DRAGON’S DEN OF TERROR

Prisoners’ bodies contorted in the infamous ‘tiger chair’. Women sterilised or raped. An author who’s interviewed dozens of victims lays bare in forensic detail China’s monstrous abuse of the Uyghur Muslims

THE day Maysem was taken away for re-education, she was not given a chance even to take a change of clothes. A phone message ordered her to report, like all Uyghur Muslim students in the Xinjiang region of north-west China, to the ‘street administration’ centre in Kashgar.

A local government officer told her that, because she had studied abroad, she needed to enrol for a month-long politics course. This was mandatory, and it began with immediate effect.

As she left the building, she recognised a woman from her apartment block — Mrs Ger, the designated ‘neighbourhood watcher’. Mrs Ger pulled her aside and said: ‘This isn’t my doing. Big changes are coming.’ Her voice was polite but menacing. Then Maysem was bundled into a car.

The young Chinese student, whose passion for reading had always worried her parents, knew that the ‘big changes’ had already begun. It was September 2016 and one week earlier a new governor had been appointed, Chen Quanguo. It was rumoured that he intended to crack down on the underground dissidents campaigning for political independence and greater freedom for Muslims. Protesters were being denounced as terrorists.

Maysem was an observant Muslim but her social science studies, which had taken her to university in Turkey, were her consuming interest. As she was ordered into the back of a car, to be taken to the re-education centre, her main concern was that this compulsory month-long course would put her return to Turkey and the start of her final year’s postgraduate education at risk.

It took only an hour to realise that the dangers ran much deeper than that. The car pulled up at a school outside the old city walls, but this school had soldiers in camouflage uniforms standing guard at the gates.

Inside were policemen in black carrying assault rifles and spiked, electric-shock batons.

MAYSEM was escorted from the vehicle to a pair of black iron doors where she was scanned with metal detectors. Above the entrance hung a sign: ‘The defence of our nation is the duty of every citizen.’

The doors slammed shut behind her. On one was a slogan: ‘I am a citizen. I love my country. I will make my nation great.’

She was ushered into a lobby with one receptionist and cameras in each corner of the room. Maysem began to explain that she had done nothing wrong, and asked why she had been brought here.

‘Don’t ask questions. You sit and wait,’ snapped the receptionist.

Ten minutes later, a few dozen elderly, well-dressed men and women flooded in, escorted by guards. ‘What is the meaning of this?’ shouted an older woman wearing ostentatious jewellery.

‘Do you know who I am? My husband works for the vice-governor!’

Around ten officers in black SWAT uniforms stood at the front of the room. One announced the indoctrination sessions would run for six hours a day. Then he said: ‘We have a problem. This place is getting dirty. We have to clean up. Who wants to volunteer?’

He pulled Maysem out of the crowd. ‘You look like the youngest person here! You can wash the windows.’ When she protested that she was a student, not a cleaner, he asked her: ‘Do you have any important relatives?’ Then he summoned another officer and said: ‘Take her to the detention centre.’

After a short car journey, she was pushed through another set of steel doors and down a corridor — this one decorated with murals of Muslim girls cowering before a veiled teacher. On the opposite wall were happy Han Chinese women, leading a class of beaming children.

Maysem was led into a walled compound. In the middle stood a medieval apparatus built from wood, iron and leather straps. With a shiver of horror, she realised this was an infamous ‘tiger chair’.

It was around noon. A boiling August sun stood high in the sky. Ten guards surrounded her as she began to protest: ‘It’s a mistake, I shouldn’t be here, I’ve done nothing wrong, I come from a good family.’

‘Let’s show this bitch who’s boss,’ one of the guards said. Two of the men pushed her on the ground and pulled off her shoes. ‘Slut!’ the guards shouted. ‘Bitch! Whore!’

The guards picked Maysem up and dragged her to the chair. It forced her back upright, with her legs stretched along a bench at an excruciating, raised angle. Cuffs were fitted around her forearms and shins. ‘The discomfort was extreme. We had all heard of the tiger chair. That’s how they make an example of you, torturing you by contorting your body,’ she told me.

Other prisoners gathered round to watch. ‘They were like patients who’d recovered from the head trauma of a car crash and lost their personalities,’ she said. ‘They didn’t seem able to think, ask questions, show emotion or speak. They just watched me with an empty stare, and then they were herded away back into the building.’

The guards left Maysem in the sun until her skin burned. When they finally removed the straps, they ordered her to get on her feet. ‘You’re going to raise your arms and stand still for another few hours,’ said one. He stood behind her with a baton. ‘You know what happens if you move,’ he told her.

‘How did I get here?’ she kept asking herself.

IN XINJIANG, a region in northwest China whose nearest borders are with Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan and Pakistan, people call their dystopia ‘the Situation’.

The majority of the region’s population are Uyghurs (just under one per cent of China’s 1.4 billion population) and since 2017, an estimated 1.1 million of them — one in ten — have been accused by the government of

harbouring ‘ideological viruses’ and ‘terrorist thoughts’, and taken away to hundreds of concentration camps. Once there, they are sentenced, without trial, to anything from a few months’ detention to seven or more years.

Many of the camps were repurposed high schools and other buildings, turned into detention centres for torture, brainwashing, and indoctrination.

It is the largest internment of ethnic minorities since the Holocaust.

Thanks to strenuous efforts by the Chinese government to suppress all reports of the Situation, the outside world knows little of it. But over three years, up to September 2020, I interviewed 168 Uyghur refugees, technology workers, government officials, researchers, academics, activists, and a former Chinese spy who was preparing to defect. Some requested that I use pseudonyms if I published their interviews.

Their stories remained consist

‘The discomfort was extreme. They make an example of you by torturing you’