A security company founded by Erik Prince, the former head of the private military company Blackwater, has announced an agreement with the Chinese state to run a training center in the Chinese province of Xinjiang, largely Muslim. In the months following the invasion of Iraq by the United States, Blackwater was hired by the State Department to provide diplomatic security in various locations in the Middle Eastern country. In 2010, when the company was suddenly sold to a group of private investors, its tactics in Iraq had stirred international polemics.
Prince continued to contribute to the foundation of Frontier Services Group (FSG), another private security company registered in Hong Kong. The company provides security training to staff working for Chinese companies. Its specialization is the training of staff of Chinese companies based abroad, mainly in the African regions.
The announcement of the new training center was published on the Chinese language website of the FSG. One of the FSG branches signed an agreement to build and operate a "training center" in the Kashgar Caohu industrial park in the city of Kashgar, one of the most western cities in China, located near the border of the country with Tajikistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan.
The city of 1 million people is located in Xinjiang province. In recent months, Beijing has been heavily criticized by several Western countries for alleged mass detentions of Uyghur Muslims, which make up about half of Xinjiang's population. Uighurs are ethnically related to the peoples of Central Asia and speak a Turkish dialect. Some see the Chinese state as an occupier and support secession, often combined with calls to create an Islamic caliphate. China denies allegations of mass detentions and states that Uyghurs are voluntarily enlisted in "educational and training facilities", where they are de-radicalized through political and cultural education. It is estimated that up to one million Uyghurs have been enrolled in these facilities in the last year.
It is worth noting that the initial announcement of the Kashgar Caohu training center agreement between the FSG and its Chinese client was eventually erased from the company's website. At the end of last week, a spokesperson for the FSG told a number of news agencies, including Reuters, that Prince was not involved in what was described in a statement as a "preliminary agreement" for a training center in Xinjiang . The spokesman added that the prince probably had "no involvement" in the deal.