Blackwater founder says he had ‘no knowledge’ of new company’s plans to build camp in Chinese state known for Muslim persecution

Erik Prince attempts to distance himself from deal in state accused of human rights abuse

Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL best known as the founder of the security contractor formerly known as Blackwater, has made it clear he considers China a priority. He partnered with one of China’s biggest conglomerates and set up a company that would help Chinese companies overseas.

But Mr Prince scrambled to distance himself from the latest announcement: That his company, Frontier Services Group, had struck a deal to build a training camp in the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang, where hundreds of thousands of Muslims have been detained in indoctrination camps that have drawn condemnation in Washington and abroad.

Mr Prince’s current company, Frontier Services Group, said in January that it had reached an agreement with officials and an industrial park in Tumxuk, a city in western Xinjiang, to build a training facility there. A statement announcing the agreement provided few details about what kind of training would take place there, though the company cast the project as a move to help upgrade the city through tourism and infrastructure projects.

Chinese media later reported FSG would invest about $600,000 (£459,624) into the camp and train about 8,000 people a year.

But in a statement provided by a spokesperson last week, Mr Prince said he had “no knowledge or involvement whatsoever” of what he called a “preliminary memorandum”.

He added, “Any potential investment of this nature would require the knowledge and input of each FSG board member and a formal board resolution.”

The statement announcing the deal had been also been removed from the FSG website.

Mr Prince, who is the brother of US education secretary Betsy DeVos, has long courted controversy, most recently when he laid out a plan for President Donald Trump to privatise the war in Afghanistan. Blackwater, a US military contractor in two Asian conflicts, became a symbol of unchecked US power in the Iraq War after its employees killed 17 unarmed civilians in Baghdad in 2007.

Frontier Services Group has expressed interest in western China before. Two years ago, it said it would set up an office in Xinjiang, where Chinese authorities have taken an increasingly hard line on the local population, citing concerns about terrorism. Xinjiang is home to a largely Muslim ethnic minority group called Uighurs.

Since then, a fuller, more disturbing picture has emerged.

Officials in Xinjiang have rounded up ethnic Uighurs and other Muslim minority groups in huge numbers, putting them into re-education camps where they are subjected to a severe indoctrination program to remove any devotion to Islam and make them obedient to the Chinese Communist Party. Experts, human rights groups and officials in the United States and elsewhere estimate hundreds of thousands of people have been caught up in the campaign, part of an expansive crackdown Beijing has put in place in the name of fighting extremism and separatism.

“Xinjiang is a region where we have documented severe human rights abuses both by the police and ordinary officials,” said Maya Wang, a researcher for Human Rights Watch. “Anything that would involve training government officials involved in this repression would be contributing to human rights abuses.”

US officials have taken notice. Politicians have introduced bipartisan bills that urge the Trump administration to punish Chinese officials and to prevent sales of some US equipment to some Chinese state agencies. Officials at the White House and in the State and Treasury departments have been discussing whether to impose economic sanctions on Chinese officials who oversee the system of repression in Xinjiang.

Mr Prince made a name for himself as the founder of Blackwater, a private military contractor that did business in Iraq. After Blackwater employees were held responsible for civilian deaths in Baghdad, Mr Prince sold the company and set up FSG, turning his sights to the growing demand from Chinese companies moving into countries and regions with ethnic strife.

FSG, which is listed in Hong Kong, has unabashedly courted Chinese officialdom. Citic Group, one of China’s biggest state-owned conglomerates, owns a quarter of FSG’s stock. A security and logistics company, FSG has tied itself to China’s sprawling Belt and Road Initiative, a major campaign by China's president Xi Jinping to develop geopolitical ties by building bridges, trains and ports through Asia. China considers Xinjiang, which borders Kazakhstan and several other Central Asian countries, a gateway to a strategically important region.

The city of Tumxuk lies between Kashgar and Aksu, larger settlements that have been a focus of the Chinese government’s drive to stifle anti-government sentiment. The city comes under the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a sprawling organisation run along military lines founded in the 1950s to bring security, development and Han Chinese settlers — members of China’s largest ethnic group — to the region. Even now, the corps acts as a kind of parallel administration in Xinjiang, holding vast areas of land and operating its own schools, courts and other institutions.

But Tumxuk has also been drawn into the region-wide drive to transform Uighur society through indoctrination camps.

The government says the camps wean Uighurs and other Muslim minorities from religious extremism, while teaching them Chinese language and job skills. But former inmates have described harsh, even brutal treatment, and United Nations human rights committees and experts have condemned the camps for holding people in the camps without legal appeal.

Tumxuk has more than 160,000 inhabitants, nearly two-thirds of them Uighur, according to official population estimates, and government reports and records show that the city has built at least one camp, as well as other specialised schools, to “deradicalise” minority residents.

The New York Times