Following the BBC’s report on the systematic rape of Uighur women in detention camps in Xinjiang, CNN recently interviewed two Xinjiang camp survivors who revealed that Chinese Communist police often subjected women to extreme abuse, including gang rape.
What happened to Qiyawudun
Tursunay Ziyawudun, from Xinyuan County, Xinjiang, who was previously interviewed by the BBC, arrived in the United States in 2020 and had a hysterectomy. She told CNN that she was detained twice in Xinjiang concentration camps in April 2017 and March 2018, where she was subjected to extreme abuse, including multiple gang rapes.
Here is her own account of her ordeal.
Along with 20 other women, I was taken to a cell where there was little Food or water and I could only go to the toilet for three to five minutes a day. Those who took more Time were electrocuted with electric batons.
Guards interrogated her about her Life in Kazakhstan, trying to find out if there were ties to Uighur exiles.
During one interrogation, police kicked and beat her until she fainted. On another occasion, two female guards took her to another room and placed her on a table. “They inserted an electric baton into me and shocked me with a hard twist. I passed out from the pain.” She said, “They were extremely sadistic, causing pain and physical injury by beating me on the head and slamming it against the wall …… It was their way of punishing us.”
Ten days later, a group of male police officers took her from her cell. “In the next room, I heard another girl crying and screaming. I saw about five or six men enter that room. I thought they were torturing her. But then I was gang-raped. After that I realized that they had gang-raped her too,” Ziaudun said tearfully. This happened many times in the camp.
Siddique’s testimony
Qelbinur Sidik, an Uzbek national who grew up in Xinjiang and has been an elementary school teacher for 28 years, was sent to Xinjiang in 2016 to teach “illiteracy” in the camp.
On her first day of teaching, Sidik saw two soldiers carrying a young Uyghur woman out of the camp on a stretcher. “There was no spark of life on her face. There was no blood on her face, she wasn’t breathing.” She said.
A female police officer told her that the woman died of hemorrhaging.
The female officer told her she had been assigned to investigate rape and torture taking place at the facility. “When (male guards) were drinking at night, the police would tell each other how they raped and tortured women.”
Siddique’s allegations are similar to those of former inmates who spoke of rape and sexual assault in Chinese detention camps.
Her testimony is a rare illustration of what it was like to live in internment camps in Xinjiang, where the U.S. government says the Chinese Communist Party is committing genocide against Uighurs and other Muslim minorities through a repressive campaign of mass detention, torture, forced birth control and abortion.
In July 2020, another survivor, Jalilova, told CNN that she was detained in May 2017 and held in a “prison-like” room with 20 women.
Jalilova said she encountered a guard who sexually assaulted her. “I asked him, ‘Aren’t you ashamed? Don’t you have a mother, a sister, how can you do this to me?” He hit me with a baton and said, “You’re not human.”
Victim: I am no longer afraid that they have killed my soul
In a statement to CNN, the Chinese Foreign Ministry extensively denied the allegations. In a Feb. 10 article, the official Global Times accused Jalilova of being an “actress” and said that Ziaudun was born infertile.
Ziaudun responded, “I am a woman in my 40s, do you think I would be proud to share [the gang rape] with the world?” She said, “I would tell them that I am no longer afraid of them because they have killed my soul.”
Sidik, for her part, said her husband (in Xinjiang) told her that government officials went to his house and spent four hours teaching him to make a short film, denying his wife’s claim that she was in a detention camp.
Winter magazine, which reveals persecution of religious faith groups, also reported in early February that in addition to Uyghur women, Uyghur men, members of the Almighty God Church and female Falun Gong practitioners were also targeted for rape.
Recent Comments