The BBC released an investigative report Tuesday indicating that multiple survivors of the Xinjiang detention camps said they experienced, witnessed or were forced to assist authorities in raping, sexually assaulting or torturing Uighur women while in custody. Others who worked in the camps also confirmed these accounts to varying degrees.
The BBC interviewed multiple survivors and former guards from the Xinjiang detention camps who said they experienced these tortures firsthand in the camps or saw incriminating evidence of mass rape, sexual abuse, and torture.
Survivors tell of rape experiences
The subject of the report is Tursunay Ziawudun, 42. She said that during her nine months in the camp in 2018, she noticed that sometimes after midnight, Han Chinese men in masks and suits would come to the cells, select the women they liked and take them to a “dark room” at the end of the hallway, where Ziawudun was selected several times.
She revealed that women were taken out of their cells “every night” and then raped by Han Chinese men at this camp in Xinyuan County, Ili Autonomous Prefecture, Xinjiang. She herself was tortured and then gang-raped three times by multiple men.
The BBC could not fully corroborate Ziawudun’s account, but the travel documents and immigration records she provided corroborated the story, and her description of the camp’s layout matched the media outlet’s satellite image analysis. In addition, her description of daily Life in the camp and the manner of abuse largely matches the pattern of other survivors.
Chinese Teacher: The Screams Go On and On
Gulzira Auelkhan, an ethnic Kazakh woman who was held in the camp for a year and a half, was also quoted as saying that she was forced to strip and handcuff Uighur women in the camp and then leave the house so that some foreign Han Chinese men or police could enter and rape them.
Qelbinur Sedik, an ethnic Uzbek woman who was forced to teach Chinese at the camp, told the Uighur Human Rights Project (UHRP) in Washington, D.C., that she heard that staff members would insert electric batons into women’s genital tracts to torture detainees. She also said that the screams often ran throughout the building, and she sometimes heard them during lunch or class. Siddique also told the BBC that on one occasion she had heard from a Han female guard that rape had become a Culture. Han Chinese police not only raped the Uighur women, but also tortured them with electric shocks.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said Wednesday that the report was unfounded and that some of the people interviewed by “the media concerned” had been shown to be “actors” spreading false information, but he did not provide evidence for this.
Academics: genocide
The Inter-Parliamentary Policy Coalition on China (IPAC), a group formed to counter the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party to the global order, issued a statement Tuesday saying it was shocked by the BBC’s revelations and condemned them. The statement said that the democratic countries and the international community cannot just talk, they must take joint action to hold the Chinese government accountable and stop these atrocities.
Adrian Zenz, a senior fellow in the China program at the Communist Memorial Foundation, tweeted Tuesday that the reported systematic rape and torture may have met another condition for “genocide” under the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: causing members of the group to suffer physical or mental harm. He also writes that he does not believe that there is any evidence of genocide. He also writes that he believes that no one can use the images of Uighur “hot girls” to cover up the atrocities in Xinjiang anymore because the outside world is aware of what can happen to Uighur women in and out of detention camps.
Some can’t stand it, others say there’s not enough evidence
The Washington Post also reported that Tommy Zwicky, deputy communications manager at huawei‘s Danish office, quit his job after the outlet revealed late last year that Huawei had tested face-scanning software that could be used by police to identify Uighurs. He recently told the media that he had called on Huawei to more firmly deny the technology, only to be told by the company that they would not admit to making a mistake in the matter, which forced him to abruptly resign.
Still, some Chinese scholars believe that foreign governments should not take counter-action against Beijing authorities over the human rights situation in Xinjiang. Australian University of Adelaide professor Gao Maobo last month submitted an objection to an amendment to a customs law banning the import of Uighur forced labor products proposed by Australian senators last year, noting that the outside world still does not have conclusive evidence that human rights abuses are taking place in Xinjiang.
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