Report: ‘Mass Rape And Torture In China ‘Re-Education Camps’
By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent
(Worthy News) – Women in China’s “re-education” camps for Uighurs have been systematically raped, sexually abused, and tortured, the British broadcaster BBC reported Tuesday, citing survivors.
The investigation came after rights groups accused China’s Communist government of removing religious and other freedoms of the Uighurs. That reportedly culminated in an oppressive system of mass surveillance, detention, indoctrination, and even forced sterilization.
The policy flows from China’s President, Xi Jinping, who visited the Xinjiang region in 2014 following a terror attack by Uighur separatists.
Shortly after, according to documents leaked to the New York Times newspaper, he directed local officials to respond with “absolutely no mercy.”
The U.S. government said last month that China’s actions since amounted to “a genocide. Beijing denied the accusations and called reports of mass detention and forced sterilization “lies and absurd allegations.”
However, former detainees and a guard told the BBC they experienced or saw evidence of an organized system of mass rape, sexual abuse, and torture.
WOMEN REMOVED
Tursunay Ziawudun, who fled Xinjiang after her release and is now in the U.S., said women were removed from the cells “every night.”
They were allegedly raped by one or more masked Chinese men. She said she was tortured and later gang-raped on three occasions, each time by two or three men.
Ziawudun had spoken to the media before, but only from Kazakhstan, where she “lived in constant fear of being sent back to China,” she said.
She said she believed that if she revealed the extent of the sexual abuse she had experienced and seen and was returned to Xinjiang, she would be punished more harshly than before. And she was ashamed, she added.
Gulzira Auelkhan, who was detained for 18 months, also testified to constant rapes in the Chinese camp in which she was staying. She told the BBC that some women who were taken out of their cells at night never returned.
FOOD SHORTAGES
A former camp guard who spoke to British reporters outside of China via video link also talked about torture.
Prisoners were not given food if, for example, if they failed to memorize passages from a book about Chinese leader Xi Jinping, the guard claimed.
“Once we were taking the people arrested into the concentration camp, and I saw everyone being forced to memorize those books. They sit for hours trying to memorize text, everyone had a book in their hands,” he said on condition of anonymity.
Those who failed to do so were reportedly denied food or beaten. The prisoners were given clothes that indicated whether they had failed to memorize the passages one, two or three times.
More than 1 million Uyghur women are in concentration camps, which Beijing calls “re-education camps”, according to several estimates.
Last month social network platform Twitter blocked the account of the Chinese Embassy in Washington over what it called dehumanizing messages.
Twitter responded to an embassy ‘tweet’ stating that Uighur women in Xinjiang have been emancipated and are no longer “baby-making machines.”
Twitter said the January 7 tweet violated its policy. “The dehumanization of a group of people based on their religion, caste, age, disability, serious disease, national origin, race, or ethnicity,” is prohibited Twitter said.
China condemned the move and said it is a victim of “misinformation”.
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