A State Department spokesperson said Wednesday the department was “deeply disturbed” by the latest reports of China’s treatment of the Muslim minority group known as Uyghurs.
“These atrocities shock the conscience and must be met with serious consequences,” the spokeswoman said.
Women in Chinese internment camps were subjected to systemic rape, sexual abuse, and torture, according to the latest report on the horrific conditions faced by the Uyghurs.
The latest report comes from the BBC, which obtained detailed accounts from women who had escaped or been released from the internment camps, which China calls “re-education” facilities. China claims the facilities are in place to stamp out alleged Uyghur extremism, but numerous reports have found that is not the case.
Tursunay Ziawudun spent nine months inside the internment camps and detailed how men running the facility would come into the cells and select certain women to take to a “black room” without surveillance cameras. She said she was taken several times to be raped. She said she was also tortured and gang-raped three times by the men who worked in the facilities.
“It is impossible to verify Ziawudun’s account completely because of the severe restrictions China places on reporters in the country, but travel documents and immigration records she provided to the BBC corroborate the timeline of her story. Her descriptions of the camp in Xinyuan county – known in Uighur as Kunes county – match satellite imagery analysed by the BBC, and her descriptions of daily life inside the camp, as well as the nature and methods of the abuse, correspond with other accounts from former detainees,” the BBC reported.
Another woman, Gulzira Auelkhan, told the outlet that she was forced to strip Uyghur women naked before handcuffing them and leaving them alone with male Chinese guards. Afterwards, she said, she would have to take “the woman for a shower.” She added that Chinese men “would pay money to have their pick of the prettiest young inmates.”
As The Daily Wire has previously reported, leaked documents from the Chinese Communist Party show just how far the oppression of Muslim minorities goes. Leaks reviewed by BBC Panorama show that the re-education camps are intended to be run as prisons and not as educational facilities, as the CCP routinely claims. One nine-page memo included in the collection of documents, sent in 2017 by then deputy secretary of Xinjiang’s Communist Party, Zhu Hailun, explains how the prisons should be run:
- “Never allow escapes”
- “Increase discipline and punishment of behavioural violations”
- “Promote repentance and confession”
- “Make remedial Mandarin studies the top priority”
- “Encourage students to truly transform”
- “[Ensure] full video surveillance coverage of dormitories and classrooms free of blind spots”
The documents further explained how each “student” is to have their every move controlled:
“The students should have a fixed bed position, fixed queue position, fixed classroom seat, and fixed station during skills work, and it is strictly forbidden for this to be changed. Implement behavioural norms and discipline requirements for getting up, roll call, washing, going to the toilet, organising and housekeeping, eating, studying, sleeping, closing the door and so forth.”
Those documents also showed the terrifying “Minority Report”-style surveillance system China uses to incarcerate people based on the prediction that they will one day commit a crime. In one of the leaked documents, this system is shown to have flagged 1.8 million people as potential future criminals because they had the Zapya app on their phone. Chinese authorities then investigated 40,557 people who had the app installed and that “if it is not possible to eliminate suspicion” then send them for “concentrated training,” the documents said.
Another stash of leaked documents was reviewed by The New York Times including internal documents showing how authorities in Xinjiang were to respond to college students returning home to discover their families had been sent to the labor camps.
Authorities were to respond: “They’re in a training school set up by the government,” and if the student pressed for more information, the authorities were to say their families were no criminals but could not leave the “schools.” Further, students would be threatened that their families may be held longer depending on the student’s actions.
Sayragul Sauytbay, who said she had been released from one of the concentration camps, talked about the rampant abuse and rape within the facilities.