‘Living in horror’
China hell camps for Muslims
China has secretly constructed new prisons and internment camps over the past several years as the Communist Party-ruled country ramps up its mass detention campaign against Muslim minorities, according to a report on Thursday.
Since 2017, China has built 260 of the high-security camps, which can hold tens of thousands of people. The move points to a shift from using public buildings and schools as makeshift detention centers to the creation of a permanent prison system, BuzzFeed News reported, citing satellite images and interviews with former detainees.
China, which has detained hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim groups in the largest-scale detention of ethic and religious minorities since World War II, has outfitted the facilities with concrete walls and guard towers, the report said.
Some contain factories, a sign of forced labor.
Former detainees described being held in horrendous, brutal conditions with many blindfolded and handcuffed, being fed a starvation diet of rice, steamed buns and porridge but little or no meat.
Many had to sleep two to a bed or take turns sleeping in shifts because of overcrowding.
They relayed stories about being subject to torture, solitary confinement, forced birth control and brainwashing sessions of Communist Party propaganda. They also claim they were forced to speak only Chinese, not their native languages.
“People are living in horror in these places,” Zhenishan Berdibek, 49, who was held in a camp in the Tacheng region for much of 2018, told BuzzFeed.
Watching young women being dragged away to solitary confinement, she said she “wanted to die inside the camp.”
The Chinese Consulate in New York denied that the centers in Xinjiang had anything to do with “human rights, religion or ethnicity,” claiming they were part of the country’s fight against terrorism.
It called allegations that 1 million Uighurs had been detained a “groundless lie.”
“Xinjiang has set up vocational education and training centers in order to root out extreme thoughts, enhance the rule-of-law awareness through education,” the consulate said, adding that the “trainees have freedom of movement.”
China’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to BuzzFeed’s requests for comment.
But Abduweli Ayup, a former detainee who was held in Xinjiang and later exiled, said those held in the camps are “peaceful people.”
“They are businessmen and scholars and engineers. They are our musicians. They are doctors. They are shopkeepers, restaurant owners, teachers who used Uighur textbooks,” Ayup said.