A testimony from our “100 Camp Testimonies” Book
I was born on June 29, 1979 in Ghulja, East Turkistan. I moved to Kazakhstan in 2014. In 2017, I returned to East Turkistan to visit my daughter (ten months old), at which time I had a Kazakhstan green card, and I still had my Chinese passport.
On July 17, 2017, I was arrested upon entry to East Turkistan at the Khorgas border checkpoint and my passport was confiscated on the spot by a group of policemen, who said that I could not return to Kazakhstan anymore, without stating the reason why. I was taken for interrogation by the local police. They took me to my village of origin, about fifty miles from the Khorgas border checkpoint, and it was the longest drive of my life. I was very emotional and cried a lot in the police car. They dropped me off at my brother-in-law’s house.
The next morning, I had to go to the local police station. I went to meet the head (Uyghur) of the fourth unit of the Dolan farm in Ghulja, and asked him for my passport. He refused to give me back my passport, and said I needed to attend a “reeducation” program for fifteen days. But I wanted to visit my dying father first. He told me not to worry, for the reeducation would only be fifteen days. I asked him if I could go to my brother-in-law’s house to pick up some clothes and other stuff, but he denied my request. They drove me straight from his office to the internment camp.
Upon entering the internment camp, I was given the camp uniform: a red T-shit, black pants, and a pair of sneakers. They cut my hair short, gave me some injection, and drew my blood. They periodically drew our blood, and I had no idea why they did that. I was told the injection was a “flu shot” that cost CN¥250. They forced me to sign the consent form for the injection. I was then given hot water to drink for three days. I felt the effects of the injection, which altered my senses. Before getting the injection, I would miss my daughter a lot, but after the injection I could only think of food, and it was hard to think about other things.
A week after the injection they said, “You do not know it yet, but after a year and a half, the injection will show its results.” After receiving the injection, our menstrual cycles were disrupted, and many female internees even stopped menstruating. This happened to me as well. Now, my period lasts fourteen days, while in the past it used to last three to five days. I have children, but after leaving the internment camp, I’m no longer able to conceive another child, i.e., I’m sterilized. I think that was what they meant when they said that after about a year, we would see the results of the injection. I also do not feel well, feeling lethargic all the time and experiencing severe headaches. We were also forced to take unknown pills on a regular basis.
Eventually, I found out that I was going to be “re-educated” for a year, not fifteen days as I was told. I tried to explain to them that I had a travel permit, but they did not care. They said that it was their prerogative to hold me there as I am a Chinese citizen. Inside the camp, everyone must introduce themselves and confess to their “crimes.” For instance, I said that I was there because I had visited Kazakhstan. They asked if I had relatives in Kazakhstan, in the police force, in the legal system, or in prison, and also asked how many children I had, etc. They notably asked why my brother Samedin was given a religious name. They asked me many questions and made a record of my answers. In that camp, they kept asking me the same questions over and over. I was interrogated about nineteen times during my internment. There were many Kazakhs held in that camp. Once, a security official told me that Kazakhstan was on a list of twenty-six “dangerous countries,” which should not be visited. I asked other Kazakh internees why they were interned, they told me that it was because they visited family members in Kazakhstan, made phone calls to foreign countries, etc.
From July to November 2017 I was held in a “reeducation” center known as the Ghulja County vocational school, i.e., effectively an internment camp. It was one of several internment camps in which I was coercively held. In this camp, I believe there were eight hundred female internees, and I did not see any male internees there except for some security officers. The camp guards were females, but their superiors were males. In a classroom within the camp, there were about fifty internees, with three teachers and two security guards. There were surveillance cameras installed everywhere, surveilling us around the clock. We studied Mandarin for 45 minutes every day. We were taught and forced to say communist slogans, “I love China,” “I love Xi Jinping,” etc. We had to write down our feelings and gratitude towards Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Once a week they would grade our writings and tell us if we passed. They told us that our priority was learning Mandarin, after which we could get a good job, like working for the government, but even then, we knew that was ridiculous.
In the camp, we were held in a long hall, like a sort of shed, where each hall held thirty-three internees. By the way, there were a lot of disabled internees. We had to make our beds every morning and fold the blankets without a wrinkle within three minutes. It was as if we were in the army. If the inspector did not like how I made my bed, he would take my bedsheet to the toilet in the corner and throw it in. Each night, we had to take turns every two hours to keep watch. The camp guards treated us badly: They beat and humiliated us. They were always punishing people, even those who were disabled. Zainura, a cellmate of mine, could not even go to the toilet after being subjected to the guards’ punishments. They did not care about our health, so everyone’s health kept deteriorating. Sometimes we also had to change cells.
Some cells had a toilet, while others only had a bucket. So, if you were sent to a cell without a toilet, you had to use the bucket for your bodily functions. At night, we could not talk to each other at all, or else we would be punished. Even if you wanted to kill yourself, you could not, because you were being monitored everywhere. We were not allowed to cry, and if we were caught crying, they would say, “You have evil thoughts in our minds.” We could sometimes hear screams echoing. We had to go to the toilet in pairs, so that one could keep an eye on the other, which was to prevent forbidden religious expression like ablution, i.e. the washing of the body before a religious activity, like praying. Once, I accompanied an older lady to the toilet and she accidentally splashed urine on her feet. The guards noticed that she had rinsed herself and they considered it as an ablution, so they punished me, i.e., they handcuffed my hands behind my back for twenty-four hours. The toilet visits should be kept under two minutes, and if we took more time in the toilet, they would inflict electric shocks on us by using stun guns, which happened to me five or six times as I was slow.
We were taken to a Women & Infants Hospital for medical check-ups. Ten days after I arrived in the camp, the policemen called us by our names and divided us into groups of 10 to 20 before herding us onto the buses. We wrote our names and gave our fingerprints. They made us take off all our clothes. They did all sorts of examinations, like ultrasound, scans, and blood tests. They inserted something inside me. I did not know whether it was an injection or something else. I was stressed, and I felt uncomfortable even hours after the medical exam. They did not tell us anything about the tests, nor results.
In early October 2017, the camp was overcrowded for about five days. There were so many people that they gave us only a boiled egg and hot water for breakfast, sometimes with steamed buns. One of our teachers asked some of us to help out in the kitchen as the cooks could not manage to prepare food for so many people. I volunteered to help. In the kitchen there was a Hui woman, a Muslim, who was a cook and had been working there for two and a half years. When I went outside with her to dump the trash, she told me to drink a lot of water when eating the boiled egg, for the eggs were injected with some substance before they were served. I thanked her for the warning with tears in my eyes. During those five days, we went to the toilet outside. Once, on my way to the outhouse I saw two big storage cellars, like the ones used for storing vegetables, where there were piles of car tires stacked around the entrance. There were also holes that were about the length of a human body. I asked a teacher about these holes, and she said, “It is a place where we deal with the dead bodies.” I was shocked and felt sick. She continued, “Obey the rules, do whatever they say and try to get out in one piece.”
I was interned in four different facilities over the course of 437 days. In November 2017, they took me to the second camp, which looked like a new hospital, but repurposed as a camp I believe; it was fenced off with barbed wire. This camp was one of the “reeducation” centers of the Ghulja region. We could talk to our relatives once a week on the phone, and they could visit us once a month. We could only see and talk with our relatives through a wire mesh fence. They fed us plain rice and steamed buns, but we never felt full. Once, on a Chinese holiday, they made us eat pork. They actually forced us to eat pork, and if you refused, as I did once or twice, they would put shackles on you and lock you up because your ideology was wrong and you must become friends with the Chinese people. They would also handcuff you and strap you into the “tiger chair”, a torture equipment, and ask you, “Why did you refuse to eat this food provided by the communist party?” They would also reprimand you, and if you continued to resist eating pork, they would take you to another harsher facility, so eventually I stopped resisting. They made us eat pork to “bring us closer” to them, the Han Chinese, to be a part of the Chinese nation. Moreover, sometimes the camp guards would make us burn Korans.
Most of my cellmates were Uyghur women. In this camp (my second camp), conjugal visits were apparently allowed. My husband was in Kazakhstan, but for those whose husbands were available (not taken to the camps), they could meet up once a month for two hours at the camp. A room, installed with surveillance cameras, would be provided and they would be left alone; moreover, the husbands were told to bring bedsheets. Before seeing their husbands, the female internees were given a pill. The camp officials forced every woman who had a husband to arrange conjugal visits. Even an old woman had to lie in bed for two hours with her husband. According to other internees, their husbands had a medical procedure performed on them before the conjugal visits, i.e., the semen was taken from them with a syringe, which caused them pain and made them unable to pass any urine.
Sometimes, unmarried internees (i.e. singles, the divorced, and widows) would be taken away at night, who then would be chained to a bed and raped violently. Among these victims, many did not return to their cells. I know about this because from January til June of 2018 I worked as a cleaner in the camp. I was a normal “student” (i.e. internee) like the others during the day, but at night I was a cleaner. I used to clean the conjugal visiting room, and only then did I find out about the rapes.
What I’m about to describe was a routine that I followed while working as a cleaner in the camp. When a camp employee brought in a female internee to the conjugal visiting room, she would write down her name in Chinese and I would take her fingerprints. I would help her to take off her clothes, leaving only her underwear on. I also would restrain her hands with the chains. I was not allowed to talk to her. Then a Han Chinese man would enter the room, and I would go sit silently next to the door in the hallway. Upon him leaving the room, I would take her to a bathroom for shower. There was nothing I could do but obey the order. If I had refused to obey the order, they would have sent me to another worse internment camp.
The only thing that saved me from getting raped was my marriage certificate. Although the female internees who were taken to that room did not speak to me, I knew they were either divorced or widowed because my cellmates who were divorced or widowed were forced to do the same thing. I continued doing this task for six months. Once, I was in that room mopping the floor, and there was a man there. I asked him to move his feet so I could clean the floor, but he replied, “I paid to come here, and it is up to me if I want to move my feet or not.” All of those men who went to that room were Han Chinese, who were very frank and open about what was going on in the room. They would tell those poor women that nobody could help or rescue them. Many young women disappeared, meaning they were taken away from their cells and they never returned, while different women were brought in to take their places. We were often assembled in a hall when leaders or officials visited the camp, so we would recognize one another and we would know if someone had disappeared.
In July 2018, they transferred me to the third camp, which was an ordinary school repurposed as a “reeducation” camp, i.e., an internment camp. In this camp, there were no toilets, so we had to use buckets for our bodily functions. Here too, they would interrogate us, asking us about our husbands and children, and sometimes, they would take away three or four female internees at a time, who would then never come back.
In August 2018, I was sent to the fourth internment camp, i.e. the last one. They kept promising us that we would be released eventually. On October 6, 2018, some ethnically Kazakh officials came to the camp, and one of them said that good news was coming our way. The next day, I was released along with other 250 women or so, about 150 of whom were Kazakhs. One camp official said, “Kazakhstan and China are friends, and we should maintain this good relationship. You will be treated in a friendly way, but watch out for dangerous ideas, which are coming from Kazakhstan. Only say good things about the camp.” We knew there was a threat implied in his words. If someone is sent to an internment camp, their relatives could also end up in one.
After my release (October 7, 2018), I was taken to Ghulja village. A ceremony was held for me and other women from the village. The regime officials made each of us say nice things about the internment camps. They told the locals about my “achievements” and how I became well-educated. At last, I went to my father’s village, but even there my sister-in-law was forced to spy on me by the Chinese authorities. I didn’t get to stay for more than five days at my father’s house because the local officials gathered all the women in the area who were from Kazakhstan, including me, and told us that from then on we would be working in a factory.
I started making gloves in a factory. We were told the products were being exported and sold to foreigners. If we had refused to work there, we would have been sent to an internment camp again, so we had no choice anyway, i.e., we were used for forced labor. They made me sign a contract indicating that I agreed to work at that factory for a year, but I ended up working there for a month and a half. In total, I made more than two thousand gloves, and earned a meager CN¥220 (roughly US$34).
When I worked at the glove factory, I had my phone with me as it was given back to me. After more than a year of internment, I could talk to my husband again. One day, I took a picture of the factory and sent it to him, and he published the picture elsewhere. As a result, I was interrogated for a whole night, but eventually they let me go. My husband’s relatives were angry with me and him on account of what we had done, so they sent messages to my husband telling him to stop complaining and that he should praise China and thank the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). I was taken back to my father’s place in January 2019, and I saw him again, probably for the last time as he was in bad shape. The police told my family that I should not speak about the camp or my father would be arrested. They took photos of us drinking tea together. They then took me back to the village head’s office and forced me to write a thank you letter, thanking and praising the CCP for “re-educating” me for a year and a half. Finally, they took me to the border, where they interrogated me yet again for another four hours, after which they let me cross the border into Kazakhstan.
Even today I am still suffering from the traumas of the internment. I always feel tired, and I have kidney problems according to a doctor. I was lucky because my husband was fighting for my release when I was forced to work at that glove factory. He made video testimonies via Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights Organization, testifying for my internment in China.
On an equally heart-wrenching note, I would like to talk about my son’s death. My son disappeared on November 11, 2011 and we didn’t find him until four months later. He was sold to a Han Chinese woman, and among the six children who disappeared at the time, my son and another child were found safe and sound, while the rest remained to be missing. However, there were rumors that children’s organs were being harvested and sold in inner China. Personally, I was not aware of any such cases. About a year after we found my son, he died. I suspect he was given injections because he used to be a healthy and active boy.