A testimony from our “100 Camp Testimonies” Book
I am ethnically Uyghur, and I was born in 1989 in Cherchen County, southern East Turkistan. When I was twelve years old, I was sent to Guangzhou to study at a middle school, which was/is a part of the Chinese regime’s assimilation program: Sending Uyghur children to inner China at a young age. The purpose of this assimilation program was/is to immerse Uyghur children in Han Chinese schools, far away from their homes, their language, and cultural environments, so it was/is expected that they would embrace the Chinese way of life. Personally, this experience only made me more conscious of my Uyghur identity. The constant discrimination and humiliation I experienced as a young Uyghur girl in a Chinese school in southern China made me realize that I was different from the majority Han Chinese population.
After studying economics at Guangzhou University and working for a private company that did business with Arab countries, I was enrolled in December 2011 in the British University in Egypt to study business administration in Arabic, where I also met my husband. In March 2015, I gave birth to healthy triplets, two boys and a girl, who are Egyptian citizens. It was difficult taking care of my three babies and my parents insisted that I come back, so on May 13, 2015 I left for China with my three two-month-old triplets to seek help from my parents.
Upon arriving at the border control of Ürümchi airport, I was taken to a room for questioning and my babies were taken away from me. The authorities repeatedly asked me whom I met and talked to in Egypt. They then handcuffed me, put a duct tape over my mouth, and put a black hood over my head. They pushed me when I was getting in the police car, and as a result I got a broken nose and lost a lot of blood. They took me to the basement of a detention center, where I saw many foreigners through the iron fences. The police learned that I spoke Arabic, so they ordered me to translate for a Malaysian lady, whose husband was Uyghur and had already been detained. When the lady said that she wanted to contact the Malaysian embassy, they beat her very hard and said the embassy could get involved only if she could come out alive from there. They said, “This is China and we can do whatever we want according to the local law.” They interrogated me for three days, including nighttime. Then they locked me up in a dark room for seven days. After that, they took me to an upstairs cell, in which there were about thirty women. We ate steamed buns and cooked rice. We had to sing red songs (hongge 红歌 ‘Chinese patriotic songs’) and read Chinese books. Some women were locked up there just for having more children than it was allowed or for having expired ID cards.
One day in July 2015, I was released on parole because my children were sick. They told me that I could stay with them until they got better, but warned me that I was still under investigation. They kept my passport, ID card and mobile phone. I went straight to the hospital to see my children. My oldest son was in an intensive care facility and I could only see him through a glass window. I was not allowed to go near him.
The next day, a doctor told me that my son died due to health complications, and gave me his dead body. I noticed that all my three babies had been operated on their neck area while I was in the detention center. I was told that they had been fed through a tube that went through their necks since they could not eat. I was perplexed, for I had been breastfeeding them without any issues back in Egypt. My other two children had developed health complications and I spent the next few months seeking medical treatment, including an eye surgery for my daughter. I was not able to return to Egypt because all my documents had been confiscated by the Chinese authorities. I had also been blacklisted in the system: My ID card would set off a beep wherever I used it, e.g. in a hospital, pharmacy or even on the bus. So the police would check my identity and have to approve every step I took.
In April, 2017, the police detained me for the second time when I was at my parent’s home in Cherchen County. They took me to the Security Bureau of Cherchen County, where I was interrogated for three days (nighttime included). They would always ask me the same questions: “Who do you know abroad? Who are you close to? Which organization do you work for?” I suppose that my ill treatment was due to the fact that I had lived abroad and could speak a few foreign languages. They tried to label me as a spy. My mouth and nose would bleed due to their frequent beatings. They slapped me so hard that I lost my hearing in the right ear.
They forced me to take some medication twice, and checked my mouth with their fingers to make sure I swallowed them. I felt lethargic, less conscious, and lost my appetite after taking the medication. They also interrogated me while I was suffering from the side effects of the medication. They showed me the other rooms, where they were threatening two completely naked women with the police dog; I was scared to death. They took me to the county hospital for a check-up: blood, urine, X-ray, Ultra-sound etc. In the basement, they put me in a machine while being fully naked. They did a vaginal test, which caused an extreme pain. Ever since then, my period stopped for seven months.
They then sent me to an internment camp, where one female and two male officials examined my body while I was naked. They shaved my head and made me wear a blue prison uniform, which had the number 54 written on it. An official told me that this uniform was usually worn by serious criminals, who are sentenced to death or life imprisonment; besides, the number “54” is homophonous with the Chinese characters 我死 (wosi, ‘I die’ or ‘my death’). I was very scared, and I thought I would die in that place.
They threw me into an underground holding cell with no windows. There was an iron door that would open electronically through a computerized lock system. I saw a small hole in the ceiling for ventilation, and I was never taken outside for fresh air. When a guard opened the door, they would hold their nose because there was a toilet bowl placed in the corner the cell, with no lid, nor toilet paper. There were cameras on all sides, so the surveillants could see every corner of the cell, including the toilet area. There was one light in the cell that was always on.
There were around forty internees held in a forty-square-meter cell, so at night ten to fifteen women would stand while the rest would sleep on our side due to lack of space; we would rotate every two hours. There were people there who had not taken a shower for over a year. The first night was very difficult. As I was crammed on the floor with all these women, with shackles on my wrists and ankles, I thought about what it was that I did wrong, why I was there without any charges or explanations, what crime I committed, and whether I deserved such inhumane treatment.
Each morning at 5 a.m. we would be woken up by a loud alarm sound. We had to fold the six blankets that we shared. If the blankets were not folded neatly and did not look symmetrical, the whole cell would be punished: The guards would take away the blankets and we would have to sleep on the concrete floor. Before breakfast, which was very watery rice porridge with little rice in it, we had to sing red songs to praise the Chinese Communist Party and repeat the following lines in Chinese: “Long live Xi Jinping;” “Leniency for those who repent and punishment for those who resist.”
We were given seven days to memorize the camp rules and fourteen days to memorize the contents of a book on communist ideology. The women with weak voice, those who could not sing the red songs in Chinese, and those who failed to remember the specific camp rules were either denied food or got beaten up. We should speak the “national language” (i.e. Mandarin) instead of “Han language”, otherwise we would be slapped and denied food. We were supposed to receive three meals a day. The lunch was a steamed bun, but sometimes there was no food at all. For supper, we would have either a steamed bun or cooked rice. The steamed buns were getting smaller and smaller as the number of people detained kept increasing, and they were not freshly cooked, or rather they were hard or went bad. The guards would throw the steamed buns on the floor instead of giving them to us. We were never given fruit or vegetables.
We were forced to take some unknown pills and drink some kind of white liquid. The pills would cause us to lose consciousness and reduce our cognition. The white liquid would stop women’s menstruation, and for some it caused severe bleeding, and even death. Because we were never given water, we would quench our thirst when we were given these medicines, caring less about the potentially lethal consequences of taking them.
When I first entered the cell, which was cell No. 210, there were forty other women, aged between 17 and 62. It got more and more crowded in the cell: After three months (before I left), there were sixty-eight women. I knew most of the women in my cell. They were neighbors, daughters of my former teachers, and doctors, including one who had been educated in the United Kingdom and treated me in the past. They were mostly well-educated professionals.
The most horrific days for me were when I witnessed the suffering and death of my cellmates. The nighttime was the busiest time of day in the camp, e.g. swapping of people between cells and removals of dead bodies. In the silence of the night, we would sometimes hear men from other cells groan in agony. We would hear beatings, men screaming, and people being dragged in the hallways, as the chains on their wrists and ankles would make terrible noise on the floor. The idea that these men could have been our fathers or brothers was unbearable. I witnessed nine deaths in my cell during those three months. If my small cell, the No. 210, in a small county, could see nine deaths in three months, I cannot imagine how many deaths must have occurred across the region. These traumas caused me to have seizures, which I had never experienced before.
One victim was a sixty-two-year-old woman named Gulnisa. She had red rashes all over her body, her hands would tremble, and she could not eat anything. She seemed really sick but the doctors in the camp determined that she was fine. The doctors were expected to say this in the camp because if they had said an internee was sick, they would have been perceived as sympathetic towards or supportive of their patients. One night, Gulnisa was humiliated for not having memorized her lines in Chinese and she was crying when she went to sleep. She did not snore that night. Her body was cold when we tried to wake her up the next morning. Unfortunately, she died in her sleep.
There was another woman, whose name was Patemhan. She was twenty-three years old. Her mother had died, and her husband, father and brother were all taken to the camps. Her crime was attending a wedding back in 2014 that was held according to the Islamic traditions, so there was no dancing, singing, nor drinking alcohol. She said that all four hundred people who attended that wedding were arrested and sent to the camps. When she was taken to the camp, her two children were left behind in the backyard. She had already spent one year and three months in the camp, and she agonized every single day over the whereabouts of her children. She experienced frequent bleeding for over a month, but was denied medical treatment. One night, while she was standing with other women, she suddenly collapsed and stopped breathing. Several people with masks came and dragged her by her feet and took her away.
In the camp, once every week or ten days, they would interrogate us. When I was last taken to an interrogation room, which had an electric chair, also known as the “tiger chair”, a torture equipment that clamps down the wrists and ankles, used by police for interrogation, I was forced to sit in the chair, with my arms and legs locked in place and tightened by the pressing of a button, and a helmet-like thing was put on my head. There were belts and whips hung on the wall. Each time they electrocuted me, my whole body would shake violently, and I could feel the pain in my veins. I felt that I would rather die than go through any more of that, so I begged them to kill me.
They insulted and humiliated me, and pressured me to admit to my “wrongdoings,” even though I had never involved myself in any political activity when I was abroad. They also subjected to psychological torture: “Your mother died the other day, and your father will serve a life sentence in prison. Your son was in the hospital and he died as well. Your daughter’s eyes will remain cross-eyed permanently and she will be thrown in the street because you cannot take care of her. Your family is torn apart.” This caused me a great amount of distress, making me feel guilt and believe I was worthless. I cried and begged them to kill me. The last words I remember them saying was: “Being Uyghur is a crime.” And I fainted. When I regained consciousness, I found myself in the cell again. On the same day (i.e. June 9, 2017) after being tortured, I suffered from excruciating pain and struggled with the death of my cellmate Patemhan, and I passed out again.
When I regained consciousness, I found myself in a psychiatric hospital in Ürümchi. My right hand and left foot were chained to the bed. Later that day, my father and two policemen took me to Cherchen. Those two policemen stayed at our home for seven full days until I got a little better. They rotated with other policemen once a week. They slept and ate with us. When my father was not home, they would sexually harass me and my mother. We tried everything to make my father stay home.
In November 2017, I was detained for the third time and taken to a place like a prison, an internment camp. They forced me to put on a yellow uniform and told me that I had been sentenced. They gave me a pen and paper to write down my will. They said I had three choices: to die by taking lethal medication, to hang myself, or to be shot dead. For the last option I had to pay CN¥1800, which would be the price of three bullets. This time I was alone in the cell. Then they sent me to two other camps, where I saw women with injured hands due to forced labor.
After all this torture and suffering, I never thought I would make it out alive. I still cannot believe it. Two hours before being told that I would be released, I was given an unknown injection. I was very scared; I thought the injection would slowly kill me. I was surprised to still be alive when I was given a statement to read, which I also signed. I read and swore to their prepared statement as they filmed me. The statement was, “I am a citizen of China and I love China. I will never do anything to harm China. China has raised me. The police never interrogated, tortured, or detained me.” I was warned that I must return to China after taking my kids to Egypt, and that I must not forget that my parents, siblings, and other relatives were at the mercy of the Chinese authorities.
On April 5, 2018 I was released from the internment camp, and I was able to finally see my kids. I did not see my parents and was not allowed to ask about their whereabouts. I left my hometown three days later with my two children. I stayed in Beijing for about twenty days because I was denied boarding the plane three times due to missing “documents”.
On my fourth attempt at leaving China, I was able to board the plane, and I finally landed in Cairo on April 28.
I was lost and in pain, and I did not know what to do. I thought that my parents and siblings could be locked up in internment camps, and the Chine regime could kill them if I did not return to China. But if I did return, I would die in a camp, whereas the Chinese regime could still keep my family in the camps or kill them. In the end, I mustered up all my courage and decided to tell the world about China’s concentration camps, so that those people who tortured me and others would be held accountable and punished for what they had done.
I came to the United States on September 21, 2018. I was very confused, yet overwhelmed with joy that day. I now live in the United States with my two kids. I am still haunted by what I had seen and experienced in China’s internment camps, with sudden episodes of fear and anxiety. My children have physical and psychological health issues, who would get scared when someone knocks on the door and are afraid of getting separated from me. My body still bears the scars from the constant beatings, and I still have the pain in my wrists and ankles due to the shackles.
I lost hearing in my right ear because of the heavy beatings I received. I fear the dark, while too much light or noise would also make me uncomfortable. The police sirens would give me anxiety and cause my heart to beat faster or skip a beat. Sometimes, I experience shortness of breath, while my body goes numb and my heart starts to ache. I still have nightmares. Even though I was told that I am safe here, I feel afraid at night, thinking that the Chinese police would knock on my door and take me away and kill me. I also fear the fact that the Chinese regime is monitoring me. Once, a group of Chinese men followed me outside and continued to do so until I got into a car.
The Chinese regime forced my brother to reach out to me. He left a voice message on my cell phone: “How could you do this to your parents, to us? What kind of daughter are you? You should go to the Chinese Embassy right now and denounce all the things you said about the Chinese government in the interviews conducted by Radio Free Asia, and tell them you love China. Tell them you were pressured by the Uyghur organizations in the United States to lie about your detention and torture in the camps and take back everything you said. Otherwise, China can get to you wherever you hide.” I was terrified after hearing this message, believing that the Chinese regime could still threaten me from so far away. Today I still feel scared and think that they will try to hurt me.
