Chinese ‘re-education camps’ in spotlight at Kazakh trial

ZHARKENT ( Kazakhstan): Secretive “re-education camps” allegedly holding hundreds of thousands of people in a Muslimmajority region in western China are the focus of an explosive court case in Kazakhstan, testing the country’s ties with Beijing.

On trial is Sayragul Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh Chinese national who is accused of illegally crossing the border to join her husband and two children in Kazakhstan.

But it is the 41-year-old’s testimony about her forced work in the camp system in the Xinjiang region that has drawn the most attention.

Beijing has stepped up a crackdown in Xinjiang against what it calls separatist elements.

At a public hearing, Sauytbay said she was granted access to classified documents that shed light on the sprawling network of re-education centres.

China’s predominantly Muslim ethnic minority groups are believed to make up the majority of the camps’ populations.

Chinese authorities have denied the existence of such facilities despite mounting evidence from both official documents and testimonies from those who have escaped them.

Asked under oath about a so-called “camp” where she worked as an employee of the Chinese state, court spectators gasped when Sauytbay replied it held some 2,500 ethnic Kazakhs.

“In China they call it a political camp but really it was a prison in the mountains,” she said.

Sauytbay said authorities had told her she would never be allowed to enter Kazakhstan, where her family had obtained citizenship.

“That I am discussing this camp in an open court means I am already revealing state secrets,” said Sauytbay, who asked Kazakhstan not to send her back to China.

Sauytbay is one of many ethnic Kazakhs separated from relatives over the border after a crackdown in Xinjiang, where authorities cite separatist and extremist threats as justification for repressive policies.

There are about 1.5 million ethnic Kazakhs in Xinjiang.

They had however avoided extreme state repression suffered by Uighurs, another mostly Muslim Turkic group that forms a demographic majority in many parts of the region.

Unlike Uighurs, ethnic Kazakhs had long moved freely between China and their historic homeland.

About 200,000 of them became Kazakh citizens since the Central Asian country’s independence in 1991.

That freedom disappeared however after a Chinese official known for his aggressive surveillance and population control measures in Tibet took charge of the nominally autonomous region in 2016, overseeing mass detentions and programmes of re- education for Muslims.

In late 2016 authorities took the unprecedented step of calling in Muslim minorities’ passports, forcing anyone needing to leave the country to file official requests.