Kazakhs Won’t Be Silenced on China’s Concentration Camps

Activists are speaking out for those imprisoned in East Turkestan—even if their own government doesn’t like it.
BY REID STANDISH, AIGERIM TOLEUKHANOVA

Gulnur Kosgeulet shows a photo of her husband, Ekpor Sorsenbek, whom she believes is in a concentration camp in East Turkestan, in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on Jan. 21. 

ALMATY, Kazakhstan—Gulzira Auelkhankyzy remembers little about the January day when she was released from East Turkestan’s vast network of concentration camps. 

Auelkhankyzy, an ethnically Kazakh Chinese citizen, spent 15 months inside an internment camp, where she was regularly interrogated, forced to give blood, and required to learn Chinese and Communist Party songs. 

Auelkhankyzy was then coerced into signing a contract and sent to a “black factory” in October 2018, where she worked long hours sewing gloves for a measly wage. 

By the time Auelkhankyzy was taken to the border with Kazakhstan, she said, she was so exhausted and sick from her ordeal that she can barely remember the crossing.
Now back in Kazakhstan, she has joined the growing chorus of voices speaking out against the sweeping internment program in China’s western colony of East Turkestan, where United Nations human rights officials estimate the Chinese currently hold a million or more Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities. 

It’s causing uproar among Kazakhs—and sparking heavy-handed pushback from a government that is more interested in maintaining good relations with Beijing than protecting its own people.
Auelkhankyzy credits her freedom to her husband, who is a Kazakh citizen, and his efforts in lobbying the Kazakh government for help and raising attention to her case on social media and by speaking to local and international journalists. 

Like many Kazakhs and Uighurs in China, Auelkhankyzy does not read Chinese. 

When she first learned of her release, Auelkhankyzy was forced to sign pages of documents that she did not understand before having her passport returned to her. 

She was told by Chinese officials that her relatives in China would face consequences if she spoke about the camps once back in Kazakhstan. 

Her two daughters and her elderly parents are still in East Turkestan. 

Despite the threats, however, she insists on speaking out about what she experienced.
“I know how awful these camps are, and I want the world to know about them,” Auelkhankyzy said during an interview in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city. 

“In Kazakhstan I can speak about this, so I am doing it on behalf of those still trapped in East Turkestan.”
The plight of ethnic Kazakhs in China has become the source of growing uproar inside Kazakhstan, with the testimonies of former detainees such as Auelkhankyzy fueling a growing guerrilla advocacy campaign inside the Central Asian country of 18 million people. 

The grassroots effort has turned authoritarian Kazakhstan, which has been overseen by President Nursultan Nazarbayev since 1989, when it was still part of the Soviet Union, into an unlikely battleground for the truth about the political indoctrination camps in East Turkestan.
The groundswell has also left the Kazakh government walking a tightrope between appeasing Beijing—a strategic, economic, and political partner—and quelling an increasingly exasperated segment of the population focused on the fate of their relatives and ethnic brethren in neighboring China.

The Kazakh government has avoided criticizing China and publicly toes Beijing’s line about the camps, but behind the scenes, Kazakh diplomats have grown increasingly active in working for the release of the country’s own citizens and ethnic Kazakh Chinese citizens with ties to Kazakhstan.
Interviews conducted by Foreign Policy with 60 other people in Kazakhstan, including former detainees, those with firsthand knowledge of the concentration camps, and people who believe their relatives are in detention in East Turkestan, show the devastating imprint of the camps and how powerful public outrage has been.
“Our government is dependent on China, but they’re also dependent on public opinion,” said Andrey Grishin, a researcher at the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, a nongovernmental organization based in Almaty. 

“Now, they’re stuck balancing between the two.”

Orynbek Koxebek, a Kazakh citizen born in China who spent 125 days in a concentration camp, shows a East Turkestan identification document and photos in Almaty on Jan. 21. 

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kazakhstan opened its doors to ethnic Kazakhs scattered outside its borders as part of a repatriation program that offered a pathway to citizenship. The influx has mostly come from neighboring Central Asian countries and China, but the flow of immigration has also left families divided across the border and separated by multiple citizenships and residence statuses.
That made life hard for many Kazakhs in China. 

Spending time in a foreign country, even a close neighbor like Kazakhstan, is one of the many warning flags used by Chinese security forces to determine who to imprison. 

As Beijing’s dragnet has expanded from Uighurs to other Muslim minorities, ethnic Kazakhs have been increasingly targeted for visiting family across the border. 

Bureaucratic excuses such as collecting a pension or signing documents to finalize their status outside of China were often used to force their return to East Turkestan. 

Other detainees include naturalized Kazakh citizens born in China, with Beijing refusing to acknowledge that they had relinquished their Chinese citizenship, according to multiple interviews conducted by FP.
“I told them that I was a Kazakh citizen and no longer had a Chinese passport, but they didn’t care,” said Orynbek Koxebek, a Kazakh citizen born in China who was released in April 2018 after spending 125 days in a concentration camp. 

His Kazakh passport was taken from him and that he was beaten and waterboarded for failing to learn Chinese at the indoctrination camp, resulting in suicide attempts and lingering trauma. 

He was forced to sign documents in Chinese that he did not understand, which he later learned were forms to re-open his Chinese citizenship.
“I’m thankful to the Kazakh diplomats that helped get me released,” Koxebek said, “but China has ruined my life.”
Beijing’s influence is a charged issue in Kazakhstan. 

Popular anger over China was the gist of widespread protests across Kazakhstan in 2016 due to fears that a proposed legislative change would allow Chinese interests to buy up land in the country. 

As more ethnic Kazakhs have been caught up in the camps in East Turkestan, Astana is keen to avoid any similar flashpoints that could turn into another popular outpouring.
“Kazakhstan needs Chinese investment, and the government would have preferred to have this stay on the sidelines, but it has grown too big,” said Nargis Kassenova, a Central Asia expert and senior fellow at Harvard University. 

“Public opinion is definitely getting worse, and anti-Chinese sentiments are growing.”
Despite reluctance on the part of Kazakh authorities to defy Beijing, the government has lobbied hard for its own citizens in order to ease mounting civic pressure.
After initially pleading ignorance, Kazakh delegations have made several visits to East Turkestan, and the Kazakh Foreign Ministry began offering press briefings to show that it is active on the issue. Official accounts remain rosy, but high-level meetings have been followed by news of fresh releases, although the official line from both countries stressed that the detained Kazakhs were the result of bureaucratic problems due to dual citizenship.
This diplomacy has paid off for some of those imprisoned. 

A couple weeks after an early November 2018 meeting between then-Kazakh Foreign Minister Kairat Abdrakhmanov and China’s Ambassador Zhang Xiao, the Kazakh Foreign Ministry announced that 29 citizens had been detained in East Turkestan, of which 15 have been released. 

This was followed by an announcement in December 2018 by the Kazakh Foreign Ministry that China had given the green light to 2,500 ethnic Kazakhs to abandon their Chinese citizenship and come to Kazakhstan. 

The development was framed as a purely administrative issue, and no details were provided about how or when the move would take place.
These figures were updated on Monday when Kazakh Foreign Minister Beibut Atamkulov announced that 20 Kazakh citizens had now been freed out of a total of 33 from the camps. 

He also noted that the ministry has received more than one thousand letters from citizens appealing to the government to help relatives located in re-education centers in neighboring East Turkestan.
Other accounts attest to a more active, upstream role played by Kazakh diplomats in East Turkestan. One naturalized Kazakh citizen, who requested anonymity in order to protect relatives still in East Turkestan, credits the Kazakh government for helping secure his exit from China. 

The person returned to China in 2013 after gaining citizenship in Kazakhstan and had their Kazakh passport seized upon re-entry. 

In May 2018, the person was told by a colleague that because they had spent time in a foreign country, they would be sent to a camp. 

The Kazakh consulate in Urumqi, the regional capital of East Turkestan, issued a temporary passport for the person and pushed the Chinese government to issue an emergency visa, which allowed them to leave for Almaty by bus.
“If it wasn’t for Kazakhstan, I’d be in a camp right now,” they added.

Kazakhs with family members missing in the camp system in neighboring East Turkestan show documentation at Atajurt Eriktileri’s offices in Almaty, Kazahkstan, on Jan. 21. 

While the Kazakh government has worked behind the scenes to secure some releases from the camps, it has also begun to exert pressure at home against activists raising awareness about the situation in East Turkestan.
Serikzhan Bilash, the head of Atajurt Eriktileri (“Homeland Volunteers”), an organization of volunteer activists and family members whose relatives have disappeared in East Turkestan, was fined 252,000 tenge (about $700) in February for operating an unregistered organization. 

Bilash said that he tried to register Atajurt several times since it was founded in 2017 but was denied by the Ministry of Justice. 

Despite being unregistered, Atajurt faced few obstacles until earlier this year, when in late January a group of Kazakh intellectuals, citing harm caused to Kazakhstan’s relationship with China, called in an open letter for the organization to be closed. 

A legal case was launched against Bilash a few days later.
Atajurt, which Bilash says has documented close to 10,000 cases of ethnic Kazakhs who have been detained, has been successful in raising awareness about the camps in East Turkestan. 

Bilash intends to appeal his recent fine and will attempt again to officially register Atajurt, but he said that the organization will continue to be a target for further legal actions so long as it continues its sensitive work.
“I think they will stop us. They will try to close our organization,” Bilash said in an interview. 

“We collected so many testimonies and shared them with the world. That makes us a big enemy for the Chinese government.”
A litmus test for Kazakhstan’s difficult balancing act is the case of Sayragul Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh Chinese national who illegally fled to Kazakhstan after being forced to work at a camp where she says around 2,500 ethnic Kazakhs were being held for indoctrination. 

In August 2018, a court refused to extradite her back to China, in what many commentators saw as a rebuke of Beijing by Astana. 

However, her asylum claim has since been denied twice, leaving her future status in Kazakhstan up in the air. 

Keeping her in Kazakhstan could strain ties with Beijing, but Sauytbay’s case has become a cause célèbre, and deporting her could spark new protests.
Sauytbay recently fired her lawyer, whom she says was absent at crucial times during her case and encouraged her to stay quiet. 

During an interview with FP in January, Sauytbay said that she has received threats against speaking out and feared that Astana could succumb to pressure from Beijing and send her back to China
Sauytbay’s new lawyer is Aiman Umarova, a prominent human rights lawyer who was presented an International Women of Courage Award last year by U.S. first lady Melania Trump. 

Umarova told FP in an interview that her client continues to face intimidation against speaking publicly about what she witnessed while working at a camp. 

According to Umarova, Kazakh security officials have pressured Sauytbay against taking on new legal representation and even encouraged her to publicly discredit both Bilash and Atajurt on national television. 

As she prepares a new legal strategy, Umarova said that she fears pushback from Kazakh authorities intended to remove her from the case and silence Sauytbay.
“They will do everything to stop me from being her lawyer and create problems for [Sauytbay],” Umarova said. 

“They can extend her case, deny her asylum application, and then she can just disappear.”
One ethnic Kazakh Chinese national, who also crossed into Kazakhstan illegally in the spring of 2018 and spoke to FP on the condition of anonymity, said that they are watching the outcome of Sauytbay’s case closely. 

They said they were stopped at the border in East Turkestan by Chinese authorities while trying to enter Kazakhstan legally and were then detained and extensively interrogated about their ties to the country and loyalty to China. 

After learning that their name was added to a list of people slated to be sent to a concentration camp, the person said they decided to flee East Turkestan illegally. 

They are hesitant to come forward because they believe that the Kazakh government will deport them back to China.
“Recognizing someone from East Turkestan as a refugee would mean acknowledging that the camps and the abuses in them are real, which would contradict Beijing,” said Aina Shormanbaeva, the president of the International Legal Initiative, an NGO based in Almaty that provides legal assistance to Kazakh families with relatives currently in concentration camps. 

“The [Kazakh] government’s strategy for now is to avoid any decision or action when it comes to people like [Sauytbay], but it is very possible that she gets sent back to China.”

A Uighur woman walks on a street of the old town in Kashgar, in East Turkestan, on July 16, 2013. 

For the families separated by the camps in East Turkestan, however, advocacy remains one of the few options available. 

Despite growing internal pressure on them in Kazakhstan, many activists and family members feel that their efforts are bearing fruit.
On a snowy afternoon in January, relatives of Dina Iemberdi, a 25-year-old ethnic Kazakh artist who is a Chinese citizen, received word that she is now under house arrest after being sent to a camp in February 2018. 

Iemberdi is still in East Turkestan, and there is no word yet if she will be allowed to come back to Kazakhstan, but for her relatives lobbying for her freedom the news was cause for tears of joy. Iemberdi joins hundreds of other ethnic Kazakhs in China who have been released from detention camps and placed under house arrest in recent months.
Other families remain in the dark about their relatives’ fate in East Turkestan but see value in publicly advocating for them despite the risks it entails.
After not hearing from Meiramgul Togzhan, an ethnic Kazakh journalist in East Turkestan, for more than one year, her two daughters and son-in-law posted a video appeal on Atajurt’s YouTube channel pleading for news of her whereabouts. 

Within a few hours, they received a call from Togzhan, saying that she is fine and that they should stop asking about her. 

Several other people who posted video appeals about relatives shared similar stories about receiving calls—often from numbers listed in countries around the world—asking them to stop their advocacy efforts in Kazakhstan and saying there would be repercussions for them and their relatives should they continue. 

But Togzhan’s family says the calls have only emboldened them to keep fighting.
“What choice do we really have?” said Arai Zhenis, one of Togzhan’s daughters. 

“At least now they know that someone is asking about her and she can’t just disappear like the others.”

China's Final Solution

US Sportswear Traced To Chinese Concentration Camps 

Chinese authorities are forcing detained Uighurs and Kazakhs to work in factories

AP

HOTAN, China — Barbed wire and hundreds of cameras ring a massive compound of more than 30 dormitories, warehouses and workshops in China’s far west. 

Dozens of armed officers and a growling Doberman stand guard outside.
Behind locked gates, men and women are sewing sportswear that end up on U.S. college campuses and sports teams.
This is one of a growing number of internment camps in the East Turkestan colony, where one million Muslims are detained, forced to give up their language and their religion and subject to political indoctrination. 

Now, the Chinese government is also forcing some detainees to work in manufacturing and food industries. 

Some of them are within the internment camps; others are privately owned, state-subsidized factories where detainees are sent once they are released.
The Associated Press has tracked recent, ongoing shipments from one such factory inside an internment camp to Badger Sportswear, a leading supplier in Statesville, North Carolina. 

The shipments show how difficult it is to stop products made with forced labor from getting into the global supply chain, even though such imports are illegal in the U.S. 

Badger CEO John Anton said Sunday that the company would source sportswear elsewhere while it investigates.
In this image from undated video footage run by China’s CCTV, Muslim trainees work in a garment factory at the Hotan Vocational Education and Training Center in Hotan, East Turkestan, northwest China.

Chinese authorities say the camps, which they call training centers, offer "free vocational training" for Uighurs, Kazakhs and others, mostly Muslims, as part of a plan to bring minorities into “a modern civilized” world and eliminate poverty in East Turkestan. 

They say that people in the centers have signed "agreements" to receive "vocational training".
The East Turkestan Propaganda Department did not respond to a faxed request for comment. 

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman accused the foreign media Monday of making “many untrue reports” about the "training" centers, but did not specify when asked for details.
However, a dozen people who either had been in a camp or had friends or family in one told the AP that detainees they knew were given no choice but to work at the factories. 

Most of the Uighurs and Kazakhs, who were interviewed in exile, also said that even people with professional jobs were retrained to do menial work.
Payment varied according to the factory. 

Some got paid nothing, while others earned up to several hundred dollars a month — barely above minimum wage for the poorer parts of East Turkestan. 

A person with firsthand knowledge of the situation in one county estimated that more than 10,000 detainees — or 10 to 20 percent of the internment population there — are working in factories, with some earning just a tenth of what they used to earn before. 

The person declined to be named out of fear of retribution.
In this Dec. 3, 2018, photo, a police station is seen inside the Artux City Vocational Skills Education Training Service Center at the Kunshan Industrial Park in Artux in China’s East Turkestan colony.

A former reporter for East Turkestan TV in exile said that during his monthlong detention last year, young people in his camp were taken away in the mornings to work without compensation in carpentry and a cement factory.
“The camp didn’t pay any money, not a single cent,” he said, asking to be identified only by his first name, Elyar, because he has relatives still in East Turkestan. 

“Even for necessities, such as things to shower with or sleep at night, they would call our families outside to get them to pay for it.”
Rushan Abbas, a Uighur in Washington, D.C., said her sister is among those detained. 

The sister, Dr. Gulshan Abbas, was taken to what the government calls a "vocational center", although she has no specific information on whether her sister is being forced to work.
“American companies importing from those places should know those products are made by people being treated like slaves,” she said. 

“What are they going to do, train a doctor to be a seamstress?”
In this Dec. 9, 2018 photo, Orynbek Koksebek, a former detainee in a Chinese internment camp, holds up a phone showing a state television report about what Beijing calls “vocational training centers” for a photo in a restaurant in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Koksebek says that shortly before he was released from the camp in April, the camp’s director strode into his class and told them they would soon be opening a new factory, and that detainees would be required to work and taught how to cook, sew, and repair cars.

The predominantly Muslim Uighur and Kazakh ethnic minorities in China live mostly in the East Turkestan region bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan, with a legacy dating to ancient traders on the Silk Road. 

In recent decades, violent attacks by Uighur militants have killed hundreds and prompted the Chinese government to blanket East Turkestan with stifling security.
About two years ago, authorities launched a vast detention and re-education campaign. 

They also use checkpoints, GPS tracking and face-scanning cameras for surveillance of ethnic minorities in the region. 

The slightest perceived misstep can land someone in the internment camps.
Men and women in the complex that has shipped products to Badger Sportswear make clothes for privately-owned Hetian Taida Apparel in a cluster of 10 workshops within the compound walls. Hetian Taida says it is not affiliated with the internment camps, but its workforce includes detainees.
In this Dec. 6, 2018, photo, Nurbakyt Kaliaskar, the wife of a sheep herder, holds up a picture of her daughter, Rezila Nulale, and her graduation certificate, at an office of an advocacy group for ethnic Kazakhs born in China in Almaty, Kazakhstan on December 6, 2018. Kaliaskar says her daughter, a college graduate who had a job in advertising, was detained in an internment camp in China’s far western colony of East Turkestan and is now being forced to make clothes for no pay.

As China faced growing international pressure about the detention camps, its state broadcaster aired a 15-minute report in October that featured a “vocational skills education and training center” in the southern East Turkestan city of Hotan.
“Terrorism and extremism are the common enemy of human civilization,” the China Central Television program began. 

In response, the report said, the East Turkestan government was using "vocational training" to solve this “global issue.”
Wu Hongbo, the chairman of Hetian Taida, confirmed that the company has a factory inside the same compound as the training center featured in the China Central Television report. 

Hetian Taida provides employment to those "trainees" who were deemed by the government to be “unproblematic,” he said, adding that the center is government-operated.
“We’re making our contribution to eradicating poverty,” Wu told the AP over the phone.
The 20 to 30 "trainees" at the factory are treated like regular employees and make up a small fraction of the hundreds of people in its workforce, he said.
"Trainees" featured in the state television report praised the Communist Party for saving them from a criminal path.
“I don’t dare to imagine what would have happened to me if I didn’t come here,” one Uighur student said. 

“The party and government found me in time and saved me. They gave me a chance to reinvent myself.”
The segment said that in addition to law and Mandarin-language classes, the "training center "collaborated with companies to give trainees practical experience. 

"Trainees" were shown hunched over sewing machines in a factory whose interior matches that of Hetian Taida’s main Hotan branch, as seen in prior Chinese media reports.
In this Dec. 3, 2018, photo, a child stands near a large screen showing photos of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping near a carpark in Kashgar in East Turkestan colony.

Police told the AP journalists who approached the compound earlier this month that they could not take photos or film in the area because it was part of a “military facility.” 

Yet the entrance was marked only by a tall gate that said it was an “apparel employment training base.”
Posters line the barbed-wire perimeter, bearing messages such as “Learn to be grateful, learn to be an upright person” and “No need to pay tuition, find a job easily.”
Nathan Ruser, a cyber-policy researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), analyzed satellite images for the AP and found that in Hetian Taida’s case, the apparel factory and the government-run "training" camp are connected by a fenced path.
“There are watchtowers throughout,” Ruser said. 

“There are clear fences between the buildings and walls that limit movement. Detainees can only access the factories area through walkways, and the entire facility is closed.”
The AP could not independently determine if any workers were allowed to come and go, or how much if anything they were paid.
At least 10 times this year shipping containers filled with thousands of men’s, women’s and youth polyester knitted T-shirts and pants were sent to Badger Sportswear, a 47-year-old athletic gear seller. The company mostly manufactures in Nicaragua and the U.S., and there is no way to tell where the products from East Turkestan specifically end up. 

But experts say supply chains are considered tainted by forced labor and modern slavery if even one item was produced by someone forced to work.
Sprinkled on the internet are clues that repeatedly tie the company to the detention camp’s sewing factory floor.
Shawn Zhang, a researcher at the University of British Columbia, noted an overlooked Hotan city social media post from February about the first batch of some 1.5 million pieces of clothing worth $400,000 heading overseas from the Hetian Taida Factory. 

In the middle of a photo of young women flashing the peace sign is Badger Sportswear’s marketing director Ginny Gasswint, who is quoted as saying she’s surprised the workers are “friendly, beautiful, enthusiastic and hardworking.”
In this Monday, Dec. 3, 2018, photo, a guard tower and barbed wire fences are seen around a facility in the Kunshan Industrial Park in Artux in East Turkestan colony. This is one of a growing number of internment camps in East Turkestan.

Badger Sportswear goes to university bookstores and sports teams large and small around the country, places like Charlotte Country Day School squash team in Charlotte, North Carolina, Rhode Island’s Coventry Little League and Hansberry College Prep in Chicago, according to its website and advertisements. 

Dozens of college bookstores advertise their gear printed on Badger Sportswear, including Texas A&M, University of Pennsylvania, Appalachian State University, University of Northern Iowa, University of Evansville and Bates College. 
However, it’s impossible to say if any particular shirt is made with forced labor.
All the teams and schools that responded to the AP condemned forced labor.
Badger chief executive Anton said Sunday that his company has sourced products from an affiliate of Hetian Taida for many years. 

He said about a year ago, the affiliate opened a new factory in western China. 

Anton confirmed Badger Sportswear officials visited the factory and have a certificate that the factory is certified by social compliance experts.
“We will voluntarily halt sourcing and will move production elsewhere while we investigate the matters raised,” he said.
Badger Sportswear was acquired by New York investment firm CCMP Capital Advisor in August 2016. 

Since then, CCMP has acquired three more team sportswear companies, which they are managing under the umbrella of Founder Sport Group.
In recent years, Badger imported sportswear — jerseys, T-shirts, workout pants and more — from Nicaragua and Pakistan. 

But in April this year, it began importing 100 percent polyester T-shirts and pants from Hetian Taida Apparel, according to U.S. customs data provided by ImportGenius, which analyzes consumer shipments. 

The address on the shipping records is the same as for the detention camp.
The U.S. and United Nations say forced labor is a type of modern slavery, and that items made by people being exploited and coerced to work are banned from import to the U.S.
It’s unclear whether other companies also export products made by forced labor in East Turkestan to the U.S., Europe and Asia. 

The AP found two companies exporting to the U.S. that share approximately the same coordinates as places experts have identified as internment camps, and Chinese media reports mention “training” there. 

New Jersey Republican Congressman Chris Smith, a member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, called on the Trump Administration Monday to ban imports from Chinese companies associated with detention camps.
“Not only is the Chinese government detaining over a million Uyghurs and other Muslims, forcing them to revoke their faith and profess loyalty to the Communist Party, they are now profiting from their labor,” said Smith. 

“U.S. consumers should not be buying and U.S. businesses should not importing goods made in modern-day concentration camps.”
Rushan Abbas, 51, of Herndon, Va., holds a photo of her sister, Gulshan Abbas, Monday, Dec. 17, 2018, in Washington. Rushan Abbas, a Uighur in Washington, D.C., said her sister is among the many Uighurs detained. The sister, Dr. Gulshan Abbas was taken to what the government calls a vocational center, although she has no specific information on whether her sister is being forced to work.

The detention camp system is part of China’s increasingly stringent state security under Xi Jinping. Some detainees told AP earlier this year about beating, solitary confinement and other punishments if they do not recite political songs, names and phrases. 

The AP has not been given access to these facilities despite repeated attempts to get permission to visit.
Not all the camps have forced labor. 

Many former detainees say they were held in facilities that didn’t have any manufacturing equipment and focused solely on political indoctrination.
“They didn’t teach me anything. They were brainwashing me, trying to make us believe how great China is, how powerful it is, how developed its economy is,” said Kairat Samarkan, a Kazakh citizen who said he was tortured with a metal contraption that contorts your body before being released in February after he tried to kill himself.
Interviewees described a wave of factory openings earlier this year. 

Ex-detainee Orynbek Koksebek said that shortly before his release in April, the director strode into his class and announced that a factory would be built in the camp. 

Koksebek, who cannot speak Mandarin, listened to a policeman as he translated the director’s words into Kazakh for the roughly 90 women and 15 men in the room.
“We’re going to open a factory, you’re going to work,” Koksebek recalled him as saying. 

“We’ll teach you how to cook, how to sew clothes, how to fix cars.”
This fall, months after Koksebek’s release, news began trickling into Kazakhstan that the Chinese government was starting forced labor in internment camps and would transfer some detainees out into gated, guarded factories. 

The workers must live in dormitories on factory grounds. 

Contact with family ranges from phone calls or in-person visits, to weekends at home under police surveillance.
In October, Chinese authorities acknowledged the existence of what they called "vocational training centers". 

State media published an interview with Shohret Zahir, the governor of East Turkestan, saying that “some trainees” were nearly done with their “courses.”
“We will try to achieve a seamless connection between school teaching and social employment, so that after finishing their courses, the trainees will be able to find jobs and earn a well-off life,” Zahir said.
The forced labor program goes along with a massive government initiative to develop East Turkestan’s economy by constructing enormous factory parks. 

Another internment camp the AP visited was inside a factory compound called Kunshan Industrial Park, opened under the national anti-poverty push. 

A local propaganda official, Chen Fang, said workers inside made food and clothes.
A hospital, a police station, smokestacks, dormitories and a building with a sign that read “House of Workers” could be seen from outside the surrounding barbed wire fencing. 

Another section resembled a prison, with guard towers and high walls. 

The AP did not track any exports from Kunshan to the U.S.
In this Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2018, photo, residents pass by the entrance to the “Hotan City apparel employment training base” where Hetian Taida has a factory in Hotan in East Turkestan colony.

Many of those with relatives in such camps said their loved ones were well-educated with high-paying jobs before their arrest, and did not need a poverty alleviation program. 

Nurbakyt Kaliaskar, a sheepherder’s wife in Kazakhstan, said her daughter, Rezila Nulale, 25, was a college graduate with a well-paid advertising job in Urumqi, the capital of East Turkestan, where she lived a typical urban lifestyle with a computer, a washing machine and an apartment in the city center.
Then last August, after returning from a visit to her family across the border in Kazakhstan, Nulale vanished. 

She didn’t answer phone calls and stopped showing up to work.
Four months later a stranger contacted Kaliaskar online and confirmed her fear: her daughter had been detained for “political training.” 

The next spring, she said she fainted when two cases of her daughter’s clothes were delivered to her home in Kazakhstan.
Last month, Kaliaskar got word via a friend who knows the family that Nulale was working in a factory next to the camp where she had been detained. 

The friend had heard from Kaliaskar’s brother, who had visited Nulale, bringing medicine for an injured hand.
Kaliaskar learned her daughter wasn’t being paid and had to meet a daily quota of three articles of clothing. 

She couldn’t leave. 

Her uncle thought she looked pale and thin.
“They say they’re teaching her to weave clothes. But the thing is, she’s well educated and had a job,” said Kaliaskar. 

“What’s the point of this training?”
A former detainee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect himself and his family members, said other detainees from his camp also had been forced into jobs at factories far away. They were taken to a government office and handed labor contracts for six months to five years in a distant factory, which they were required to sign.
If they ran from the factories, they were warned, they’d be taken straight back to the camps for “further education.”
In this file image from undated video footage run by China’s CCTV, Muslim trainees work in a garment factory in the Hotan "Vocational Education and Training Center" in Hotan, East Turkestan.

“I never asked the government to find work for my husband,” said Mainur Medetbek, whose husband did odd repair jobs before vanishing into a camp in February during a visit to China from their home in Kazakhstan.
She has been able to glean a sense of his conditions from monitored exchanges with relatives and from the husband of a woman who is in the same camp. 

He works in an apparel factory and is allowed to leave and spend the night with relatives every other Saturday. 

Though she’s not certain how much her husband makes, the woman in his camp earns 600 yuan (about $87) a month, less than half the local minimum wage and far less than what Medetbek’s husband used to earn.
Since her husband was detained, Medetbek and her children have had no reliable source of income and sometimes go hungry. 

The ordeal has driven her to occasionally contemplate suicide.
“They say it’s a factory, but it’s an excuse for detention. They don’t have freedom, there’s no time for him to talk with me,” she said. 

“They say they found a job for him. I think it’s a concentration camp.”

Muslim Solidarity

A Critic of China’s Concentration Camps Says His Family Faces Deportation From Turkey

By DAKE KANG

In this Aug. 25, 2018, photo, Omir Bekali, right, an outspoken critic of China's internment camps for Muslims, poses for a picture with his children Aisha, left, and Ibrahim in a cafe in Istanbul. 

An outspoken critic of China’s concentration camps who now lives in Istanbul says his wife and son face deportation to China because Turkish authorities might bar them from entering the country.
Omir Bekali, a Kazakh national, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that Turkish authorities are holding his wife and 2-year-old son at the airport in Istanbul and are accusing them of using fake passports.
“My family has been split in two,” he said by phone from the airport. 

“They didn’t let me see her. I’ve been waiting here. My heart is hurting.”
Bekali was among the first to speak publicly about the ordeal he endured in new indoctrination camps in China’s East Turkestan colony — camps that China denies exist.
Bekali told The AP in a report in May that he and dozens of other Muslim minority Kazakh as well as Uighur detainees were held in camps for months and forced to disavow their Islamic beliefs, criticize themselves and their loved ones and give thanks to the ruling Communist Party.
The camps are estimated to hold upward of 1 million people and reports about them have drawn growing criticism of China from the U.N. and the U.S. 

The U.S. is considering sanctioning Chinese officials responsible for the stifling security crackdown in the region.
Bekali returned to Kazakhstan after being released from detention but moved to Turkey earlier this year, fearing for his safety. 

His wife, Ruxianguli Taximaimaiti, 45, a Chinese ethnic minority Uighur, and their youngest son Mukhamad Bekali were to join him in Istanbul this week.
They arrived in Istanbul on a plane from Almaty on Sunday night. 

Bekali, who had been waiting for them at the airport, got a call from his wife telling him that border police weren’t letting them into the country.
Turkish airport authorities accused his wife and son of holding fake passports, Bekali said, and had earlier booked them on a flight back to Kazakhstan, where she no longer has a valid visa that would allow her to stay.
“I’d rather die here in Turkey then go back,” she had told Bekali at the time.
It was not immediately clear if they boarded any flights. 

Attempts to reach Turkish airport police for comment on Monday were unsuccessful.
If they are sent back to Kazakhstan, Bekali said, authorities in that country would likely deport his wife back to China where she could be punished for his criticism of the indoctrination camps, leaving nobody to take care of his son.
East Turkestan, the tense colony where most Uighurs live, has been enveloped in recent years in a vast dragnet of police surveillance which authorities insist is needed to root out separatism and Islamic extremism.
Critics of China’s policies in the region and the harsh restrictions imposed on Uighurs and Kazakhs have been punished severely. 

Zhang Haitao, a Han Chinese electronics salesman who complained online about the treatment of Uighurs, was sentenced to 19 years in prison in 2016.
Prominent Uighur scholar Ilham Tohti, a moderate critic of the government’s policies in the region, was handed a life sentence in 2014 on charges of fanning ethnic hatred.
Bekali said the uncertainty over his wife and son’s fate had reignited a persistent anxiety he had about China and the detention he had left behind.
“I feel like I’m a thief, hiding and sneaking around. The pressure is enormous,” Bekali said. 

“I can’t live like an ordinary person. We have no way to live safely in the 21st century.”