China’s ‘skills’ camps, where inmates face the cattle prod
The alarm rings at 5am every day in Yerzhan’s overcrowded concrete cell. He dresses in a thin blue uniform before armed guards escort him to a bathroom where he has minutes to wash while under supervision. At 7am, there is breakfast: tea and a single steamed bun for each of the cell’s 18 inmates. For the rest of the day, Yerzhan is forced to sit straight on a stool, learn Mandarin, sing patriotic songs and memorise ruling Communist Party ideology.
To receive a small portion of rice at noon and 6pm he, like all the others, must praise the Chinese president and shout “Long live Xi Jinping”.
Those who refuse are shocked with a cattle prod. In another facility, for women, it is Amina’s turn to be on suicide watch, guards burst into the cell during the night, put a black hood over the head of one of the other inmates and take her away. She returns in the morning crying, barely able to speak; one morning, she doesn’t come back at all.
This is life inside China’s internment camps in the far-western province of Xinjiang, according to eight former detainees who have spoken to The Daily Telegraph. Their testimony provides the most detailed and current picture of conditions in camps which, the UN estimates, hold around a million Uighur Muslims and Kazakhs.
Most of the former detainees, who fled to Kazakhstan upon release in January, asked to remain anonymous to protect relatives still in China.
Chinese officials at first denied the camps existed. Then, last October, Beijing legalised them and described them as voluntary “vocational skills training” centres aimed at preventing Muslims from becoming terrorists.
China is continually forced to defend this policy. Ten days ago, at a UN meeting on its human rights, Beijing said “efforts are made [in Xinjiang] to fight terrorist extremism in accordance with law”, and stressed that “human rights are also seriously protected”, according to documents filed to the UN. “There is no such problem as arbitrary detention,” the documents claimed.
But these accounts from former detainees contradict the Chinese government position.
Yerzhan was interned after using Whatsapp – which is blocked in China – and Amina for studying and travelling abroad in Kazakhstan.
“[Inside], it was not somewhere humans could stay. In there, one minute felt like one year,” said Amina (not her real name).
“It looked like a prison. Everything was iron,” said Yerzhan, 24, whose name has also been changed. “You’re asking yourself – why am I here? What have I done to end up here?”
The Chinese government is “trying to align reality, at least to a certain degree on the surface, to this story that they are crafting”, said Rune Steenberg, a Xinjiang expert at the University of Copenhagen.
Indeed, one detainee who we interviewed was given a government certificate at the end of her detention, attesting that she had spent six months at an “education” centre and was being released after fulfilling requirements. She even received a receipt after being required to pay for her meals while in detention – 10 yuan a day, totalling 1,800 yuan (£200).
But former detainees and experts say the paperwork is all just for show.
Government bids “call for spiked clubs and cattle prods – all kinds of things that you wouldn’t expect for a vocational training centre”, said Rian Thum, a Xinjiang historian at the University of Nottingham. “There’s also the obvious evidence that you don’t need to train people in their 80s with vocational skills, or university presidents [and] other kinds of cultural elites who have been swept up.
“It’s not as they have said, telling to the world that they are great, merciful, clever and strategic by educating and teaching skills to all these people,” said Kairat Samarkan, 30. “I didn’t learn any skills there – it’s all not true.”
Former detainees describe horrific experiences. One said that a severely ill woman confided she was being regularly taken to a separate room and gang-raped.
Brutal punishment is doled out to those who misbehave. Guards shackled Amina’s hands and feet and kicked her with metal-tipped boots, simply for asking what crime she had committed. She was made to swear she’d never again go to a mosque, wear a headscarf or pray. Mr Samarkan, who refused to make his bed one day, was made to wear an iron suit that stretched his limbs out. “After that, I was the most obedient person,” he said. “It was so painful.” Guards watched detainees constantly – both in person and through surveillance cameras. Camp facilities ranged from re-purposed buildings that held a few hundred to compounds with as many as 18,000 people. One person described being detained in a massive complex with 13 buildings of four floors each, all packed with inmates.
Perhaps the biggest shock, however, was that some guards belonged to the same ethnicity.
“It wasn’t their choice… they were obeying the Chinese government,” said Yerzhan, describing how he, as an ethnic Kazakh, was primarily watched over by Kazakh guards.
China may “finally create the very problem it has claimed to be trying to prevent, producing potentially a new generation of suicide bombers”, said Jo Smith Finley, a Xinjiang expert at Newcastle University.
Former detainees say their experiences have soured them on their home country. “I hate China,” said Amina. “I hate the Communist Party.”