NEW YORK: Indian-Origin Journalist Wins Pulitzer Prize For Exposing China’s Detention Camps For Muslims

NEW YORK: Megha Rajagopalan, an
Indian-origin journalist, along with two contributors has won the Pulitzer
Prize for innovative investigative reports that exposed a vast infrastructure
of prisons and mass internment camps secretly built by China for detaining
hundreds of thousands of Muslims in its restive Xinjiang region.

Ms
Rajagopalan from BuzzFeed News is among two Indian-origin journalists who won
the US’s top journalism award on Friday.

Tampa Bay
Times” Neil Bedi won for local reporting. Neil Bedi along with Kathleen
McGrory has been awarded the prize for the series exposing a Sheriff’s Office
initiative that used computer modelling to identify people believed to be
future crime suspects. About 1,000 people were monitored under the programme,
including children.

Neil Bedi
is an investigative reporter for the Tampa Bay Times.

“What
Kathleen and Neil unearthed in Pasco County has had a profound impact on the
community,” said Mark Katches, Times executive editor. “This is what
the best investigative journalism can do and why it is so essential.”

Ms
Rajagopalan’s Xinjiang series won the Pulitzer Prize in the International
Reporting category.

In 2017,
not long after China began to detain thousands of Muslims in Xinjiang,
Rajagopalan was the first to visit an internment camp – at a time when China
denied that such places existed, BuzzFeed News said.

“In
response, the government tried to silence her, revoking her visa and ejecting
her from the country,” BuzzFeed News wrote in its entry for the prize.

“It
would go on to cut off access to the entire region for most Westerners and
stymie journalists. The release of basic facts about detainees slowed to a
trickle.”

Working from
London, and refusing to be silenced, Ms Rajagopalan partnered with two
contributors, Alison Killing, a licensed architect who specialises in forensic
analysis of architecture and satellite images of buildings, and Christo
Buschek, a programmer who builds tools tailored for data journalists.

“The
blazing Xinjiang stories shine desperately needed light on one of the worst
human rights abuses of our time,” said Mark Schoofs, editor-in-chief of
BuzzFeed News.

Minutes
after she won, Ms Rajagopalan told BuzzFeed News she wasn’t even watching the
ceremony live because she wasn’t expecting to win. She only found out when Mr
Schoofs called to congratulate her on the victory.

“I’m
in complete shock, I did not expect this,” Ms Rajagopalan said over the
phone from London.

She said
she was deeply grateful to the teams of people who worked with her on this
including her collaborators, Killing and Buschek, her editor Alex Campbell,
BuzzFeed News” public relations team, and the organisations that funded their
work, including the Pulitzer Center.

Ms
Rajagopalan also acknowledged the courage of the sources who spoke to them
despite the risk and threat of retaliation against them and their families.

“I’m
so grateful they stood up and were willing to talk to us,” she said.
“It takes so much unbelievable courage to do that.”

The three
of them set out to analyse thousands of satellite images of the Xinjiang
region, an area bigger than Alaska, to try to answer a simple question: Where
were Chinese officials detaining as many as 1 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and
other Muslim minorities?

For
months, the trio compared censored Chinese images with uncensored mapping
software. They began with an enormous dataset of 50,000 locations.

Buschek
built a custom tool to sort through those images. Then, “the team had to
go through thousands of images one by one, verifying many of the sites against
other available evidence,” BuzzFeed News wrote in its prize entry.

They
ultimately identified more than 260 structures that appeared to be fortified
detention camps. Some of the sites were capable of holding more than 10,000
people and many contained factories where prisoners were forced into labour.

The
groundbreaking technological reporting was also accompanied by extensive
old-fashioned “shoe leather” journalism.

Barred
from China, Ms Rajagopalan instead travelled to its neighbour Kazakhstan, where
many Chinese Muslims have sought refuge.

There, Ms
Rajagopalan located more than two dozen people who had been prisoners in the
Xinjiang camps, winning their trust and convincing them to share their
nightmarish accounts with the world.

Pulitzer
prizes are awarded yearly in twenty-one categories. In twenty of the
categories, each winner receives a certificate and a USD 15,000 cash award. The
winner in the public service category is awarded a gold medal.