East Turkistan is ‘one of the most heavily policed regions in the world’: study

Calling East Turkistan “one of the most heavily policed regions in the world,” the Uyghur Human Rights Project published a report identifying the various police forces used to carry out what it said were “atrocity crimes” against the 11-million strong Muslim ethnic.

The report has been released on Wednesday by the Washington-based organization, “Policing East Turkistan: Mapping Police and Security Forces in the Uyghur Region,”.

Since police officers “among the prime actors in carrying out the genocide [of Uyghurs] arising from the Chinese Communist Party’s policies,” the group said it felt it needed to examine exactly how they are structured.

The report laid out several different agencies with different duties and command structures, but said they are all under the control of the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP.

One such agency, the People’s Armed Police, or PAP, is under the same CCP arm that controls the military, even though the PAP is not. The PAP has more “mobile detachments,” similar to an army regiment, than any other region in China.

It points out that there are twice as many PAP mobile attachments in East Turkistan than in Beijing, despite having only a fraction of the capital’s population.

The report said that there were more police in East Turkistan per population than elsewhere in the country.

As of 2017, there were 2.3 times more People’s Armed Police and other “security-related positions” than elsewhere in China: 478 per 100,000 population compared to 212 nationally, it said.

it was important to not only condemn the upper leadership in China.

“What's important is that in terms of accountability, in terms of understanding who is responsible for these kinds of abuses, it's critical that we … also focus on the ones who are actually perpetrating the abuses on the ground,” Peter Irwin, the associate director for research and advocacy at UHCP told RFA’s Uyghur Service.