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Fast Money & Foreign Objects
By Emily Rauhala
August 10
ZHARKENT, Kazakhstan — First-of-its-kind courtroom testimony here has corroborated allegations that the Chinese government has built a network of internment camps in western China where Muslim minorities are held without charge for “reeducation.”
Sayragul Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh Chinese national, said she crossed from China’s Xinjiang region to Kazakhstan without proper papers after being forced to work at a camp where around 2,500 ethnic Kazakhs were being held for indoctrination.
“In China, they call it a political camp, but really it was a prison in the mountains,” she told a court last month packed with Kazakh villagers, reporters and a few tight-lipped Chinese diplomats.
Interviews by The Washington Post with 20 other people in Kazakhstan familiar with the experiences of ethnic Kazakhs in China, including three former detainees and more than a dozen people who say they believe a family member is in detention, provided similar accounts of the camps, with additional details.
Taken together, their statements provide new evidence of extralegal detention and forced indoctrination in Xinjiang, revealing how the government, which has been predominantly targeting ethnic Uighur Muslims, also is detaining members of other, mostly Muslim groups, including Kazakhs.
People who have recently arrived here from China told of villages with checkpoints and countless security cameras and scanners where those suspected of having foreign ties can be interrogated, held without charge and sent to “reeducation centers” indefinitely.
At these camps, Muslim minorities spend their days singing propaganda songs such as “Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China,” and their nights in crowded cells, they said. One man released from a camp said he had been waterboarded.
In April, Laura Stone, acting U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for China, said at a briefing in Beijing that “at least” tens of thousands of Chinese Muslims are in detention. Experts at a July 26 hearing in Washington held by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China — a body created by Congress in 2000 with a legislative mandate to monitor human rights and rule of law — suggested the number could be hundreds of thousands or more.
- The Washington Post
Long article continued in link
Thoughts?
August 10
ZHARKENT, Kazakhstan — First-of-its-kind courtroom testimony here has corroborated allegations that the Chinese government has built a network of internment camps in western China where Muslim minorities are held without charge for “reeducation.”
Sayragul Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh Chinese national, said she crossed from China’s Xinjiang region to Kazakhstan without proper papers after being forced to work at a camp where around 2,500 ethnic Kazakhs were being held for indoctrination.
“In China, they call it a political camp, but really it was a prison in the mountains,” she told a court last month packed with Kazakh villagers, reporters and a few tight-lipped Chinese diplomats.
Interviews by The Washington Post with 20 other people in Kazakhstan familiar with the experiences of ethnic Kazakhs in China, including three former detainees and more than a dozen people who say they believe a family member is in detention, provided similar accounts of the camps, with additional details.
Taken together, their statements provide new evidence of extralegal detention and forced indoctrination in Xinjiang, revealing how the government, which has been predominantly targeting ethnic Uighur Muslims, also is detaining members of other, mostly Muslim groups, including Kazakhs.
People who have recently arrived here from China told of villages with checkpoints and countless security cameras and scanners where those suspected of having foreign ties can be interrogated, held without charge and sent to “reeducation centers” indefinitely.
At these camps, Muslim minorities spend their days singing propaganda songs such as “Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China,” and their nights in crowded cells, they said. One man released from a camp said he had been waterboarded.
In April, Laura Stone, acting U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for China, said at a briefing in Beijing that “at least” tens of thousands of Chinese Muslims are in detention. Experts at a July 26 hearing in Washington held by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China — a body created by Congress in 2000 with a legislative mandate to monitor human rights and rule of law — suggested the number could be hundreds of thousands or more.
- The Washington Post
Long article continued in link
Thoughts?
