A testimony from our “100 Camp Testimonies” Book
I am ethnically Uyghur, and I was born on August 10, 1978 in Karboghay village, Kunes County, East Turkistan. I was sent to an internment camp twice. The first internment was from April 10, 2017 to May 15, 2017. The second internment was from March 10, 2018 to December 25, 2018. On September 26 2019, I left for Kazakhstan. Subsequently, I came to the USA.
First Internment
My husband is ethnically Kazakh, and he moved to Kazakhstan. I joined him in Kazakhstan in 2011. In 2016, I had to return to China as my Kazakhstani visa expired, accompanied by my husband. I wanted to get another visa so that I could return to Kazakhstan as soon as possible. When I went back to Kunes County, I was summoned to the police station many times. After the police confiscated both my husband’s and my passports, we realized that our plan to return quickly to Kazakhstan was not going to happen for a while, so we rented a house in Kunes County.
Around April 10, 2017, we received a phone call from the police station, telling us to stay put and wait outside our house. It didn’t take long before a police car showed up, and one policeman asked me to get in and told me that I had a meeting to attend. The policeman said I could return home after the meeting for it wouldn’t be long, to which I agreed. At that moment two policemen grabbed me by both arms and shoved me into their car.
They took me to the first camp, which at the time was still a school, and in its hall gathered around a thousand people, both males and females, including many elder people. I heard two camp staff ask what they should do and how they should proceed with so many people. We were told that they were going to arrange accommodation for us. Upon hearing this, I started crying and asked them why they wouldn’t let us leave and why they arrested us. They brought my husband to me and he told me that he would get me out. We were then taken to a room that looked like a student dormitory, into which I along with many other internees were crammed.
At that time, it seemed like the police just sprang into action and carried out mass arrests, for they were not prepared at all for dealing with so many people under arrest. It was an order from the higher-ups, commanding that a certain amount of people should be arrested in a given area. This piece of information was straight from the horse’s mouth, namely a policeman. He also said that they were just following the order from the higher-ups. The order was given out of the blue, for which the police did not make any preparations. Prison-like internment camps were not built yet around Kunes County, so some existing buildings were repurposed as an internment camp, i.e., our local secondary school was turned into a camp to hold a thousand people or so. We didn’t sleep that night, as we were all crying. The next day we ate in the school cafeteria. We were informed that we were going to attend class in two days.
Two day later, a man came to teach us law, and an imam also came to the camp and told us not to pray, stating that praying was wrong. He also told us not to wear a headscarf or skirt, not to believe in Allah (God), emphasizing that we had to believe in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
After hearing all that, none of us could accept what imam said. We were all shocked and scared, but we kept quiet. Every three or four days they would ask us what had changed in our minds and what we understood as wrong. They did not allow us to communicate in Uyghur, only in Mandarin Chinese. They said, “If you can’t speak Chinese, then don’t speak at all.” They would make us dance to communist red songs (hongge 红歌 ‘Chinese patriotic songs’) in the yard outside, and then make us learn the red songs that praised and glorified the CCP.
The food in the camp was very bad. I was not able to eat, for I was in a constant state of vomiting. A month later I fainted, and they took me to the hospital. The doctor said that I had experienced severe food poisoning, so I was admitted. During my stay at the hospital I was being watched. I cried to my husband on the phone every day. He went to the police station with my diagnosis multiple times, telling them that I was in poor health and that I would die if they continued to hold me in that camp. The police chief was Kazakh named Bakip, and he agreed that he would issue me papers so I could be released soon. After getting discharged from the hospital, I was taken back to the camp. In the course of one week, they transformed that place into a prison, a frightening sight to behold. They put me in a cell with seven or eight other women. The next day, circa May 15, 2017, I was released.
Roughly a month after my release, we went to the local police station to inquire about our passports. They would give back my husband’s passport only if I signed as a guarantor (which I did), but not mine. My husband went back to Kazakhstan circa June 15, 2017. He called me from Kazakhstan and told me not to worry, and that I should take care of myself and wait for his message. Since then I couldn’t contact him anymore. The police kept asking me where my husband was and when he was coming back.
The year 2017 was a scary time; I was worried all the time for the police were arresting people everywhere. I was so scared that I didn’t dare to walk on the street, not knowing when it would be my turn again. I thought I should be safe for I was arrested and sent to an internment camp once, hoping the police wouldn’t come back for me.
Second Internment
On March 8, 2018 a policeman called me, asking me to come over to the police station. The police already sent two of my brothers to internment camps. At the time, I still thought the conditions inside the camp would be the same. If I had known about the “new” cruel conditions, I would have killed myself, and I would not have agreed to go in. I would have killed myself for sure. I would rather kill myself than go through what I had gone through. I went to the police station on March 10, 2018.
Two policemen took me to the camp, and I entered through a newly installed gate. I noticed that the whole area around the camp was fenced off. My cell phone was taken away. There were already four big buses full of people at the gate when I arrived. Some people had children, and the police took them away by force and moved them to another bus, waiting to be sent somewhere else. Little did I realize that my torment had just begun.
As soon as I entered the door, there were two armed guards, one on each side. There was a machine that scanned people. In another room, there were two policemen doing a full body search on newly arrived internees, ripping off all their clothes. An elder woman in her 70s stood in front of me, whose long skirt and hijab were ripped off by the policemen, by the time they were done with her she was in her underwear and wearing a small vest. She tried to cover her breasts with both hands, but the policeman did not allow her to do that. She had to stand straight and let go of her hands. There were a lot of men there, and everyone could see her breasts. I can’t forget that utter humiliation to this day. I didn’t have time to take my earrings off, and they pulled them off so viciously that my ears started bleeding; they didn’t care one bit.
I was naive enough to think that they would be a little kind, a little compassionate, and a little merciful, but I couldn’t be more wrong. I told a policeman that it was my second time there, and asked him why the place had changed so much. He became very angry and shouted at me that I should shut up, saying that we were meant to suffer there. We were required to walk inside the yellow line. I was taken to a cell, in which there were more than twenty internees crammed inside. It was dark in the cell, where some of us slept on the floor, while others on the boards, and we were all very frightened. There was a small window in our cell, through which we could see the outside, and I saw people entering the camp. In the next four or five days, I reckon thousands of people were brought in.
We could only go to the toilet once a day, for only three minutes. There was a bucket, without a lid, in our cell that we could use for our bodily functions. One time a female internee was in the toilet, and when the policeman told her to come out quickly, she said she had an upset stomach, so the policeman went right in and beat her severely, which was frightening to us. Our holding cell was small in size, with no ventilation. There were two armed policemen at the entrance of each holding cell. The sanitary conditions in the camp were so appalling that you can’t even imagine. I once told a policeman that the bucket was toxic when left without a lid on. He replied that I should be glad that they did not make us drink what was inside.
In the cell across from us, there was a Kazakh woman who kept crying, saying that she was a citizen of Kazakhstan, and that she was not Uyghur and wondered why she was arrested. A policeman kept threatening her, saying to her that she would be taken away to a more horrible place, but she continued to cry. As a result, she disappeared after three days, and we didn’t know where she went. But we all knew that one thing was clear: There was no getting out of that camp during that time.
I was interrogated by the police many times. They asked me the same questions again and again, “Which organization have you contacted? What kind of relationship do you have with Uyghurs in the US?” They tied me to a stool and interrogated me. Even though I had been telling the truth, they did not believe what I told them. Later they took me to a different cell, newly built, which was made of iron. The corridor of that place was about two hundred meters long. There were a lot of people locked up in there. I could see inside those cells when I walked past them, and they were all very crowded, full of internees. There were armed policemen standing on both sides of the corridor, equipped with real bullets, and every five steps or so there was an armed policeman. There was nothing inside that cold iron cell—no blanket, nor mattress.
We were forced to take cold showers, and we all became sick. When I had a fever, I fell down and the camp guard went to call the woman who was in charge of us. When she came over, she was very angry and said, “Why didn’t you just die?” I was just thrown aside. I wanted to drink some water, but there was no water. They gave me instead the toilet water, which I did not drink.
Every night, some women would disappear. One of my cellmates was taken away at night and she never came back. In the opposite cell, a girl went mad one morning: She kept pulling her hair and slapping herself. Someone came and gave her a sedative drug, but she started hitting herself again after a while, so they took her away. They said they took her to the psychiatric hospital.
We, the internees from four or five holding cells, would be taken to a class together, and the “teachers” would brainwash us. They taught us the Chinese law and told us not to have children, emphasizing that those who would have children in the future would be punished. We went hungry, for they didn’t feed us that often.
We were given unknown injections. Every fifteen days they gave us injections and we also had to take some medication while being watched. The unknown injections and medication caused a lot of people to become delirious. After taking the medication, I just didn’t know anything, couldn’t think about anything, and couldn’t do anything. I was in a state of confusion. There were two types of pills that we had to swallow: One type made me feel really groggy and tired, while the other made me feel like there was something moving under my skin, and both types were white pills. They were given to us as “vitamins.” I would get very thirsty after taking those pills. Many female internees said that their menstruation stopped, and one woman named Aliye said that her menstruation stopped more than 8 months ago. On the contrary, another woman named Roshengül experienced hemorrhage, i.e., an excessive discharge of blood. I bled a lot not because of the pills, but due to the beatings. I think those two types of pills were used for contraception and mind control.
There was a big bus inside the internment camp, which I saw through the cell window. The bus was equipped with medical supplies and used to perform medical tests on the internees. I saw healthy people get on the bus and later get off the bus in a bad shape.
One woman was taken for interrogation and came back three days later. When she came back, she could only lie down, and she couldn’t stand up or sit up at all. One of the camp rules was to sit straight every day, and there was no way we would be allowed to lie down. The camp guards said that, maybe out of sympathy, she could lie down and rest for an hour. We all wondered what had happened to her, so the next day I went to ask her what had happened. She started crying while hugging me; she couldn’t say anything, just kept on crying. I thought she must have been beaten. When she went to take a shower, I saw her body and I knew what had happened to her.
On May 10, 2018 the interrogations started. I was taken to the interrogation room few days later. At the beginning they just interrogated me in that dark room, and I didn’t know what time it was. Later in the interrogation, they started beating me severely and pulling my hair. A Kazakh policeman brought me food, but I refused to eat it, and I started to resist. I asked him why he hadn’t asked my husband those questions, for he was the one who had taken me to Kazakhstan. I didn’t even know what World Uyghur Congress was at the time. We don’t have access to this kind of information in China, due to the great firewall. I was on the verge of a mental breakdown, so I pulled the policeman and told him all that.
A Han Chinese policeman came right into the room and kicked me right in the head, and I fell to the floor. He kept on kicking me in the stomach and the head, and I felt that my stomach would split open. He swore at me while he was kicking me, and he said, “All these Uyghurs are like this, and they should be treated like this.” He kept on kicking me until I passed out. I found myself in my cell again after regaining my consciousness. I felt like I was going to die, and all my inner organs ached. My cellmates took me to the toilet, and I realized that I bled a lot. My cellmates ran to the camp guards and told them that I was bleeding, and they didn’t care one bit, saying that it was normal. The pain in my stomach persisted for a month or two.
Even though I was in great pain, they took me in for questioning again in that same dark room. One of my cellmates was also taken for interrogation, but she was in the adjacent room. I heard her screaming so badly that I just assumed she was being beaten. It was such a miserable sound. The interrogator kept asking me questions, what I had done, and if I would confess to any wrongdoings. In the middle of the interrogation, some policeman said I was still bleeding, but they didn’t care and took me to the next room, in which there were three policemen.
They used a Taser on me, and they raped me by inserting iron bars, electric batons, and other equipment into my genitals. I have no words to describe the inhuman cruelty of the violence I was subjected to: They didn’t just beat me; they sexually assaulted me to satisfy their sexual desires. I can’t explain to you exactly what kind of equipment, anyway. It felt like pulling out your intestines and internal organs. I was raped by all three of them together. I remember it clearly. I must see them pay for what they did to me.
After the sexual assault, I became a walking corpse: My soul and heart were dead. The young lady who was tortured came back to our cell, and she was already delirious, like a mad person, not talking at all, not doing anything, nor saying anything. After being tortured myself, I realized why my cellmate’s body was so bruised and battered as if she was attacked by a few dogs. We were subjected to torture and abuse.
They gave us super thin rice porridge, with no real food. None of us had ever experienced such hunger. I was on my knees begging the police to give us something to eat. Once a female Uyghur cadre who was assigned to be our teacher took pity on me and went looking for food, but she only found a moldy bread, half of which I shared with another cellmate who looked at me pitifully, and we cried together while eating the bread.
The camp internees were divided into different categories, where each category has its own distinctly colored uniform. I wore the blue uniform and my camp conditions were more tolerable than those of others. When I was in the medical room of the internment camp, where I frequently went due to my health condition, I saw internees in red uniforms. Even in the medical room they had shackles around their wrists and ankles, whereas I was always allowed to be in the medical room without handcuffs. I could not begin to imagine how they were doing in their cells. I overheard the camp guards talking about the conditions in the cells of the internees in red uniforms: Meals were often not given there, many suffered from hunger, and some even died of starvation. We were also treated like this for a month, i.e., we were given very little food, consisting of black watery rice porridge with a small piece of bread.
They cut our hair, and we were forced to have intrauterine contraceptive devices (IUD) inserted. Before every meal, we would take the oath of loyalty to the communist party and thank China. Every day we were subjected to inhuman treatment and conditions, and some could not bear it and went mad, who would eventually end up in a psychiatric hospital (so we were told).
In September or October 2018 I was moved again to another cell in the same complex but different building, where I was held until my release. The number of internees held in these cells were always twelve. Through the small slit in the door I could see what was happening in the corridor. On both sides of this long corridor were our cells, and in the middle of the corridor there was a partition. At night, some men in suit would come with their masks on, though this was before the COVID-19 pandemic. They always appeared in the corridors, accompanied by policemen or camp guards.
At first, I thought it was some security check. It was highly likely that these people were actually selecting female internees for the purpose of committing gang rapes. At night I would see them coming and going with a couple of female internees through the corridors. Among those men, I saw the man who raped me. I came to this conclusion—that they were committing gang rapes—because almost every day such visits of masked men in suits would take place only at night. Usually in the camp, when female internees were taken to the interrogation rooms, where there were no cameras installed, they would satisfy their sexual desires. Torture, abuse, and sexual assaults would often take place in the interrogation rooms.
Our so-called teachers would come and make lists of people with different occupations, for example, one list with people in the textile industry. At that time, we considered this as a chance to get out of the camp, and would be very happy to be on these lists. Now I know that the people on those lists were/are used for forced labor. I was lucky that one of my teachers, a Kazakh, warned me about it and told me not to register myself for those lists, as many of those women would never come back. I listened to her and didn’t sign up for any list.
One day, they came with a list of internees who had relatives abroad, on which I was also included. I didn’t know that my husband was fighting for my release in Kazakhstan. On December 24, 2018 (the day before my release) I was once again taken to the interrogation room, and I thought they were going to abuse me all over again. However, to my surprise, they were abnormally decent and questioned me in an acceptable manner, after which I was taken away for interrogation. However, this time the interrogation took place in a classroom and not in an interrogation room. Two police officers (or they could be intelligence officers), a Kazakh woman and a Han Chinese woman named Li Lan, were waiting for me in the classroom. They kept telling me all day what I should say to others when asked about the conditions in the “reeducation” center (i.e. internment camp). They told me that I should thank the communist party and tell everyone outside that I had enjoyed the “reeducation” program, and that it was such a success. I signed my two-page long confession letter, and they also made a video recording of me, in which I thanked and praised the communist party. I should have been happy that day as it was the day before my release, but at nighttime all I did was cry, thinking of my cellmates in the camp.
With regard to the internees that died in the camp, I can tell you that one of my cellmates, female, died due to abnormal uterine bleeding and was taken away. We could see people in white hazmat suit taking dead bodies away from other cells. During my internment, an estimation of over 100 women had died in the camp.
In-home Police Monitoring after My Release
On the day of my release, my sister came to the camp, accompanied by two police officers. I got my ID card back, and we went to my sister’s house. I became indignant when the police officers said that they would spend the night, but my sister said to me, “Be glad that you are out! Let them sleep here.”
I rented an apartment in an area approved by the police. Two police officers, one man and the other woman, lived with me. After a month, they let me call my husband, who was in Kazakhstan. They did not give me back my old cell phone, or other belongings. I should buy everything anew. During the first call, I couldn’t talk at all, just cried. After a few days, I was told that I should call my husband again and tell him that I was fine. They said they would shoot some videos of, capturing all my “happy” moments, e.g., my happy moment while shopping in the supermarket, and my happy moment while wandering around the city. They also returned my passport, but it was invalid, and I had to apply for a new one. I knew how hard it was, as a Uyghur, to apply for a passport, so I told them that I wasn’t going anywhere. To my surprise, they said that I could get a passport real fast, and that I didn’t have to deal with or go through any bureaucratic hurdles. It turned out to be true. I just had to go from one government department to another to collect all the necessary approval stamps and signatures. I could not believe that they let me out of the country.
During the month of Ramadan (the holy month of fasting in Islam), they wanted me to drink alcohol with them, and I said I couldn’t because I was sick. They still forced me to drink a sip of alcohol during Ramadan. Moreover, they filmed me drinking alcohol and published it on WeChat. I want to say to Uyghurs in the diaspora communities that please don’t criticize our people when you see them drinking alcohol with a happy face on WeChat or other Chinese social media. It is highly likely that they were forced to do so.
When I received my new passport, they filmed me again, forcing me to be a part of their propaganda. They scanned my face, recorded my voice, and drew my blood. After having done everything they had asked for, I applied for a Kazakh visa, which was a long and complicated procedure. I was granted the visa on September 24, 2019, and I traveled to Kazakhstan on September 26, 2019.
The regional police officer who had monitored me contacted me soon after I arrived in Kazakhstan. They initially sent me a message, commanding that I should avoid talking to strangers and keep my mouth shut about what had happened in the internment camp. They also threated to detain my relatives back in East Turkistan. Someone even set fire to my house in Kazakhstan.
I feared for my life, so I decided to go to the U.S. Consulate in Almaty. I explained to them my whole situation and told them what was happening to me, and that I was being threatened and the Chinese regime would not give me any peace even in Kazakhstan. I still had the Chinese citizenship and could be deported or repatriated to China at any time by the Kazakh authorities. The U.S. Consulate in Almaty assured me that I would not be deported, but they also said that they couldn’t guarantee to bring me to the US.
I experienced pain and some other complications while in Kazakhstan, so I continually went to the doctor. I considered a hysterectomy, but it was expensive. I thought I was going to die. At last, I was operated in the US; moreover, I was also diagnosed with tuberculosis, another disease developed during my internment. Do not believe a word of the Chinese propaganda targeting me as I have all my medical records showing that I was operated only in the US.
