Hundreds of thousands of people are said to be locked up in re-education camps in China’s Xinjiang province. Three survivors report what they experienced in detention.
Munich – The Uyghur Gulbahar Haitiwaji came to China to sign a few pension documents. But then she disappeared into a re-education camp for three years. She had lived in France with her husband and two daughters for several years. But in late 2016, she received a call from her former employer, an oil company in the so-called Xinjiang Autonomous Region. In order to receive her pension rights, she must come to China in person and sign the documents, she was told. And so she boarded a plane in Paris and traveled to Xinjiang, to the city of Karamay in far northwest China.
“When I arrived, they took my passport from me,” said the 56-year-old at a meeting in Munich at the end of May. She was then taken to a police station and shown a photo of her daughter Gulhumar, who had taken part in a demonstration in Paris in support of Xinjiang’s independence from China. Officials said her daughter was a terrorist and locked Gulbahar Haitiwaji in a cell. “The Chinese government has accused me of not being loyal to the party. That was my crime.”
She was held in prison cells for several months, she says. Then they took her to a “school”. But the supposed educational institution turned out to be a re-education camp. The inmates had to sing communist songs, study Chinese and memorize sayings of the head of state and party leader Xi Jinping. “I lived in a cell with nine beds,” says Gulbahar Haitiwaji. “But in reality sometimes 30 or 40 women had to share the cell.” There was no toilet, the prisoners had to defecate in a bucket. The women were “taught” eleven hours a day, they were not allowed to talk to each other. “And we had no contact with the outside world.”
China’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang: “We were chained to tables so we could not move”
The treatment by the guards, says Haitiwaji, was cruel. “We were chained to tables so we couldn’t move,” she says, close to tears. “Sometimes two, three hours, sometimes a whole day or more.” She lost weight, got sick. Twice a year all women would have received an injection, allegedly a vaccination. “But I think that the injections made us infertile,” she says. Haitiwaji was imprisoned for three years until a judge suddenly declared her innocent and she was able to leave the camp in August 2019. The government in France had previously exerted diplomatic pressure on China.
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Reports of the Xinjiang re-education camps have been around for years. The Chinese government initially denied their existence and later, when the evidence could no longer be denied, spoke of “training centers”. The people are there voluntarily, according to Beijing. One wants to help the Muslim Uyghurs to get away from extremist thoughts and to get fit for the working world. However, statements such as that of Gulbahar Haitiwaji show that there can be no talk of voluntariness. Human rights activists estimate that hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs are in the camps against their will. The US and several other countries are already talking about a genocide aimed at destroying Uyghur culture.
“The goal of the Chinese government is to destroy the Uyghur people,” says Kelbinur Sidik. Sidik, 52, worked as a Chinese teacher in 2017, first in a camp for men and later in one for women. She was told that she would teach illiterate people in training centers, she says. “But when I arrived I realized that it doesn’t look like a school, it looks like a prison. All wore the same uniform and were bound with chains. They had to sleep on the floor.” The inmates only smell the toilet twice a day, there were no showers. “The men were interrogated for hours, sometimes even tortured,” says Sidik, who now lives in the Netherlands. “They weren’t called by their names, only by their inmate number.” In the women’s camp, the inmates’ hair was shaved, “they were given medicine to stop their periods and to sterilize them,” says Sidik at the meeting in a Munich camp Hotel.
China: UN human rights commissioner visits Xinjiang
Michelle Bachelet, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has been in Xinjiang for a few days. Bachelet is unlikely to see the camps. Human rights organizations fear that Bachelet will only be shown what she should see. But the evidence for the camps is overwhelming.
Most recently, international media published thousands of photos of detainees under the name “Xinjiang Police Files” at the beginning of the week, as well as speeches by Chinese politicians, detention lists and training documents from the security authorities. Information about around 300,000 Chinese registered by the authorities, mainly Uyghurs, is among the documents stemming from a gigantic data leak leaked to German anthropologist Adrian Zenz. “It’s like a window into a police state with so little information getting out. We’ve never seen anything like it,” Zenz said mirrorwho was involved in the analysis of the data.
Gulbahar Yelilowa was born in Kazakhstan in 1964. For many years, the Uyghur businesswoman traveled to Xinjiang on and off. She too came to Munich to talk about the camps. On her cell phone she shows a photo of a document from the Chinese security authorities. Her name and date of birth are on the one-page sheet of paper, and it says she is suspected of “being involved in aiding and abetting terrorist activities.” Yelilowa traveled from Kazakhstan to Xinjiang in May 2017, as she often does. But shortly after her arrival in the provincial capital of Urumqi, she was arrested, presented with the document and told to sign it. “But I’m not a terrorist,” she says. Even when she was beaten with sticks, she refused to sign.
China: Detained in a camp in Xinjiang
She was eventually taken to the Urumqi No. 3 Detention Center. Her Kazakh passport was taken from her and Chinese documents were issued to her. “They simply made me Chinese,” says the Uyghur. She had to live in a cell that was so full that only some of the women could sleep; the others, she says, had to stand and wait their turn to rest. “When I was sent to the cell, I started crying,” she says. “A woman came up to me and told me not to cry. We all know that we are innocent. If we cry, the guards will come and punish us.” After three months in the camp, she was questioned for the first time. “They wanted to know if I or someone in my family was praying,” says Yelilova. She was tied up, was not allowed to use the toilet, and was beaten with an electric baton.
As the interpreter translated her words, Gulbahar Yelilova cried. Then she tells that there were rapes in the camp, as well as beatings. And two tablets every week, plus an injection every ten days. Young women, she says, have lost their menstrual periods. Others had their newborn babies taken away and given pills to stop the flow of milk. Official data from China show that birth rates in Xinjiang have been falling dramatically for years – the government, according to experts, obviously wants to make the Uyghurs a minority in their own country.
China speaks of a “lie of the century” – Olaf Scholz of human rights violations
Gulbahar Yelilova was finally released from the camp in August 2018 – “after one year, three months and ten days”. The government of Kazakhstan appears to have lobbied for their release. Today she lives in Paris and tells others about her experiences. “I was told not to tell what I saw. Otherwise I would be persecuted and killed,” she says. “But that doesn’t stop me.” Gulbahar Haitiwaji, who traveled to China from France in 2016 and was subsequently imprisoned, has written a book about her time in the camps. “I live in a free, democratic country today and I should be safe,” she says. “But sometimes I feel like Chinese agents are following me, that my life is in danger because we are telling the truth about the Chinese government.”
Data leaks like the Xinjiang Police Files and testimonies from women like Gulbahar Haitiwaji, Kelbinur Sidik and Gulbahar Jelilowa show the full extent of human rights abuses in Xinjiang. One can no longer “look away when human rights are violated, as we are currently seeing in Xinjiang,” said Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz shortly after the new evidence was published. The government in Beijing, however, continues to speak of a “lie of the century”, despite all the evidence.
Gulbahar Haitiwaji is certain that their culture will survive, that China will not be able to wipe it out. “We have a long history,” she says of her home in Xinjiang. “We are strong enough to keep our identity.” (sh)
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