China has been secretly building new prisons and internment camps in recent years as the Communist-led country launches its massive detention campaign against Muslim minorities, according to a report on Thursday.
Since 2017, China has built 260 of the entire security camps that have the capacity to hold tens of thousands of people, pointing to a shift in use of public buildings and schools as temporary detention centers after using a permanent prison infrastructure system, BuzzFeed News reported, mentioning satellite images and interviews with former detainees.
China, which has detained hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities in the largest-scale detention of ethical and religious minorities since World War II, has equipped the facilities with concrete walls and watchtowers, the report said.
Some contain factories, a sign of forced labor.
Construction continues.
Former detainees described were kept in horrific, cruel conditions with many blindfolded and with their hands in handcuffs, and were fed with a starvation diet of rice, steamed buns and porridge with little or no meat.
Many had to sleep two after a bed or take turns sleeping in shifts due to overcrowding.
They told stories of torture, solitary confinement, forced birth control, forced brainwashing sessions on Communist Party propaganda, and forced to speak only Chinese, unlike their mother tongues.
“People are living in horror in these places,” Zhenishan Berdibek, 49, who spent most of 2018 in a camp in the Tacheng region, told BuzzFeed. “Some of the younger people were not as tolerant as we were – they cried and screamed and cried.”
When she saw that young women were being dragged to solitary confinement, she said she “wanted to die in the camp.”
Orynbek Koksebek, an ethnic Kazakh, said when he was first arrested in late 2017, he was sleeping in a room with seven other men and they did not have to share a bed. But more people arrived every month, and by February 2018, the number of men in his room had doubled.
“Some of us had to share blankets or sleep on the floor,” he said. “They later told us that some of us would get jail time or be transferred to other camps.”
Koksebek said the conditions were stifling.
“There was a window in our room, but it was so high that I could not see much other than a place of heaven,” he said. “I once wished I was a bird so I could have the freedom to fly,” he said.
The Chinese consulate in New York denied the centers in Xinjiang had anything to do with “human rights, religion or ethnicity”, but fought against terrorism.
It called allegations that a million Uighurs in the region were being held in a “baseless lie.”
“Xinjiang has set up vocational education and training centers to eradicate extreme thoughts, raise awareness of the law by educating, improving vocational skills and creating employment for them so that those affected by extreme and violent ideas can return. to society as soon as possible, “said the consulate, adding that the” interns have freedom of movement. “
The programs, it said, were similar to “mandatory terrorist programs” implemented in the US and the United Kingdom.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China did not respond to BuzzFeed’s requests for comment.
But Abduweli Ayup, a former detainee who was detained in Xinjiang and later deported, said the people in the concentration camps were “peaceful people.”
‘They are businessmen and scholars and engineers. They are our musicians. They are doctors. They are shopkeepers, restaurant owners, teachers who used Uighur textbooks, ‘said Ayup.
The report said the Chinese government does not include detention camps as part of the criminal justice system, so detainees have never been formally charged or arrested for a crime.
They also did not have a chance to defend themselves in court.
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