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More shocking details came to light about the Chinese re-education camps, where Chinese authorities lock up Uighurs and other Muslim minorities to force them to learn the Chinese language, traditions and culture. The BBC re-interviewed several victims and a farm worker about how Uighur women were sexually abused by Chinese police in the camp.
In the fall of 2019, Chinese officials leaked documents on how the Chinese leadership had established a network of re-education camps in Xinjiang province, where an estimated millions of Muslim minorities, mainly Uighurs, had been imprisoned. In the internment camps, according to official central propaganda, continuing education programs for Uighurs and Kazakhs are carried out in the province, but according to the Western press and human rights organizations, they are actually interned, abused and coerced. to work. The Chinese government has consistently denied the allegations as more and more former detainees make statements to the Western press about atrocities in the camps.
At first he did not understand where his cellmates were being taken.
Tursunay Ziawudun, a 42-year-old Uyghur woman, was released from the Xinjiang Internment Camp in December 2018, where she was detained for 9 months. Ziawudun has previously told the media after fleeing China. At first he went to Kazakhstan, but there he was constantly afraid of being sent back, so he fled to the United States. He said that after informing the foreign press about his sexual abuse, he would face even more severe punishment in China if he returned.
Ziawudun lived with her Kazakh husband in Kazakhstan for five years and returned to the Xinjiang region in 2016. A few months after their return, the police approached Ziawudun to go to a meeting with several Uighurs and Kazakhs, where they were all eventually arrested. .
The woman was detained for a month, claiming that she was still being treated fairly, received adequate food and had access to her telephone. Finally, after a month, he was discharged because he had a stomach ulcer. When she was released, her husband was working in Kazakhstan, so he wanted to go after her too, but the authorities kept her in Xinjiang. While her husband was still in Kazakhstan, Ziawudun was sent to the police station in March 2018, where she was told that she needed “more education”.
Ziawudun was then deported to the re-education camp where he had been detained before, but the woman said the camp looked completely different by then and that buses were transporting people there permanently. The camp guards constantly wore masks, even though there was no epidemic at the time.
When Ziawudun arrived with several women, their jewelry was confiscated, Ziawudun’s earrings were ripped off with bloody ears. The guards also tore the women’s handkerchiefs while yelling at them to wear long clothes down to the ground in accordance with the Muslim religion. According to Ziawudun’s account, an old woman was stripped of all her clothes, leaving her only lingerie as she tried to cover her body with her hands. Ziawudun remembers sobbing the entire way as he watched the old woman being humiliated.
After all of their clothes were turned over to the guards, they were escorted to row houses full of cells.
According to the Uighur woman, not much happened in the first month or two, they watched Chinese propaganda films with them in their cells and cut their hair violently.Two months later, the guards tried to question Ziawudun, whose Kazakh husband they wanted to know more about, and when the woman resisted, they kicked her in the abdomen.
“The guards’ boots were very hard and heavy. So at first I thought they were hitting me with something, but then I realized they were trampling my belly. I almost fainted, I felt a wave of heat going through my body, “he says.
After being taken back to her cell, her cellmates signaled to the guards that the woman was bleeding, but they did not care, replying that “it is normal for women to bleed.”
Ziawudun reported that in one cell, a total of 14 women slept in bunk beds, there was also a sink and toilet in the cell, and the window had a lattice.
At first, the Uyghur woman did not understand why the guards sometimes took someone out of the cell in the middle of the night, assuming they would be transferred to another location.Then one night in May, a masked man came for him and his cellmate in his early 20s. His cellmate was taken to a room called the Black Room because there were no surveillance cameras installed. The cellmate yelled from the room. Ziawudun thought he was torturing the young woman, he didn’t even think that he had actually been raped.
The woman who accompanied the Uighurs to the black room told one of the guards that Ziawudun had recently bled before the mask instructed her to accompany him to the room as well.
“Those inside had an electric stick in hand and I didn’t know exactly what. They put him in my vagina and tortured him with electric shocks, ”he says.
He said he was tortured three times and then gang-raped by two or three men. His body was severely bitten several times.
The raped women were threatened after torture so that they would not tell their cellmates about what had happened. His cellmate, who had been taken to the black room before him, returned to the cell, he no longer spoke to anyone, he just sat silently as if he had fallen into a trance. Ziawudun claims that many women returned to the cells in this condition.
The BBC also interviewed a Kazakh woman, Gulzira Auelkhan, who had spent 18 months in re-education camps and was tasked with undressing and handcuffing Uighur women before leaving them alone with Chinese men in the black room, which she then had to clean. .
“My job was to remove their clothing above the waist and handcuff them so they couldn’t move. Then I left them in the room where a Chinese was. I sat silently at the door, and when the man left the room, I led the women to the shower, ”says Auelkhan, who was forced to obey the guards, otherwise he would have been punished.
According to the Kazakh woman, Chinese men have even paid to choose the most beautiful women for themselves.
Rape has become a culture
In addition to their cell, the prisoners also spent a lot of time in a classroom where they were taught the Chinese language and culture.
An Uzbek woman, Qelbinur Sedik, who was forced to teach the detainees, told the BBC. Sedik heard many rumors about the rape during his stay at the camp, so he once asked a police officer at the camp if what he heard was true. Police told him that they could only talk in the courtyard during the lunch break, where Sedik answered a question:
Yes, rape has become a culture. Gang rapes do occur, but the Chinese police not only rape women, but also torture them with electric shocks. They are subjected to horrible torture, “he said.
Sedik became aware of a total of four methods of electric torture: Chinese police used an electric chair, a helmet, gloves and a stick to sexually abuse the women. The teacher reported that the building continued to echo with the screams of the women.
Another teacher from the camp, Sayragul Sauytbay, also reported that he himself witnessed an attempt to persuade a woman in her 20s to testify publicly, in groups, raped in front of about 100 detainees, who turned their heads or closed their eyes. punished.
It was also common for Uighur women to receive medication and injections, and several, including a 20-year-old woman, were forcibly sterilized, which the Chinese government denied to the BBC.In addition to medical interventions, Ziawudun reported that inmates at his camp chanted patriotic Chinese songs for hours and watched TV shows about Chinese President Xi Xing.
“I forgot my life outside the camp. I don’t know if I was brainwashed or it was a side effect of the injections and the pills, but I didn’t think of anything else that I wanted my stomach to be full, we were very hungry, “he said.
Food deprivation has been used as punishment, for example, in cases where someone could not memorize some passages from the book on Xixing. Those who failed one or more times on the exam were given color codes on their clothing, telling the guards what punishment and how much food deprivation they should receive.
A guard who requested anonymity who worked in the camp testified that he knew nothing about the rape, but admitted that they used electroshock to persuade inmates to testify.
Adrian Zenz, a leading expert on the Xinjiang region, said the women’s accounts are the most dire evidence he has heard since the atrocities in the re-education camps were revealed.
“These confessions are credible and detailed evidence of a level of sexual abuse and torture that we did not previously assume,” says Zenz.
The BBC approached the Chinese government to do so, but it denied the existence of re-education camps, saying they were purely vocational training centers.
“The Chinese government protects the rights and interests of all ethnic minorities equally. The government attaches great importance to the protection of women’s rights, ”said a government spokeswoman.
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