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More than two years have passed since Sayragul Sautbay was released from a re-education camp in China’s westernmost Xinjiang region. However, the mother of two still suffers from nightmares and memories of the “humiliation and violence” she suffered while in detention.
Sautbay, a medical doctor and educator now living in Sweden, recently published a book detailing her ordeal, which included witnessing beatings, alleged sexual abuse and forced sterilization.
In a recent interview with Al Jazeera, he shed more light on other indignities that Uighurs and other Muslim minorities were subjected to, including the consumption of pork, a meat that is strictly prohibited in Islam.
“Every Friday, we were forced to eat pork,” Sautbay said. “They have intentionally chosen a holy day for Muslims. And if he rejects it, he will receive severe punishment. “
He added that the policy was designed to inflict shame and blame on detained Muslims and that it was “difficult to put into words” the emotions he had every time he ate the meat.
“I felt like I was a different person. Everything around me went dark. It was really hard to accept, ”he said.
The testimonies of Sautbay and others provide an indication of how China has tried to crack down on Xinjiang by targeting the cultural and religious beliefs of the majority Muslim ethnic minority, implementing widespread surveillance and, since around 2017, opening a network of camps that have. justified as necessary to counter “extremism”.
#Ayragul #Sautbay published a book about his experience in the Chinese concentration camp (part 1). China’s policy of genocide against the natives of #EastTurkistan #Uygurs #Kazakhs #Kyrgyzstan #Uzbeks Y #Tataras #IndepenceToEastTurkistan #FreeKazakhs pic.twitter.com/otlXJ9X6QQ
– FreeKazakhs (@FreeKazakhs) August 20, 2020
But documents made available to Al Jazeera show that agricultural development has also become part of what German anthropologist and Uighur scholar Adrian Zenz calls a policy of “secularization.”
According to Zenz, state-approved news articles and documents support the conversation within Uighur communities that there is an “active” effort to promote and expand pig farming in the region.
In November 2019, Xinjiang’s chief administrator, Shohrat Zakir, said that the autonomous region would become a “pig-breeding center”; a measure that, according to the Uyghurs, is an affront to their way of life.
A news article published in May that Zenz recorded describes a new farm in southern Kashgar that aims to produce 40,000 pigs each year.
The project is expected to occupy an area of 25,000 square meters (82 square feet) in an industrial park in the Konaxahar county of Kashgar, renamed Shufu, according to the Chinese-language website Sina.
Ethnic Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang say the government is deliberately trying to erase their cultural and religious traditions. [File: Diego Azubel/EPA]
The agreement was formally signed on April 23 this year, the first day of Ramadan, the Muslim fasting month, and states that pig farming is not intended for export, but “to guarantee the supply of pork.” in Kashgar.
Uighurs make up 90 percent of the population of the city and its surroundings.
“This is part of the attempt to completely eradicate the culture and religion of the Xinjiang people,” Zenz told Al Jazeera.
“It is part of the strategy of secularization, to return to secular Uighurs and indoctrinate them to follow the communist party and become agnostic or atheist,” he added.
‘Three evils’
Beijing has defended its policies in the region, saying the approach is necessary to fight the “three evils of extremism, separatism and terrorism,” following the deadly riots in the regional capital, Urumqi, in 2009.
He has denied the existence of reeducation camps in which the United Nations has said that more than a million people have been held, and instead has said that it operates vocational centers that allow it to “retrain” the Uighur population and teach them new habilities.
Like Sautbay, Uighur businesswoman Zumret Dawut has first-hand experience with the arrest. She was arrested in March 2018 in Urumqi, the city where she was born.
According to the Australian Institute for Strategic Policy in September, there are at least 380 re-education camps and detention centers in Xinjiang. [File: Thomas Peter/Reuters]
For two months, Dawut said authorities demanded explanations about her ties to Pakistan, her husband’s homeland. They also asked him how many children he had and if they had studied religion and read the Koran.
She says that she was repeatedly humiliated and was once slapped in the face with a rolled-up paper after upsetting her interrogator.
On another occasion, she had to beg the male camp officials to allow her to go to the bathroom, only to have her handcuffed and watched the entire time she was in the bathroom.
She also says that she was served pork repeatedly.
“When you sit in a concentration camp, you don’t decide whether to eat or not. To be alive, we had to eat the meat that was served to us, ”he told Al Jazeera through an interpreter.
Zumret Dawut, now living in exile in the United States, was detained for two months in her hometown of Urumqi and was repeatedly forced to eat pork while in detention. [File: Nathan Ellgren/AP)
Yet those experiences could not have prepared her for what would happen next.
She and several other female detainees were sterilised to prevent them from having more children. The controversy was reported earlier this year by the Associated Press news agency, drawing widespread condemnation.
Starting them young
Sautbay, who was from the town of Ili, ended up in another camp after authorities learned that her husband and their two children had left for neighbouring Kazakhstan in early 2016.
She had originally planned to join them but by then authorities had confiscated her passport and that of other civil servants.
Because of her medical background and experience in running preschools, Sautbay was assigned to teach her fellow detainees the Chinese language, allowing her to closely observe what was happening to the Uighurs.
She says the practice of making Muslims eat pork went beyond the detention camps.
In one school in Altay, a city in northern Xinjiang, students were also forced to eat the meat and when many refused and demonstrated against their school administrators, the government sent in soldiers to intervene, Sautbay said.
The Xinjiang government also started an initiative called “free food” for Muslim children in kindergarten, serving them pork dishes without their knowledge, she added.
The idea was that by starting them young, the Muslim children would acquire a taste for non-halal food.
The Xinjiang government has also reportedly started feeding Uighur children pork, with the idea that by starting them young, they would develop the taste for non-halal food [File: Diego Azubel/EPA]
“China is using and will use different tactics to force Uighurs and other Muslim populations to eat pork,” Sautbay said.
Last year, Italy-based AsiaNews alleged that during the Chinese Lunar New Year, which turned out to be the “Year of the Pig,” government officials delivered pork directly to Muslim households in Ili and insisted that the Uighurs will decorate their homes for the holiday season.
‘Normalizing’ the prohibited
Arslan Hidayat, a Turkey-based Uyghur rights activist and secretary general of the Uighur Renaissance Association, told Al Jazeera that whether it is raising pigs or eating pork and drinking alcohol, the Chinese government is trying to “normalize “Forbidden practices for Muslims. in Xinjiang.
In 2018, as part of official state policy, the Xinjiang government also announced that all halal restaurants in the region should “operate normally” during Ramadan, in contrast to previous years when those same establishments were closed during the ritual of a month. fasting.
According to the Xinjiang government website, which published the memorandum containing the provision on Muslim food establishments, the directive was intended to ensure “a normal order of life during Ramadan.”
But Zenz believes the directive meant the government wanted to make sure “Uyghurs eat and don’t fast” during the day.
He also shared two other official documents, written in Chinese, which showed the Kashgar government allocating food money for its Uighur staff, mostly Muslim, during Ramadan.
Taken together, this constitutes a pattern of the Chinese government waging a “war on halal,” Zenz said, referring to the term used in Islam to describe acceptable food and other daily practices.
In 2018, the Reuters news agency also reported on an “anti-halal campaign” in Urumqi “to prevent Islam from penetrating secular life and fueling ‘extremism’”.
‘Radicalized’
Speaking to Al Jazeera about China’s overall policy towards Uighurs, Einar Tangen, a Beijing-based China affairs expert, said the Chinese government “strongly feels” that many of Xinjiang’s residents have been “radicalized.” in recent years.
Uighur exiled groups living in Turkey hold a protest in Istanbul to draw attention to alleged rights abuses by the Chinese government in Xinjiang [File: Yasin Akgul/AFP]
In Beijing’s view, the only way to address the situation in Xinjiang is to provide residents with “the education they should have received when they were younger.” Hence the “training grounds”.
“This is what [government] they say, and they are moving people through these educational camps. They teach them skills, language, history, and that’s their way of dealing with it. “
But activist Hidayat points out that even non-observant Uyghurs, many of them government employees who had tried to adopt a lifestyle similar to that of the Han Chinese, had not escaped punishment. They too were sent to the camps, just by virtue of their racial identity, he said.
However, Tangen noted that the economic situation in Xinjiang had “drastically improved over the years” and that people were better.
“People live longer. They have better opportunities, ”Tangen said.
“So there is always this tension between what the West says are their human rights, to speak freely, to do whatever they want, and the idea that without economic opportunity and food on the table, rights don’t mean much.”
Regarding the specific accusations of forcing Muslims to eat pork, Tangen said he did not know if the information was “factual” but that if it was occurring it was not the result of “central government policy.”
The documents seen by Al Jazeera are among a hideout that also details the alleged sterilization program reported by AP.
“I’m sure there are things happening that shouldn’t be happening. But unless you have some of the facts, it is impossible ”to determine the veracity of the allegations, Tangen said.
In a huge bureaucracy like China, there may be “some people” who could commit abuses, he said.
“The key is to find these people and punish them.”
The Chinese government has had little to say on the matter, although several state-controlled publications questioned the credibility of Sautbay and Dawut when they made accusations of other abuses in Xinjiang.
Beijing also accused Zenz, the German anthropologist, of “fabricating facts and falsifying data” and pointed to his ties to “right-wing” factions of the US government. China’s observers also raised questions about its “sudden experience” in Xinjiang and the Uighurs.
Al Jazeera has sought an official response from the Chinese Foreign Ministry, but has yet to receive a response. He also requested comment from the Institute for Human Rights of China University of Political Science and Law, but had not yet responded as of press time.
Dawut, the Uighur businesswoman now living in exile in the United States, says she backs up her story of what happened to her inside the camps.
Meanwhile, Sautbay, the Kazakh doctor, said that by sharing her ordeal, she hoped to be a voice for those who remain in captivity.
“The days I have spent in the concentration camp will not fade from my memory and I will have to live with that my whole life,” he said.
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