China's crimes against humanity

Chinese Propaganda: Muslim Concentration Camp Survivor Arrested for ‘Inciting Hatred,’ Had Syphilis

By Frances Martel

The Chinese state propaganda outlet Global Times published an interview with a communist official in East Turkestan, home to most of the nation’s ethnic Uyghur Muslims, on Wednesday asserting that the concentration camps there are “schools” and all escaped prisoners are lying.
The attacks targeted two escapees in particular: Mihrigul Tursun, who fled to the United States and says Chinese government officials used electroshock torture on her, sterilized her, and killed her infant son; and Sayragul Sauytbay, who exposed the fact that China is imprisoning thousands of ethnic Kazakhs along with Uyghurs and uses rape and drugs to torture prisoners.
Tursun, the East Turkestan official claimed, was arrested for “inciting hatred” and was carrying syphilis when arrested. 

The official did not address Tursun’s allegation that concentration camp workers killed the oldest of her infant triplets, instead addressing Tursun’s claim that the Chinese government killed her brother by denying it and printing an alleged quote by him.
Sauytbay, the official claimed, was an incompetent teacher and a criminal fraud.
The Global Times did not offer evidence for any of its claims, such as a criminal or medical record for either woman.
China has for years attempted to subjugate the Uyghur, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz ethnic populations of East Turkestan, limiting the open practice of Islam and splitting children from devout families. 

In early 2018, however, reports began to surface that China had escalated its repression and begun building concentration camps to indoctrinate, torture, and enslave locals. 

Today, the United States government believes China is holding as many as 3 million people over 1,200 concentration camps across the country’s largest and westernmost state.
The Global Times repeated the Communist Party line that the camps are necessary to “train” individuals tempted to join jihadist groups and that they are a revolutionary way of eradicating "terrorism".
The official responding to the Global Times’ questions is an unnamed “spokesperson” for the East Turkestan government, a mouthpiece for the people running the concentration camps.
“I’d like to stress again that the "education and training centers" in East Turkestan are school in nature, set up according to law. They were never the so-called ‘concentration camps’ at all,” the spokesperson said. 

“Clinics are available in all the centers and professional doctors are there to provide 24-hour free medical service to trainees. Minor ailments are treated at the clinic. In the case of major and acute illnesses, trainees will be sent to hospital. The alleged nine female deaths are pure fabrications.”

In the interview, the official admits, using Orwellian Chinese communist language, that the camps serve two purposes: indoctrinating Muslims into worshipping dictator Xi Jinping and his authoritarian state, and using detainees as slaves. 

Or, in the language of a East Turkestan government spokesperson: “theoretical studies taught in classrooms and actual skills practiced in workshops.”
All those in "vocational camps", the official alleges, have some ties to "terrorism", ranging from being solicited to engage in terrorist activity to actually executing terrorist attacks.
The spokesperson claimed that no foreign citizens have ever been detained in the camp, despite Sauytbay’s testimony that as many as 2,500 ethnic Kazakhs – some, presumably, citizens of Kazakhstan – were in the camp authorities imprisoned her in. 

The government of Australia has also confirmed that some Australian citizens have landed in the camps.
The spokesperson accused Tursun of “instigating ethnic hatred and ethnic discrimination” and claimed that she did not face time in prison due to “humanitarian considerations,” because she had allegedly contracted “syphilis and other infectious diseases.” 

The spokesperson also offered a quote allegedly from brother Erkbar Tursun, who Mihrigul alleges the Chinese government murdered: “my sister is always telling lies. She not only said I died, but also lied about others’ deaths.”
The interview does not address Tursun’s infant son.
Sauytbay, the spokesperson alleged, was a schoolteacher. 

The spokesperson claimed she held a grudge against the government because she was caught “seeking performance bonuses through cheating.”
The official claimed that neither woman ever set foot in a camp, but provided no evidence of their alleged wrongdoing. 

The claims against Tursun appeared especially difficult to corroborate given that China significantly represses dissidents and defines “hate speech” as anything that jeopardizes the supremacy of the Communist Party.
Tursun began speaking out a year ago, when she arrived in Washington, DC. 

Her version of events significantly deviates from the Chinese regime’s. 

She told reporters at the National Press Club last year that authorities imprisoned her because she traveled to Egypt, her husband’s native country, once with her family. 

Once in the camps, she was subject to indoctrination, torture, and later confirmed sterilization.
“The authorities put a helmet-like thing on my head, and each time I was electrocuted, my whole body would shake violently and I would feel the pain in my veins,” Tursun described. 

“I begged them to kill me.”
Chinese media has previously claimed that Chinese people “laughed” when they heard her testimony.
Like Tursun, Sauytbay described the prison Chinese authorities locked her in as a concentration camp, calling it “much more horrifying than prison.” 

She saw detainees taken to a “black room” where they were raped and tortured and described the widespread use of drugs to make detainees more docile.
Their testimonies align with those of other survivors. 

Nearly all survivors are either ethnic Kazakhs who could appeal to the government of Kazakhstan for help or married to foreign citizens who appealed for their freedom.
“Any woman or man under age 35 was raped and sexually abused,” Ruqiye Perhat, a student arrested in East Turkestan in 2009 for four years, told the Washington Post in October. 

Perhat said violent forced abortions were common following the mass rape.
Other survivors have testified to enslavement, force-feeding of pork and alcohol to devout Muslims, and evidence of the harvesting of organs for sale on the black market.

China’s attacks on Uighur women are crimes against humanity

By Elizabeth M. Lynch
A Uighur demonstrator wears a mask during a protest in Istanbul on Oct. 1. 

Sitting in a hearing room in Congress, in a gray plaid hijab, her dark blond hair poking out, Mihrigul Tursun begins to cry. 

She is there to share the plight of her fellow Uighurs in East Turkestan. 

Her translator reads aloud Tursun’s prepared statement about her three separate detentions by the Chinese government in East Turkestan’s concentration camps. 

As the translator recounts Tursun’s first detention — upon her release, she learned that one of her 4-month-old triplets had died — Tursun struggles to hold back tears. 

But when the translator recounts the torture — little food, a tiger chair, electric shock treatment and a liquid that stopped her menstrual cycle and likely resulted in her sterilization, which has been confirmed by U.S. doctors — Tursun can’t hold back any longer. 

She starts to sob.
As Tursun’s translator, Zubayra Shamseden, who is also the outreach coordinator for the U.S.-based Uyghur Human Rights Project, wrote in an essay back in April, the Chinese government “wants to erase Uighur culture and identity by remaking its women.” 

Shamseden’s take — that if you want to eradicate a people, you must destroy its women — was not lost on the drafters of the Genocide Convention or the lawyers who shaped the doctrine of crimes against humanity. 

Both include nonlethal atrocities that are disproportionately perpetrated against women. 

Acts designed to prevent births and forcibly transfer children from their families could constitute genocide. 

Similarly, rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization and sexual violence each constitute a crime against humanity.
Though international law recognizes the gendered nature of mass atrocities, the world has paid little attention to the gender disparities of China’s campaign against the Uighurs. 

While women likely make up only an estimated 27 percent of the 1.5 million Uighur and other Turkic Muslims detained in East Turkestan’s concentration camps, their treatment has an outsize impact on Uighur culture. 

By targeting women, China is attempting to dilute the Uighur population and destroy its culture.
Tursun’s testimony was the first time the international community heard that women in East Turkestan’s concentration camps were forced to undergo treatment that disrupts their menstrual cycles. 

Since then, others have said the same thing. 

Gulbahar Jelilova, a businesswoman and another Uighur internment victim who was held in a cell with 40 other women, also stated that female inmates were injected weekly with a substance that stopped their periods.
Allegations of rape in the camps have surfaced, too. 

Sayragul Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh who was forced to work in one of the women’s camps in East Turkestan, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that every evening, the guards would take the pretty inmates with them, returning them in the morning. 

She also saw incidents of gang rape, including of one female inmate while other inmates were forced to watch. 

Shamseden told me that she too has heard that rape is common in the camps — as well as outside of the camps, where Uighur women are forced into situations where sexual harassment and sexual assault by their Han Chinese male bosses are prevalent.
In 2018, the government ramped up a program for Communist Party cadres to stay with a Uighur’s family home for five days every two months to “teach” the Uighurs about national unity. 

But this is another opportunity for Han Chinese men to take advantage of Uighur women. 

When I told Australian genocide expert Deborah Mayersen about these home visits, she immediately likened the situation to Ottoman Empire soldiers staying in Armenian homes prior to the Armenian genocide, where they were able to rape Armenian women with impunity.
Then there are the Chinese government’s efforts to minimize Uighur births and remove their children from their care. 

As gender studies expert Leta Hong Fincher highlighted in her recent book, the government has offered incentives for Uighur couples to have fewer children and for Uighur women to marry outside of their race. 

A large number of Uighur children have also been removed from their families and placed in boarding schools, according to a recent report, leaving the Chinese state to raise them.
The sexual violence against and forced sterilization of Uighur women and removal of Uighur children constitute crimes against humanity. 

So why isn’t the international community taking a stand? 

Why isn’t more attention paid to eyewitness accounts from women held in different camps that are eerily similar and mounting up? 

Especially since China has resisted international attempts to freely investigate what is happening in East Turkestan.
The United States is one of the few countries trying to do something. 

Last month, in a rare show of bipartisan support, the Senate passed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, and this month the administration issued a flurry of sanctions on Chinese companies and citizens. 

But there has been no mention of the stories of rape, forced sterilization or sexual harassment in any of these responses.
Even if the camps are disbanded, China’s gendered policies would remain. 

In addition to demanding that the Chinese government close the concentration camps, the U.S. government — and the rest of the world — must insist that the government end the abuse of Uighur women as well.

Woman describes torture, beatings in Chinese detention camp

By MARIA DANILOVA
Mihrigul Tursun, right, speaks at a event at the National Press Club in Washington, Monday, Nov. 26, 2018. Tursun, a member of China’s Uighur minority is detailing the torture and abuse she suffered at the hands Chinese authorities as part of an escalating clampdown on hundreds of thousands of members of the country's Muslim minorities. She spent several months in detention in China where she was beaten, tortured with electric shock and given unknown drugs. 

WASHINGTON — A member of the Uighur minority on Monday detailed torture and abuse she says she experienced in one of the internment camps where the Chinese government has detained hundreds of thousands of religious minorities.
Mihrigul Tursun, speaking to reporters in Washington, said she was interrogated for four days in a row without sleep, had her hair shaved and was subjected to an intrusive medical examination following her second arrest in China in 2017.

After she was arrested a third time, the treatment grew worse.
“I thought that I would rather die than go through this torture and begged them to kill me,” Tursun, 29, told reporters at a meeting at the National Press Club.
Human rights groups say China has detained up to 2 million Uighurs to promote what the government calls “ethnic unity” in the country’s far west. 

On Monday, over 270 scholars from 26 countries released a statement drawing attention to mass human rights abuses and deliberate attacks on indigenous cultures taking place in China.
“In the camps, these detainees, most of whom are Uighur, are subjected to deeply invasive forms of surveillance and psychological stress as they are forced to abandon their native language, religious beliefs and cultural practices,” the statement said. 

“Outside of the camps, more than 10 million Turkic Muslim minorities in the region are subjected to a dense network of surveillance systems, checkpoints, and interpersonal monitoring which severely limit all forms of personal freedom.”
Raised in China, Tursun moved to Egypt to study English at a university and soon met her husband and had triplets with him. 

In 2015, Tursun traveled to China to spend time with her family and was immediately detained and separated from her infant children. 

When Tursun was released three months later, one of the triplets died and the other two developed health problems. 

Tursun said the children had been operated on. 

She was arrested for a second time about two years later.
Several months later, she was detained a third time and spent three months in a cramped, suffocating prison cell with 60 other women, having to sleep in turns, use the toilet in front of security cameras and sing songs praising China’s Communist Party. 

Tursun said she and other inmates were forced to take unknown medication, including pills that made them faint and a white liquid that caused bleeding in some women and loss of menstruation in others. Tursun said nine women from her cell died during her three months there.
One day, Tursun recalled, she was led into a room and placed in a high chair, and her legs and arms were locked in place.
“The authorities put a helmet-like thing on my head, and each time I was electrocuted, my whole body would shake violently and I would feel the pain in my veins,” Tursun said in a statement read by a translator.
“I don’t remember the rest. White foam came out of my mouth, and I began to lose consciousness,” Tursun said. 

“The last word I heard them saying is that you being an Uighur is a crime.”
She was eventually released so that she could take her children to Egypt, but she was ordered to return to China. 

Once in Cairo, Tursun contacted U.S. authorities and, in September, came to the United States and settled in Virginia.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not return a request for comment. 

Chinese authorities have denied that the internment camps exist but say petty criminals are sent to “employment training centers.”
The State Department estimates that since April 2017, the Chinese government has detained 800,000 to possibly more than 2 million Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslims in political re-education camps.
“The United States will continue to call on China to end these counterproductive policies and free all those arbitrarily detained,” the State Department said. 

“We are committed to promoting accountability for those who commit human rights violations and abuses, including by considering targeted measures against East Turkestan officials.”