Just listened to the two recent episodes about #Xinjiang and the #Uyghurs on @nytimes The Daily and have some comments. First, thanks to @paulmozur and Ferkat Jawdat for the risks and sacrifice that went into telling this story 1/ nyti.ms/2qzkh6R nyti.ms/2YwpIjE
My comments on the story in The Daily: First, Paul told us that Ferkat's mother was tortured in the camps, but then went straight to other accounts of torture from other reporting. Given the relatively small number of first-hand accounts we have of torture 2/
in the camps, and the propaganda battle being waged by PRC officialdom, it would be helpful to know something specific of what was done to Ferkat's mother, as she is highly credible. We were just told of the overcrowded conditions and rough police in the 2nd internment center 3/
(which helpfully confirms other accounts). Second, the Daily script mentions "long time conflict btw Uyghurs and Han," and "attacks getting larger in scale." Both of these phrases give a false impression, when no time is spent on the actual history. 4/
This narrative of worsening tensions, smoldering powder keg, etc. has been a XJ journalistic trope since the late 1980s, and masks longish quiet periods punctuated by occasional incidents. Both journalists and PRC want to frame this in grand narrative as "jihad"5/
or "terrorism" or even "Uyghur independence movement" when none of those narratives are generalizable. Re "attacks getting larger in scale," well, if you count the 2009 riots (not terrorism but over 200 died) then everything since 2009 has been 6/
much SMALLER in scale! CCP regularly includes 200 deaths from that repressed demonstration-turned-race-riot in statistics of past XJ "deaths from terrorism," and too many journalists parrot that statistic. We should ask, if 2009 is a reason for the camps today, why did it 7/
take 8 years to respond? The leaked docs suggest, rather, that it was 2014 events (Kunming knifings 31 dead, Urumchi rail station 1 victim, Urumchi market 43 dead) that precipitated Xi's call for more extreme collective punishment of Muslim people in the Uyghur Region. 8/
There's been other violence as well over past few years: most involving clashes between groups of men armed with knives, axes, and police or authorities; mainly we know little other than a brief PRC report: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_… 9/
In these events, the dozens of "attackers" or "militants" themselves often comprise the majority of casualties. PRC plays up and allows foreign reporting on the few jihadi style terrorist incidents, but releases only scant info on steady low-level violent popular resistance 10/
Here's the point: if journalists only give details about the handful of terrorist attacks, but then lump together ALL the unrest of past years and its death tolls AS IF ALL were terrorist attacks, they tell a false story. Likewise, 11/
blanket use of terms "militants," "attackers," "movement" for both terrorist attack and rural mass incidents, and implying religious motivation for all unrest--all further the largely unsubstantiated PRC narrative of large-scale Islamic terrorism in XJ 12/
So don't lump together, with statistics or terminology, all the violence in XJ in past years, and don't imply steadily worsening situation without clear time-frames and equal attention to the increasing severity of state responses. I go long here, b/c 13/
@ChuBailiang and @austinramzy left similar impressions in their write-up of leaked docs. Finally, about those documents: The Daily reporting used documents from the @ICIJorg as well as docs leaked to NYT (e.g. about point system in camps, "one year" minimum stay) but 14/
@mikiebarb and @paulmozur never credited ICIJ on podcast, though NYT was a partner in working the ICIJ documents too. I don't know what's up with NYT rushing to pub its own docs 1st, but at least give credit where credit is due, on a story involving millions of lives. End.
