture_forensique #images_satellitaires #rééducation #ré-éducation #camps_de_rééducation #Chine #droits_humains #droits_fondamentaux #Tibet
ping @reka @isskein @visionscarto
Face à la « crise de l’#autorité », Macron préconise une « #rééducation » sur ce qu’est « l’autorité #légitime » - Libération
▻https://www.liberation.fr/politiques/2020/08/29/face-a-la-crise-de-l-autorite-macron-preconise-une-reeducation-sur-ce-qu-
Beyond the Camps: Beijing’s Long-Term Scheme of Coercive Labor, Poverty Alleviation and Social Control in #Xinjiang
After recruiting a hundred or more thousand police forces, installing massive surveillance systems, and interning vast numbers of predominantly Turkic minority population members, many have been wondering about Beijing’s next step in its so-called “war on Terror” in Xinjiang. Since the second half of 2018, limited but apparently growing numbers of detainees have been released into different forms of forced labor. In this report it is argued based on government documents that the state’s long-term stability maintenance strategy in Xinjiang is predicated upon a perverse and extremely intrusive combination of forced or at least involuntary training and labor, intergenerational separation and social control over family units. Much of this is being implemented under the heading and guise of “poverty alleviation”.
Below, the author identifies three distinct flow schemes by which the state seeks to place the vast majority of adult Uyghurs and other minority populations, both men and women, into different forms of coercive or at least involuntary, labor-intensive factory work. This is achieved through a combination of internment camp workshops, large industrial parks, and village-based satellite factories. While the parents are being herded into full-time work, their children are put into full-time (at least full day-time) education and training settings. This includes children below preschool age (infants and toddlers), so that ethnic minority women are being “liberated” and “freed” to engage in full-time wage labor. Notably, both factory and educational settings are essentially state-controlled environments that facilitate ongoing political indoctrination while barring religious practices. As a result, the dissolution of traditional, religious and family life is only a matter of time. The targeted use of village work teams and village-based satellite factories means that these “poverty alleviation” and social re-engineering projects amount to a grand scheme that penetrates every corner of ethnic minority society with unprecedented pervasiveness.
Consequently, it is argued that Beijing’s grand scheme of forced education, training and labor in Xinjiang simultaneously achieves at least five main goals in this core region of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI): maintain the minority population in state-controlled environments, inhibit intergenerational cultural transmission, achieve national poverty reduction goals, promote economic growth along the BRI, and bring glory to the Party by achieving all of these four aims in a way that is ideologically consistent with the core tenets of Communist thought – using labor to transform religious minority groups towards a predominantly materialist worldview, akin to the Reform Through Labor (劳改) program. Government documents outline that the transformation of rural populations from farming to wage labor should involve not just the acquisition of new skills, but also a thorough identity and worldview change in line with Party ideology. In this context, labor is hailed as a strategic means to eradicate “extremist” ideologies.
The domestic and global implications of this grand scheme, where internment camps form only one component of a society-wide coercive social re-engineering strategy, are dramatic. Government documents blatantly boast about the fact that the labor supply from the vast internment camp network has been attracting many Chinese companies to set up production in Xinjiang, supporting the economic growth goals of the BRI.
Through the mutual pairing assistance program, 19 cities and provinces from the nation’s most developed regions are pouring billions of Chinese Yuan (RMB) into the establishment of factories in minority regions. Some of them directly involve the use of internment camp labor, while others use Uyghur women who must then leave their children in educational or day care facilities in order to engage in full time factory labor. Another aspect of Beijing’s labor schemes in the region involve the essentially mandatory relocation of large numbers of minority workers from Xinjiang to participating companies in eastern China.
Soon, many or most products made in China that rely at least in part on low-skilled, labor-intensive manufacturing, may contain elements of involuntary ethnic minority labor from Xinjiang.
The findings presented below call for nothing less than a global investigation of supply chains involving Chinese products or product components, and for a greatly increased scrutiny of trade flows along China’s Belt and Road. They also warrant a strong response from not only the international community in regards to China’s intrusive coerced social re-engineering practices among its northwestern Turkic minorities, but from China’s own civil society that should not want to see such totalitarian labor and family systems extended to all of China.
►https://www.jpolrisk.com/beyond-the-camps-beijings-long-term-scheme-of-coercive-labor-poverty-allev
#contrôle_social #travail_forcé #Chine #camps #minorités #pauvreté #Ouïghours #rééducation #Nouvelle_route_de_la_soie #Reform_Through_Labor (#劳改) #camps_d'internement
ping @reka @simplicissimus
Quand la #Suisse internait les pauvres et les marginaux
Jusqu’en 1981, aux quatre coins du pays, les autorités ont fait interner des dizaines de milliers d’hommes et de femmes sans procédure judiciaire. Une commission d’experts a récemment effectué des recherches sur ces « internements administratifs ». Les résultats écornent l’image que la Suisse se fait d’elle-même.
La « justice administrative » fait partie « des choses les plus révoltantes qu’on puisse imaginer ». Ces mots ont été écrits en 1939 par l’écrivain bernois réformiste Carl Albert Loosli, cité 80 ans plus tard par la Commission indépendante d’experts (CIE). Tandis que les criminels ont droit à un procès, les personnes mises à l’écart par les autorités d’assistance et autres instances administratives en sont privées, se révoltait Loosli. Les institutions suisses abritent entre leurs murs des « esclaves de l’État, livrés corps et âme à l’arbitraire des autorités ». Et le plus étonnant, souligne-t-il, c’est que « personne ne s’en offusque ».
Carl Albert Loosli, fils illégitime d’une fille de paysan, avait lui-même été placé dans une maison de rééducation durant son adolescence. Les voix critiques comme la sienne ont longtemps rebondi sur le système. Ce n’est qu’en 1981 que les cantons ont abrogé leurs lois sur l’internement et que la Confédération a révisé le code civil. Entre-temps, le domaine social s’était professionnalisé et la société était devenue plus libérale après 1968. Mais l’avancée fut surtout due à la pression internationale : la pratique suisse consistant à priver de leur liberté des adultes jeunes et moins jeunes d’un simple trait de plume n’était pas compatible avec la Convention européenne des droits de l’homme que la Confédération avait ratifiée.
La « Maison d’une autre Suisse »
Les personnes concernées, qui avaient été incarcérées alors qu’elles étaient innocentes, n’ont pas été réhabilitées à cette époque. La honte les rendaient muettes, elles aussi. « Nous portions les stigmates du temps passé en « taule » alors que nous n’avions commis aucun crime », relate Ursula Biondi. Aujourd’hui âgée de 69 ans, elle a dans sa jeunesse été « internée administrativement » – selon le langage bureaucratique (voir p. 14) – au pénitencier de #Hindelbank à des fins de #rééducation. Au début du XXIe siècle, des personnes courageuses comme elle ont commencé à raconter leur histoire. Relayé par les médias, le sujet a fini par entrer dans l’agenda politique. Entre 2011 et 2016, le Conseil fédéral a présenté deux fois ses excuses, une loi sur la réhabilitation a été adoptée et le Parlement a décidé de verser une contribution de solidarité à toutes les victimes de mesures de coercition à des fins d’assistance. À côté des internés administratifs, d’autres personnes ont également exigé qu’on reconnaisse leur souffrance et qu’on les réhabilite : les anciens enfants placés et les personnes stérilisées de force (« Revue Suisse » 5/2018).
Le Conseil fédéral a mis sur pied la CIE pour étudier en particulier les internements administratifs. Plus de 30 chercheurs se sont mis au travail. Après quatre ans d’activité, la CIE a publié dix volumes ces derniers mois, avec notamment des portraits de victimes. Elle a présenté son rapport final cet automne et recommandé de nouvelles mesures de réhabilitation allant du versement de prestations financières supplémentaires aux victimes à la fondation d’une « Maison de l’autre Suisse » comme lieu d’information sur ces événements. La ministre suisse de la justice, Karin Keller-Sutter, a reçu ces recommandations. Il s’agit aussi de décider si l’on prolongera le délai expiré de dépôt des demandes pour la contribution de solidarité, qui s’élève à 25 000 francs par personne. Dans ce cas, d’autres victimes pourraient se manifester. Y compris des personnes vivant à l’étranger qui n’ont pas pu déposer une demande dans les délais.
#Répression dans un État de droit
Le rapport de la CIE comporte 400 pages d’histoire et tend un miroir à la Suisse. On ne peut le dire autrement : pour les personnes en marge de la société, pauvres ou ne répondant pas à l’idée qu’on se faisait de la conformité, la Suisse était, jusqu’à il y a peu, un lieu inhospitalier, voire répressif. Il existait un droit de seconde classe, et peu nombreux sont ceux qui s’en sont émus. Voici un bref résumé des principaux résultats de la CIE :
Au XXe siècle, au moins 60 000 personnes ont fait l’objet d’un internement administratif dans 650 institutions. Ce chiffre est plus important que prévu. L’internement en dehors du cadre pénal ne constituait pas simplement une bizarrerie du droit suisse, il faisait partie du système.
La justice administrative visait surtout les couches sociales inférieures : les pauvres et les marginaux sans emploi fixe ni liens sociaux ou familiaux. Mais des membres de minorités comme les #Yéniches ont aussi été arrêtés et, après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, de plus en plus de jeunes « rebelles ».
Ce sont des autorités de milice qui décidaient de l’internement : conseils communaux, commissions d’assistance communales, autorités tutélaires. Le soir, après leur travail, le commerçant, la femme au foyer et le comptable scellaient le sort de leurs concitoyens. Des conseillers d’État et des membres du gouvernement le faisaient aussi, sous prétexte de porter assistance, d’éduquer ou de protéger la société. Jugements moraux et clichés sexistes teintaient les avis : on reprochait aux hommes – qui constituaient 80 % des personnes internées – leur « fainéantise » ou leur alcoolisme, aux femmes leur « inconduite ».
Quelques-unes des nombreuses institutions suisses servaient plusieurs objectifs à la fois. Il arrivait ainsi que des internés administratifs soient incarcérés avec des criminels condamnés. Ils étaient aussi placés dans des établissements de travail forcé, des colonies de travail, des foyers d’éducation, des asiles pour buveurs et des hospices de pauvres. Dans les institutions mal pourvues et peu surveillées, les hommes devaient fournir un travail physique en plein air, et les femmes, des tâches ménagères. Le travail forcé n’était pas ou peu rémunéré.
L’expérience dramatique de l’internement poursuivait les victimes même après leur libération, souvent pour la vie. Certaines ont été brisées, d’autres ont choisi d’émigrer. Beaucoup vivent aujourd’hui encore dans la précarité. Les autorités ont échoué dans leur objectif de réinsérer dans la société des « personnes en danger ». Dans les faits, les internements ont aggravé les problèmes et l’#exclusion.
Déjà une #injustice à l’époque
Aujourd’hui, ces atteintes à la liberté individuelle paraissent clairement disproportionnées et ces méthodes d’assistance, brutales. Mais l’époque était différente, et les internements s’appuyaient sur des lois. Sont-ils devenus injustes a posteriori ? Non, répond la CIE, pour qui les lois d’internement enfreignaient les droits fondamentaux et les principes de l’État de droit. Les personnes internées l’étaient souvent pour une durée indéterminée, sans décision juridique valable, et n’étaient pas auditionnées. En maints endroits, elles n’avaient pas la possibilité de faire recours auprès d’un tribunal indépendant. En outre, les lois étaient floues, et les autorités pouvaient les interpréter à leur guise. Au début, les internements représentaient pour l’État un moyen de gérer les pauvres à peu de frais. Au cours du XXe siècle, ils sont devenus des instruments de contrôle social. Dans tout le pays, on savait que quitter « le droit chemin », c’était s’exposer à « être bouclé ». Et les autorités n’étaient pas les seules à s’activer. Il n’était pas rare que la mesure fût appliquée en s’appuyant sur les dires de la famille, du voisinage, du pasteur ou de l’enseignant, notent les auteurs du rapport, qui parlent de « pratiques de marginalisation bien ancrées dans la société suisse ».
Il s’agit probablement d’une des raisons pour lesquelles les lois d’internement se sont maintenues aussi longtemps. Le retard de la Suisse en matière de politique sociale a aussi joué un rôle : les piliers de la protection sociale y ont été plantés plus tard que dans d’autres pays européens. Quoiqu’il en soit, les faits sont à présent avérés, et l’image que la Suisse a d’elle-même, avec ses géraniums, sa prospérité, sa liberté et sa démocratie directe, doit désormais être complétée par une facette moins reluisante. D’après l’historien Thomas Huonker, membre de la CIE et pionnier dans l’étude des mesures de coercition, le travail de mémoire sera capital : « Tout comme on raconte sans cesse la belle histoire de Guillaume Tell, il faudra raconter aussi sans cesse le chapitre sombre des mesures de coercition à des fins d’assistance. »
Un combat pour la justice
Ursula Biondi a 17 ans lorsqu’elle arrive au pénitencier de Hindelbank. Elle n’a rien commis de répréhensible, mais l’office des tutelles zurichois l’a envoyée dans un « foyer d’éducation fermé » pour être tombée enceinte alors qu’elle était mineure. Avant, la joyeuse adolescente avait été placée provisoirement dans un foyer de jeunes filles dont elle s’était échappée plusieurs fois. À la maison, elle se dispute avec ses parents au sujet des sorties, de la mode, de la musique. Son père, un Italien en phase de naturalisation, ne veut pas faire mauvaise impression. Les parents donnent donc leur accord pour un nouveau placement de leur fille. Ils ignorent que le « foyer d’éducation » est une prison pour femmes qui accueille aussi des criminelles. Ursula ne peut pas y suivre de formation. Après son accouchement, les autorités lui enlèvent son bébé et la contraignent à le donner en adoption. Elle s’y oppose, et récupère son fils trois mois plus tard. Après une année à Hindelbank, où elle effectue du travail forcé à la blanchisserie, elle est libérée en 1968. Elle déménage à Genève, fonde une famille, fait une carrière d’informaticienne dans une organisation de l’ONU, s’engage dans le social. « J’ai eu de la chance, dit-elle, et j’ai travaillé dur. » Car le traumatisme subi est lourd. La crainte qu’on découvre qu’elle a fait de la prison la poursuit longtemps. L’injustice endurée la tourmente. En 2002, Ursula Biondi publie l’histoire de sa vie. La revue « Beobachter » s’en fait l’écho. Elle se bat ensuite pendant des années pour qu’on étudie les « internements administratifs » – une expression qui, d’après elle, banalise la gravité des choses et cache le terrible arbitraire des autorités – et pour que les victimes obtiennent réparation. Elle trouve le rapport de la CIE réussi. Mais une chose dérange toujours cette femme engagée à qui l’Université de Fribourg a remis en 2013 le titre de docteur honoris causa : à cause de la réhabilitation bien trop tardive des anciens « internés », la nouvelle génération n’a jamais pris conscience des libertés qu’il a fallu conquérir. « Nous avons été sanctionnés et enfermés pour des manières de vivre qui, aujourd’hui, sont largement acceptées. » Pour que les jeunes restent vigilants contre l’arbitraire de la justice, Ursula donne des conférences dans les écoles.
▻https://www.revue.ch/fr/editions/2019/06/detail/news/detail/News/quand-la-suisse-internait-les-pauvres-et-les-marginaux-1
#internement_administratif #Suisse #histoire #détention_administrative #justice_administrative #pauvres #marginaux
–----------
v. aussi cet article publié dans La Cité en 2017 :
Les heures sombres de l’internement administratif helvétique
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/575589
Des documents révèlent le fonctionnement des #camps_de_détention chinois au #Xinjiang
Des documents révélés dimanche par un consortium de journalistes montrent le contrôle absolu exercé par le régime chinois dans ses immenses camps de détention de la région à majorité musulmane du Xinjiang, où sont internées plus d’un million de personnes.
Ces documents, obtenus par le Consortium international des journalistes d’investigation (ICIJ) et publiés par 17 organes de presse à travers le monde, détaillent les règlements draconiens, de la fréquence des coupes de cheveux aux horaires de verrouillage des portes, régissant ces camps installés dans la région du nord-ouest de la Chine.
D’après des organisations de défense des droits humains, plus d’un million de #musulmans, principalement d’ethnie ouïghoure, sont détenus dans des camps de #rééducation politique au Xinjiang. Pékin récuse ce chiffre et évoque des « #centres_de_formation_professionnelle » destinés à lutter contre la radicalisation islamiste.
Ces informations sont publiées une semaine après l’annonce du quotidien américain New York Times qu’il avait réussi à se procurer plus de 400 pages de documents internes au pouvoir chinois, dont des discours secrets du président Xi Jinping appelant dès 2014 à lutter « sans aucune pitié » contre le terrorisme et le séparatisme au Xinjiang.
Les dernières révélations concernent une série de directives de gestion des camps de détention, approuvées en 2017 par le chef des forces de sécurité aux Xinjiang, ainsi que des rapports des services de renseignement montrant comment la police utilise l’intelligence artificielle et la collecte de données pour cibler les personnes à interner.
Les directives qualifient les détenus d’"étudiants" devant « obtenir leur diplôme ».
Elles décrivent avec une grande précision comment les gardiens doivent gérer la vie quotidienne des détenus, de l’interdiction d’entrer en contact avec le monde extérieur à la marche à suivre en cas de maladie, selon une traduction en anglais des documents publiée par l’ICIJ. Les directives instaurent notamment un système de points pour évaluer « la transformation idéologique » des détenus, leur « respect de la discipline » et leur ardeur à « l’étude ».
« Les portes des dortoirs, des couloirs et des étages doivent être fermées à double tour immédiatement après avoir été ouvertes et refermées », détaillent les auteurs. « Une vidéosurveillance complète doit être établie dans les dortoirs et les salles de classe, sans angles morts, de façon à ce que les gardiens puissent exercer leur surveillance en temps réel, enregistrer les choses dans le détail et rapporter immédiatement tout événement suspect ».
Les directives prévoient que les « étudiants » doivent rester en détention pendant au moins un an, même si cette règle n’est pas toujours appliquée, selon les témoignages d’anciens prisonniers recueillis par l’ICIJ.
A Londres, l’ambassade de Chine a nié l’authenticité des documents publiés, les qualifiant de « pure falsification » et de « fausses informations ». « Il n’existe aucun document ou ordres pour de soi-disant +camps de détention+. Des centres de formation et d’entraînement professionnels ont été établis à des fins de prévention du terrorisme », a-t-elle affirmé dans un communiqué au quotidien The Guardian, qui fait partie des médias ayant publié les documents.
▻https://www.courrierinternational.com/depeche/des-documents-revelent-le-fonctionnement-des-camps-de-detenti
#détention #Chine #islamophobie #Ouïghours
Des femmes ouïghoures « stérilisées » dans des camps de « rééducation » en Chine | Le Club de Mediapart
▻https://blogs.mediapart.fr/silk-road/blog/150919/des-femmes-ouighoures-sterilisees-dans-des-camps-de-reeducation-en-c
La #Chine #stérilise de force les #femmes détenues dans son vaste réseau de camps de « #rééducation » abritant des #prisonniers_politiques et religieux, ont affirmé des survivantes.
Une #femme, détenue pendant plus d’un an, a déclaré à la télévision française qu’une substance lui avait été injectée à plusieurs reprises par des médecins dans une #prison de l’extrême ouest du #Xinjiang.
« Nous devions passer la main par une petite ouverture dans la porte », a déclaré à France 24 Gulbahar Jalilova, une survivante âgée de 54 ans.
"Nous avons vite compris qu’après les injections, les femmes n’avaient plus leurs règles."
Elle et 50 autres femmes ont été entassées dans une cellule minuscule, « comme si nous étions juste un morceau de viande », a-t-elle déclaré.
Lors d’une conférence récente à Amnesty International, une autre femme, Mehrigul Tursun, 30 ans, a raconté une histoire similaire, à savoir qu’elle avait été stérilisée à son insu.
]]>China says pace of Xinjiang ’education’ will slow, but defends camps
China will not back down on what it sees as a highly successful de-radicalisation program in Xinjiang that has attracted global concern, but fewer people will be sent through, officials said last week in allowing rare media access there.
Beijing has faced an outcry from activists, scholars, foreign governments and U.N. rights experts over what they call mass detentions and strict surveillance of the mostly Muslim Uighur minority and other Muslim groups who call Xinjiang home.
In August, a U.N. human rights panel said it had received credible reports that a million or more Uighurs and other minorities in the far western region are being held in what resembles a “massive internment camp.”
Last week, the government organized a visit to three such facilities, which it calls vocational education training centers, for a small group of foreign reporters, including Reuters.
In recent days, a similar visit was arranged for diplomats from 12 non-Western countries, including Russia, Indonesia, India, Thailand, Kazakhstan, according to Xinjiang officials and foreign diplomats.
▻https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-xinjiang-insight/china-says-pace-of-xinjiang-education-will-slow-but-defends-camps-idUSKCN1P
#Chine #Ouïghour #rééducation #camps #camps_d'internement
Commentaire de Kenneth Roth sur twitter:
The million Uighur Muslims whom China is detaining until they renounce Islam and their ethnicity, they must be happy, right? During a staged visit, they were forced to sing, in English, “If You’re Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands.” End of story.
ping @reka
EU leaders consider centers outside bloc to process refugees
Draft conclusions for the European Council summit next week propose the creation of ‘disembarkation platforms.’
European Council President Donald Tusk has proposed that EU leaders create “regional disembarkation platforms” outside the European Union, where officials could quickly differentiate between refugees in need of protection and economic migrants who would potentially face return to their countries of origin.
The proposal is an effort to break the acute political crisis over migration and asylum that has bedeviled EU leaders since 2015 — and even threatened in recent days to topple the German government — even as the numbers of arrivals have plummeted since the peak of the crisis.
The disembarkation platform concept — which officials said would have to be implemented in cooperation with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) — could create a formal mechanism by which the EU can bridge the divide between hard-line leaders calling for tough border controls and those insisting that EU nations obey international law and welcome refugees in need of protection.
But the idea could also open EU leaders to criticism that they are outsourcing their political problem by creating centers for people seeking entry in countries on the periphery of the bloc. Among the potential partner nations are Tunisia and Albania, but officials say it is far too soon to speculate.
The idea to create such facilities was suggested in 2016 by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the strongest critic of the EU’s policies on migration — especially on the relocation of refugees across Europe.
More recently, French President Emmanuel Macron has endorsed the idea, and on Sunday Italian Foreign Minister Enzo Moavero said Italy wants to officially put the idea on the table at the European Council summit.
According to the draft guidelines, the new sites would “establish a more predictable framework for dealing with those who nevertheless set out to sea and are rescued in Search And Rescue Operations.”
The conclusions state: “Such platforms should provide for rapid processing to distinguish between economic migrants and those in need of international protection, and reduce the incentive to embark on perilous journeys.”
▻https://www.politico.eu/article/regional-disembarkation-platforms-eu-leaders-consider-camps-outside-bloc-to
Nouveau #mots, nouvelle absurdité #disembarkation_platform...!!!
#tri #migrations #migrants_économiques #réfugiés #catégorisation #hotspots #externalisation #novlangue
#regional_disembarkation_platforms #Tunisie #Albanie #plateformes_régionales_de_désembarquement
The Psyche of Fascists
The experience of the Second World War prompted the in-depth reform of psychiatry, as social factors were included in the explanation of psychic illnesses. It also served as a justification for the psychiatric and political re-education of political opponents—as Ana Antic shows, based on patient files from a Yugoslav institute.
Une photographe infiltrée dans l’enfer des #cliniques équatoriennes pour « guérir » l’#homosexualité
En #Équateur, il existerait près de 200 « cliniques » dédiées à la « guérison » de l’homosexualité. Des centres qui existent dans un flou juridique, et où le traitement n’est rien d’autre que de la torture, entre privations de nourriture et « #viols curatifs ». Une réalité sordide que la photographe #Paola_Paredes a dénoncé en images après s’être infiltrée dans une de ces cliniques.
Des enfances à rebours, Entre la France et l’Indochine
Un documentaire de Séverine Liatard et Anne FranchiniEurope, terre d’asile ? 2/4 - Histoire - France Culture
▻http://www.franceculture.fr/emission-la-fabrique-de-l-histoire-europe-terre-d-asile-24-2015-09-22
Je ne connaissais pas ce volet de l’histoire
Présentés comme des « #rapatriements » d’enfants de sang français, le #déplacement des #métis est lié à la #guerre d’Indochine et la #décolonisation.
Issus de liaisons pour la plupart illégitimes entre des femmes indochinoises et des #militaires français, les eurasiens sont alors considérés comme des bâtards à la fois rejetés par la société indigène et par l’ordre colonial qu’ils menacent. Leur #filiation paternelle reste quant à elle la plupart du temps incertaine et falsifiée.
En 1928, un décret fixe en ces termes le statut des métis : « tout individu né sur le territoire de l’#Indochine de parents dont l’un, demeuré légalement inconnu, est présumé de race française, pourra obtenir la reconnaissance de la qualité de français ».
Pour accéder à la citoyenneté française, ces #enfants devaient donc avoir du sang français dans les veines mais aussi être socialisés dans un milieu de culture française. La Fédération des oeuvres de l’enfance française en Indochine (FOEFI) reconnue d’utilité publique par l’Etat va ainsi recueillir des milliers d’enfants métis confiés par leur mère à l’institution pour les éduquer.
]]>Le tribunal de Mulhouse lance des stages de « déradicalisation »
▻http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2015/09/09/01016-20150909ARTFIG00223-le-tribunal-de-mulhouse-lance-des-stages-de-derad
Le programme, à l’initiative du procureur général de Colmar est organisé en quatre étapes étalées sur une durée de deux ou trois mois. Dans un premier temps « diagnostiqué » - il s’agit de déterminer l’environnement social, familial et psychologique de l’individu-, le stagiaire sera ensuite incité à reconstituer un lien social, souvent mis à mal par l’emprise de la secte djihadiste. Le discours radical est ensuite déconstruit grâce notamment aux témoignages de victimes du terrorisme ou de jeunes désembrigadés. Enfin, la dernière phase consiste en la réinsertion à la fois sociale et professionnelle de l’individu .
]]>#Ouïghours, prisonniers de l’absurde
Vingt-deux hommes se trouvent en #Afghanistan en octobre 2001 lorsque les États-Unis envahissent le pays pour traquer Oussama ben Laden. Ils sont turcophones musulmans et appartiennent à la minorité chinoise ouïghoure, réprimée par le pouvoir central de Beijing. Du nord de la #Chine à la base américaine de #Guantanamo, le nouveau #film de #Patricio_Henrìquez suit l’incroyable odyssée de trois de ces #rescapés de l’absurde associés malgré eux au #terrorisme mondial.
Bande annonce :
▻https://www.onf.ca/film/ouighours_prisonniers_de_labsurde/trailer/ouighours_prisonniers_de_labsurde_bande-annonce
#Solidarité en #Slovénie : des enfants #blessés de #Gaza soignés à #Ljubljana
Chaque année depuis 2009, des #enfants victimes du conflit israélo-palestinien sont pris en charge par la Slovénie. Un centre médical de Ljubljana les accueille pour leur fournir une #prothèse et des heures de #rééducation. À l’automne 2014, trois jeunes Gazaouis amputés d’un membre ont fait le déplacement. Rencontre.
▻http://balkans.courriers.info/article26214.html
#soin #Palestine
cc @reka
La #Chine abolit les #camps de #rééducation par le #travail et la #politique de l’ #enfant #unique
La plus haute instance législative chinoise a adopté, samedi 28 décembre, des motions formalisant l’abolition des camps de rééducation par le travail et assouplissant la politique de contrôle des naissances, a annoncé un média d’Etat.
Les résolutions issues du dernier Plenum ont enfin trouvé une application légale
▻http://www.lemonde.fr/asie-pacifique/article/2013/12/28/la-chine-abolit-les-camps-de-reeducation-par-le-travail-et-la-politique-de-l
Revue de Presse Hebdomadaire sur la Chine du 23/12/2013
]]>La #Chine annonce la #fermeture des #camps de #rééducation par le travail
Cette mesure fait partie des « réformes concrètes » décidées dans le cadre du 3e plénum du Parti communiste qui s’est tenu du 9 au 12 novembre à Pékin.
Autre mesure phare consécutive au 3e #Plenum, en espérant l’efficience de sa mise en oeuvre et son non-remplacement par un système « bis ».
▻http://www.lepoint.fr/monde/la-chine-annonce-la-fermeture-des-camps-de-reeducation-par-le-travail-19-11-
Revue de Presse Hebdomadaire sur la Chine du 18/11/2013
]]>#Suisse : le #scandale des #enfants parias
Durant des décennies, jusque dans les années 1980, des milliers de jeunes Suisses ont été jetés en #prison sans procédure judiciaire, placés de force dans des #familles_d'accueil ou en maison de #rééducation, #stérilisés... Leur crime ? Une conduite jugée menaçante par une société éprise d’#ordre et de #conformisme. Ils sont les #victimes d’une politique sur laquelle la Confédération commence à peine à briser le #silence.
▻http://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/monde/europe/suisse-le-scandale-des-enfants-parias_1265422.html
]]>Le monde des sourds - C’est pas sorcier - France 3
►http://c-est-pas-sorcier.france3.fr/?page=emission&id_article=93
#dys #rééducation #uneautrevision