The times. (Gainesville, Ga.) 1972-current, December 18, 2018, Image 3

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The times., December 18, 2018, Image 3

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Newspaper Page TextTODAYS TOP HEADLINES The Times, Gainesville, Georgia | gainesvilletimes.com Tuesday, December 18, 2018 3A US sportswear traced to internment camps ANONYMOUS I Associated Press In this file image from undated video footage run by China’s CCTV via AP Video, Muslim trainees work in a garment factory at the Hotan Vocational Education and Training Center in Hotan, Xinjiang, northwest China. BY DAKE KANG, MARTHA MENDOZA AND YANAN WANG Associated Press HOTAN, China — Chinese men and women locked in a mass detention camp where authorities are “re educating” ethnic minorities are sewing clothes that have been imported all year by a U.S. sportswear company. The camp, in Hotan, China, is one of a growing number of internment camps in the Xin jiang region, where by some estimates 1 million Muslims are detained, forced to give up their language and their religion and subject to politi cal indoctrination. Now, the Chinese government is also forcing some detainees to work in manufacturing and food industries. Some of them are within the internment camps; others are privately- owned, state-subsidized facto ries where detainees are sent once they are released. The Associated Press has tracked recent, ongoing ship ments from one such factory — Hetian Taida Apparel — inside an internment camp to Badger Sportswear, a leading supplier in Statesville, North Carolina. Badger’s clothes are sold on college campuses and to sports teams across the country, although there is no way to tell where any par ticular shirt made in Xinjiang ends up. The shipments show how difficult it is to stop products made with forced labor from getting into the global sup ply chain, even though such imports are illegal in the U.S. Badger CEO John Anton said Sunday that the company would halt shipments while it investigates. Hetian Taida’s chairman Wu Hongbo confirmed that the company has a factory inside a re-education com pound, and said they pro vide employment to those trainees who were deemed by the government to be “unproblematic.” “We’re making our con tribution to eradicating pov erty,” Wu told the AP over the phone. Chinese authorities say the camps offer free vocational training for Uighurs, Kazakhs and other minorities, mostly Muslims, as part of a plan to bring them into “a modern civilized” world and elimi nate poverty in the region. They say that people in the centers have signed agree ments to receive vocational training. The Xinjiang Propaganda Department did not respond to a faxed request for com ment. A Chinese Foreign Min istry spokeswoman accused the foreign media Monday of making “many untrue reports” about the training centers, but did not specify when asked for details. “Those reports are com pletely based on hearsay evidence or made out of thin air,” the spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, said at a daily briefing. However, a dozen people who either had been in a camp or had friends or fam ily in one told the AP that detainees they knew were given no choice but to work at the factories. Most of the Uighurs and Kazakhs, who were interviewed in exile, also said that even people with professional jobs were retrained to do menial work. Payment varied according to the factory. Some got paid nothing, while others earned up to several hundred dollars a month, they said — barely above minimum wage for the poorer parts of Xinjiang. A person with firsthand knowl edge of the situation in one county estimated that more than 10,000 detainees — or 10 to 20 percent of the intern ment population there — are working in factories, with some earning just a tenth of what they used to earn before. The person declined to be named out of fear of retribution. A former reporter for Xin jiang TV in exile said that during his month-long deten tion last year, young people in his camp were taken away in the mornings to work without compensation in carpentry and a cement factory. “The camp didn’t pay any money, not a single cent,” he said, asking to be identified only by his first name, Elyar, because he has relatives still in Xinjiang. “Even for necessities, such as things to shower with or sleep at night, they would call our families outside to get them to pay for it.” Rushan Abbas, a Uighur in Washington, D.C., said her sister is among those detained. The sister, Dr. Gulshan Abbas, was taken to what the government calls a vocational center, although she has no specific informa tion on whether her sister is being forced to work. “American companies importing from those places should know those products are made by people being treated like slaves,” she said. “What are they going to do, train a doctor to be a seamstress?” Mainur Medetbek’s hus band did odd repair jobs before vanishing into a camp in February during a visit to China from their home in Kazakhstan. She has been able to glean a sense of his conditions from monitored exchanges with relatives and from the husband of a woman in the same camp. He works in an apparel factory and is allowed to leave and spend the night with relatives every other Saturday. Though Medetbek is uncertain how much her husband makes, the woman in his camp earns 600 yuan (about $87) a month, less than half the local minimum wage and far less than what Medet bek’s husband used to earn. “They say it’s a factory, but it’s an excuse for detention. They don’t have freedom, there’s no time for him to talk with me,” she said. “They say they found a job for him. I think it’s a concentration camp.” New Jersey Republican Congressman Chris Smith, a member of the House For eign Relations Committee, called on the Trump Admin istration Monday to ban imports from Chinese com panies associated with deten tion camps. “Not only is the Chinese government detaining over a million Uyghurs and other Muslims, forcing them to revoke their faith and pro fess loyalty to the Communist Party, they are now profiting from their labor,” said Smith. “U.S. consumers should not be buying and U.S. businesses should not importing goods made in modern-day concen tration camps. “ Flynn’s ex-business associates charged with illegal lobbying JACQUELYN MARTIN I Associated Press Bijan Kian, whose full name is Bijan Rafiekian, leaves the FBI Washington Field Office in Washington, Monday, Dec. 17. Rafiekian, a one-time business partner of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, has been indicted on charges including failing to register as a foreign agent. BY MATTHEW BARAKAT AND CHAD DAY Associated Press ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Two business associates of Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, were charged Monday with ille gally lobbying for Turkey as part of a campaign to pressure the United States to expel a Turkish cleric. Bijan Kian and Ekim Alptekin are accused in an indictment of conspiring to “covertly and unlaw fully” influence U.S. public opinion and politicians, all while conceal ing that the Turkish government was directing their work. The cam paign came during the final months of the 2016 presidential campaign while Flynn was a top surrogate for Trump’s campaign. The case sheds further light on how Flynn and those around him worked to benefit a foreign country in the months before he became one of America’s top national secu rity officials. The goal of the work was to get the United States to expel Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen from the country. Gulen, who holds a U.S. green card and lives in Pennsylvania, is a rival of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has accused the cleric of directing a failed coup and who wanted the U.S. to extra dite him back to Turkey. Gulen has denied any involvement in the coup. Though Flynn and his company feature prominently in the latest indictment, he is not charged with any new crimes. A retired three- star U.S. Army general, Flynn is to be sentenced Tuesday in a separate case brought by special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigat ing Russian interference in the 2016 election. Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying about his Russian contacts. As part of his cooperation in that probe, he has provided prosecutors with voluminous records from his business, Flynn Intel Group, which carried out the lobbying work. Flynn and Kian were co-founders of the firm. On Monday, Kian, a former Trump transition official whose full name is Bijan Rafiekian, made a brief appearance in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. He has an arraignment scheduled for Tues day. His lawyer, Robert Trout, declined to comment. Alptekin, a dual Turkish-Dutch citizen living in Istanbul whose full name is Kamil Ekim Alpetekin, remains at large. He has previously denied any wrongdoing and said he directed the lobbying on his own. “Ekim maintains that the gov ernment of Turkey was not a partic ipant in any of the work that he did with the Flynn Intel Group. He has not changed his story, and he does not plan to,” said Molly Toomey, a spokeswoman for Alptekin. Both men are charged with conspiracy and acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign gov ernment. Alptekin is also charged with lying during an interview with the FBI. The indictment brought by fed eral prosecutors in Virginia accuses the two men of using Alptekin’s company as a cutout to disguise the Turkish government’s involve ment. Prosecutors say that Turkish officials approved the budget for the $600,000 lobbying contract and received regular progress reports. The indictment does not say Turkey’s government directly funded the effort, but it raises questions about an unusual pay ment arrangement revealed last year. According to the indictment, Alptekin paid Flynn’s firm through wire transfers from a Turkish bank account in his name. But prosecutors say he also received portions of the money as “kickbacks” arranged by Kian. Flynn’s company was ultimately paid $530,000. Alptekin has said the payments were refunds for unfulfilled work. The indictment also provides the backstory behind a Nov. 8, 2016, op-ed Flynn published in The Hill newspaper titled “Our Ally Turkey Is in Crisis and Needs Our Support,” which compares Gulen to Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. The indictment notes that Flynn’s col umn uses identical or very similar language to that prepared by Kian in a draft op-ed. “We all remember another quiet, bearded elder cleric who sat under an apple tree ... in the sub urbs of Paris in 1978,” Flynn wrote in the op-ed, mimicking language provided to him by Kian. “He claimed to be a man of God who wanted to be a dictator.” Several days before the col umn was published, Kian crowed to Alptekin in an email about the advantageous timing of the pend ing op-ed piece coinciding with Election Day. “The arrow has left the bow!” Russia social media influence efforts active, ongoing report says BY MARY CLARE JALONICK Associated Press WASHINGTON — Rus sia’s sweeping political dis information campaign on U.S. social media was more far-reaching than originally thought, with troll farms working to discourage black voters and “blur the lines between reality and fiction” to help elect Donald Trump in 2016, according to reports released Monday by the Sen ate intelligence committee. And the campaign didn’t end with Trump’s ascent to the White House. Troll farms are still working to stoke racial and political passions in America at a time of high political discord. The two studies are the most comprehensive picture yet of the Russian interfer ence campaigns on Ameri can social media. They add to the portrait investigators have been building since 2017 on Russia’s influence — though Trump has equivo cated on whether the inter ference actually happened. Facebook, Google and Twitter declined to com ment on the specifics of the reports. The reports were compiled by the cybersecurity firm New Knowledge and by the Computational Propaganda Save Your Selfie... Some Moneyl Auto Insurance Specialist • Easy Payments • Any Driver • Any Age NEW LOCATION! 2415 OLD CORNELIA HWY., GAINESVILLE Next to Rabbittown Cafe 770-450-4500 Research Project, a study by researchers at the University of Oxford and Graphika, a social media analysis firm. The Oxford report details how Russians broke down their messages to different groups, including discourag ing black voters from going to the polls and stoking anger on the right. “These campaigns pushed a message that the best way to advance the cause of the African-American commu nity was to boycott the elec tion and focus on other issues instead,” the researchers wrote. At the same time, “Mes saging to conservative and right-wing voters sought to do three things: repeat patri otic and anti-immigrant slo gans; elicit outrage with posts about liberal appeasement of ‘others’ at the expense of US citizens, and encourage them to vote for Trump.” The report from New Knowledge says there are still some live accounts tied to the original Internet Research Agency, which was named in an indictment from special counsel Robert Mueller in February for an expansive social media cam paign intended to influence the 2016 presidential elec tion. Some of the accounts have a presence on smaller •Gift baskets •Embroidery •Unique gifts •Screen printing •Balloons for all occasions •Full Service Pharmacy •Free Local Delivery •Compounding Unit Dose Packaging Hiverride fharmaqj 935 Green St., Gainesville, GA 770.532.6253 • callriversidepharmacy.com platforms as the major com panies have tried to clean up after the Russian activity was discovered. “With at least some of the Russian government’s goals achieved in the face of little diplomatic or other pushback, it appears likely that the United States will continue to face Russian interference for the foresee able future,” the researchers wrote. EARLY DEADLINES FOR CHRISTMAS DAY Because of the upcoming Christmas Day holiday The Times will alter its advertising and legals deadline as follows: Retail Display Ads Publication The Times Date Deadline Wednesday 12/26 Friday, 12/21 Thursday 12/27 Friday, 12/21 Classified Line Ads Publication The Times Date Deadline Wednesday 12/26 Friday, 12/21 @3pm Legal Ads Publication The Times Date Deadline Wednesday 12/26 Wednesday, 12/19 @ 5pm Thursday 12/27 Wednesday, 12/19 @ 5pm dte Eftties gainesvilletimes •com will be CLOSED Tuesday, December 25th, in observance of Christmas.