Ex-inmates of China’s Muslim ‘re-education’ camps speak out
BEIJING — Kayrat Samarkand says his only “crime” was being a Muslim who had visited neighboring Kazakhstan. On that basis alone, he was detained by police, aggressively interrogated for three days, then dispatched in November to a “re-education camp” in China’s western province of Xinjiang for three months.
There, he faced endless brainwashing and humiliation, he said in an interview, was forced to study Communist propaganda for hours every day, and chant slogans giving thanks and wishing long life to President Xi Jinping.
“Those who disobeyed the rules, refused to be on duty, engaged in fights or were late for studies were placed in handcuffs and ankle cuffs for up to 12 hours,” he said. Further disobedience would result in waterboarding or long periods strapped in agony in a metal contraption known as a “tiger chair,” he said, a punishment he said he suffered.
Between several hundred thousand to just over 1 million Muslims have been detained inside China’s mass “re-education” camps in the restive province of Xinjiang, Adrian Zenz of the European School of Culture and Theology in Korntal, Germany, said in a report released Tuesday. Zenz is a leading authority on the current crackdown in Xinjiang.
In a region of 21 million people, including 11 million Muslims, the number of those he reports to be detained would be a significant proportion of the population, especially of young adult men.
Emerging accounts of the conditions in these camps make for chilling reading.
“China’s pacification drive in Xinjiang is, more than likely, the country’s most intense campaign of coercive social re-engineering since the end of the Cultural Revolution,” Zenz wrote, referring to the chaos unleashed by Mao Zedong in the 1960s.
“The state’s proclaimed ‘war on terror’ in the region is increasingly turning into a war on religion, ethnic languages and other expressions of ethnic identity.”
China has blamed violent attacks in Xinjiang in recent years on Islamic extremists bent on waging holy war on the state, with radical ideas said to be coming from abroad over the internet and from visits to foreign countries by Uighurs, the region’s predominant ethnic group.
In response, Beijing has turned the entire region into a 21st-century surveillance state, with ubiquitous checkpoints and widespread use of facial recognition technology, and has even forced Muslims to install spyware on their phones that allows the authorities to monitor their activity online, experts say. Long beards and veils have been banned, and overt expression of religious sentiment is likely to cause immediate suspicion.
In an extension of the already pervasive program of human surveillance, more than 1 million Communist Party cadres have been dispatched to spend days on end staying in the homes of (mostly Muslim) families throughout Xinjiang, according to a report by Human Rights Watch released this week, where they carry out political indoctrination, and report back on anything from the extent of religious beliefs to uncleanliness and alcoholism.
“Muslim families across Xinjiang are now literally eating and sleeping under the watchful eye of the state in their own homes,” said Maya Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The latest drive adds to a whole host of pervasive — and perverse — controls on everyday life in Xinjiang.”
But re-education camps that appear to have opened all across the region have sparked the greatest global concern.
Samarkand said 5,700 people were detained in just one camp in the village of Karamagay, almost all ethnic Kazakhs and Uighurs, and not a single person from China’s Han majority ethnic group.
About 200 were suspected of being “religious extremists,” he said, but others had been abroad for work or university, received phone calls from abroad, or simply been seen worshiping at a mosque.
The 30-year-old stayed in a dormitory with 14 other men. After the room was searched every morning, he said, the day began with two hours of study on subjects ranging from “the spirit of the 19th Party Congress,” where Xi expounded his political dogma in a three-hour speech, to China’s policies on minorities and religion.
Inmates would sing Communist songs, chant “Long live Xi Jinping” and do military-style training in the afternoon, before writing an account of their day, he said.
His account was corroborated by Omir Bekali, an ethnic Kazakh who was working in a tourism company in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital, until he was arrested by police on a visit to his parents in the village of Shanshan in March 2017.
Four days of interrogation, during which he was prevented from sleeping, were followed by seven months in a police cell and 20 days in a re-education camp in the city of Karamay, he said. He was given no trial, he said, or granted access to a lawyer.
He described a day that would begin with a flag-raising ceremony at 6:30 a.m. followed by a rendition of one or more “red” songs praising the Communist revolution. After breakfast, inmates would spend 10 minutes thanking the Communist Party and Xi for providing everything for people, from food and drink to their livelihoods.
Inmates had to learn the national anthem and red songs, he said, as well as slogans condemning the “three evil forces” of separatism, extremism and terrorism.