Dawn breaks in the crowded prison cell. Not everyone is asleep — conditions are so cramped in the 70-square-yard space that 15 of the 60 inmates have to stand to give others their turn to lie down. The lack of privacy is absolute. Toilet breaks are rationed — two minutes at a time — and in full gaze of the others. Glass walls, cameras and microphones mean that every word and deed is recorded. Informants placed in each cell even note down what people say in their sleep and pass it on to guards. As with every other day, the morning begins with compulsory singing of Communist Party songs, praising the glorious motherland and its wise leader, Xi Jinping. Then their only meal of the day arrives. Watery cabbage soup, served with a small lump of steamed dough. If they’re lucky, they may get a few grains of rice as well.
And then the medication arrives in a form of a white pill. To be sure they’ve taken it, the prisoners’ mouths are roughly forced open and searched. The mysterious drug — a tranquilliser of some sort — soon induces a state of miserable mental numbness. Thoughts and memories of life outside, the fate of loved ones, the pain of shattered hopes: all recede. Now the only aim is to get through the day. Such a scene is being played out in any one of China’s secret concentration camps, dedicated to ‘re-educating’ a million or more of the country’s Muslim Uighur population in a network of hundreds of institutions built across 640,000 square miles of Western China: an area seven times the size of Britain. Every detail of this harrowing description of life inside the ‘Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region’ — its native Uighurs call it ‘East Turkestan’ — comes from accounts that have trickled out of the region and from a huge package of internal Communist Party documents leaked last year by a brave official, disgusted by the policies he was implementing. They are confirmed by survivor testimony collated by Rahima Mahmut of the London office of the World Uyghur Congress and by Human Rights Watch, a New York based campaign group.
Internet detectives have also used publicly available satellite images to plot the growth of the camps. On Sunday, Beijing’s UK ambassador Liu Xiaoming was quizzed by Andrew Marr about drone footage, taken in 2018, showing hundreds of Uighur men, kneeling, shaven-headed, shackled and blindfolded, being led from a train, in what appeared to be a transfer of prisoners.
After a lengthy and embarrassed pause, the ambassador responded with bluster and denial. ‘Uighur people enjoy peaceful, harmonious coexistence with other ethnic groups of people,’ he insisted, dismissing the footage as ‘so-called Western intelligence’. Certainly nothing ‘peaceful’ or ‘harmonious’ marks the inmates’ daily routine. Morning is indoctrination. Inmates — hundreds of them, all shaven-headed — sit in a vast echoing room, listening to hours of lectures on the evils of religion. The instructors’ words are broken by rhythmic chanting of Communist Party slogans. All communication is in Chinese. For the inmates to mutter even a word in their own ancient language — a dialect similar to Uzbek — would be a sign of defiance and bring terrifying retribution.
The monotony of the lessons is mental torture. At the end of the class, inmates are asked ‘is there a God?’ The only permitted answer is ‘no’. Every waking moment is an onslaught on their cherished beliefs and traditions. The half-starved inmates are even forced to eat pork and drink alcohol, in defiance of their Muslim faith. Afternoon brings interrogations. To break their mental resistance, inmates are forced to watch others being tortured before their own sessions of questioning. They are made to denounce friends and family, to confess to fictitious crimes such as bomb-making and espionage, and to express abject contrition — even for such harmless acts as having a copy of the Koran. Any resistance brings beatings, electric shocks and sleep deprivation. Nakedness is another dehumanising tactic. Nudity is taboo in Islam, but prisoners of all ages are made to parade before each other and in view of the guards. For women, humiliating gynaecological inspections are mandatory. Rape is routine. The prettier younger women disappear at nights and weep silently during the day. An injection every 15 days appears to be forced contraception — monthly periods cease.Worst of all is the dreaded orange tabard. Prisoners assigned these soon disappear, never to be seen again. Rumour has it that they are murdered for their organs — kidneys, corneas, hearts and livers are looted from their bodies, to fund the lucrative international black market, or serve the needs of the Communist Party elite.
For the nine million other Uighurs living in the Western Chinese province of Xinjiang who are lucky enough not to be confined in such camps, life is another kind of prison. Every movement is under video camera surveillance backed up by intrusive searches. Police vans patrol the streets, searching for any sign of suspicious behaviour and mounting random checks. Checkpoints are every 200 yards. Worse are the ubiquitous plainclothes police, silently observing public behaviour. A single careless word or deed — perhaps a small show of faith — is punishable by incarceration and brain-washing. Little word leaks out of the fate of those who are taken away. Their families are sometimes told that they died in traffic accidents. Those who return are so traumatised that they rarely speak of their ordeal. Possession of any books, newspapers or any electronic material that could signal disloyalty to the Chinese regime is punished. No expression of religious belief is permitted. Almost all mosques, along with cemeteries, have been bulldozed. Mosques are empty shells, with worship staged only to deceive outsiders. Even a Koran or a prayer mat is a dangerous sign of disloyalty.The micro-management extends to household possessions. Kitchen knives with blades longer than four inches, for example, must be engraved with a barcode identifying the owner, and must be chained to a wall or table. Children are used as informers. School classes are shown Arabic script and asked if they recognise it.
Those who do have unwittingly highlighted that their families are believers who read the Koran. Such ‘disloyalty’ often leads to children being removed — in effect kidnapped — and sent to state-run boarding schools, even at the age of five. There they are indoctrinated to despise their families, religion, culture and native language. Asking about the fate of the people who have disappeared is dangerous. They are referred to as ‘yoq’, meaning ‘not around’. Incarceration in the concentration camps is called ‘studying’. The fate of women left at home when their menfolk are sent to the camps is particularly horrific. They are assigned a Chinese official to live in their home to monitor the family. These unwelcome guests intrude into every aspect of domestic life — and often insist on occupying the empty place in the marital bed.
Re: Uighurs in China are blindfolded and led to boxcars in drone footage.
Originally Posted by Vanoi
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