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A teacher forced to teach in Xinjiang internment camps has described her forced sterilization at the age of 50, as part of a government campaign to suppress the birth rates of Muslim minority women.
Qelbinur Sidik said that the crackdown affected not only women likely to become pregnant, but those who were over the normal age of childbearing. Messages he received from local authorities said that women aged 19 to 59 were expected to have intrauterine devices (IUDs) inserted or sterilized.
In 2017, Sidik was 47 years old and her only daughter was already in college when local officials insisted that she have an IUD inserted to avoid the unlikely possibility of another pregnancy. Just over two years later, when she was 50 years old, she was forced to undergo sterilization.
When the first request came in, the Chinese teacher was already teaching in one of the now notorious internment camps that appear in the western Xinjiang region of China.
She knew what happened to people from Muslim minorities who resisted the government, and a Uighur-language text message she shared with The Guardian, which she said came from local authorities, made the threat explicit.
“If something happens, who will take responsibility for you? Do not play with your life, do not try. These things are not just about you. You have to think about your family members and the relatives around you, ”the message said.
The Uyghurs are a predominantly Turkish-speaking Muslim ethnic group, mainly from China’s northwestern Xinjiang region. They have been subjected to religious and ethnic persecution by the Chinese authorities, and human rights groups claim that more than 1 million people have been held in detention camps in recent years.
Having initially denied the camps’ existence, China has described them as “vocational education centers” in the face of mounting evidence in the form of government documents, satellite images and testimonies from fugitive detainees. Satellite images have also suggested that more than two dozen Islamic religious sites have been partially or completely demolished since 2016.
In July 2019, China claimed that most of those sent to mass detention centers had “returned to society”, but this has been questioned by relatives of detainees. An estimated 1-1.5 million Uighurs live abroad as a diaspora, many of whom have campaigned against the treatment of their families. China repeated these claims in December 2019, but offered no evidence of its release.
In July 2020, China’s ambassador to the UK denied abuse of Uighurs, despite the emergence of drone footage of hundreds of men blindfolded and shackled.
Martin Belam
“If you fight with us at your door and refuse to cooperate with us, you will go to the police station and sit on the metal chair!”
On the day of his appointment, there were no Han Chinese among the crowds of women waiting for their mandatory birth control in the government compound, he said.
Details of China’s sweeping crackdown on Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang have slowly leaked from the tightly controlled region, but there is mounting evidence of efforts to cut birth rates, which some experts have called “demographic genocide”.
This has included forced birth control and sterilization, fines and even prison sentences for those deemed to have too many children, a recent Associated Press investigation found.
In the mostly Uighur regions of Hotan and Kashgar, births collapsed by more than 60% between 2015 and 2018, the latest year for which government data is available, the AP found. Nationwide during the same period, births fell just 4.2%.
This is the period when Sidik was forced to have the IUD inserted, despite her age and insistence that she did not want any more children.
The IUD caused heavy bleeding and she paid to have it illegally removed. But later in 2018, a routine check-up discovered it was missing and she was forced to have a second device installed, and then a year later she was forced to undergo sterilization.
“In 2017, just because I was an official worker in a school, I was given a broader option to have this IUD or a sterilization operation. But in 2019 they said there is a government order that every woman between the ages of 18 and 59 must be sterilized. So they said, you have to do this now, ”he said.
He tried to claim both age and the damaging impact of the IUDs on his health. “I said, ‘My body can’t take it,’ but they told me, ‘You don’t want to have children, so you have no excuse not to have the sterilization operation.’
His story, first told to the Dutch Uyghur Human Rights Foundation, is difficult to verify. It is difficult to take pictures inside the detention centers and there is little documentation. But the details matched the accounts of other detainees in the field and the investigation into coercive practices of birth control.
She previously gave anonymous accounts of her experience in the fields and with IUDs, but had not discussed her sterilization.
She was afraid that being identified could affect the family that is still in China, in particular her husband. But he has since divorced her, and with that bond severed, Sidik decided to introduce himself under her name.
“What happened in the concentration camps and throughout the region was really terrible. I couldn’t stay silent, ”he said. “I wonder why Western countries still cannot believe what is happening within those fields. I wonder why they are silent. “
During the years that Sidik was subjected to forced sterilization, she was also sexually harassed at home by a Han Chinese man sent to live as a “relative” in her apartment, under a surveillance program implemented in Xinjiang.
He initially spent a week every three months at home, but then increased to one week every month. There have been reports of Han “relatives” in Uighur households forcing host women to share beds and sexually assaulting them, especially when the men were in the camps.
Sidik also witnessed another aspect of the crackdown. As one of the few instructors from the field to go public, she had a clearer view of the mass incarceration system than the survivors trapped in it.
She worked as a teacher in two camps, where she claims to have seen starvation rations, unsanitary and humiliating conditions, including limited access to toilets and water. She also heard the screams of tortured prisoners and witnessed the execution of at least one dead prisoner.
At the second facility where she worked, which was mostly home to young women, a trusted colleague told her that the rape of prisoners by Han Chinese administrators was routine.
“Every time I saw them, it reminded me of my daughter and I was like, ‘Please, not my daughter,’” she said, crying at the memory. Most of the prisoners were in their 20s and 30s, he said.
Sidik came from a family that would once have been considered a model of assimilation by local authorities, he was fluent in Chinese, worked in a public school and followed government exhortations to have only one child.
He initially dismissed reports of forced sterilizations and mass arrests from other parts of Xinjiang as something that happened to troubled communities. “We felt compassion, but it was a distant story, not something that would happen to us.”
But the long shadow of ethnic oppression may have saved his life. She was born amid the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution and her mother listed her as Uzbek, even though she had always considered herself Uyghur, and that was the official ethnic identity of other members of her family.
At present, permission to leave China is only rarely granted to Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, and almost never to Uighurs. She left China in late 2019 and never expects to return. Her husband, a Uyghur, applied for a permit to travel with her. The authorities told him: “Don’t even dream about it.”
