Background: Was forced to “educate” in the camps
Sayragul Sauytbay and Kelbinur Sidik were both ordered to work as teachers, detained in China’s internment camp. Their stories are difficult to verify in their entirety, but much is supported by other testimonies. These are parts of what they told parliaments around the world.
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Sayragul Sauytbay was sent to an internment camp at the city of Zhaosu in Xinjiang. During her four months there, in 2017, several thousand people were held in the camp.
15–20 people were housed together in cells that were approximately 16 square meters in size and lacked both windows and furniture. Needs were met in a common span.
She herself was guarded by guards around the clock and her family did not know where she was. Her task was to teach party propaganda and “red songs”.
In the evenings, the prisoners were forced to write long texts of self-criticism, with messages such as “I’m not good because I don’t know Chinese”. When they were not considered to be doing enough, they were punished violently, adults and children alike.
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Kelbinur Sidik has described life in the camps as a war zone, with barbed wire fences and armed guards. She has testified about a Chinese effort to forcibly sterilize the women of the Muslim minority groups. In 2017, when she was 47 years old, she was forced to insert an IUD. Just over two years later, she was forced to undergo regular sterilization.
She was forced to work as a teacher in two camps. In one, she saw how prisoners were kept in dirty and degrading conditions, with limited access to water and toilets. In the other camp, women were kept confined and are said to have been routinely subjected to sexual abuse.
The lessons consisted of her teaching handcuffed people Mandarin under strict camera surveillance.
In April, Sayragul Sauytbay sat on a train to Malmö. Suddenly she noticed that a strange woman fixed her gaze. The woman came forward and sat down on the seat next to her. Then she started speaking Chinese.
— She asked me where the train was going. To Malmö central, I answered, only in Swedish. When I looked at her a while later, she was filming and taking pictures of me. I asked why she did that and she replied that she was just taking some photos in general inside the train. I changed wagons, says Sayragul Sauytbay, who fled China just over five years ago and made his way to Sweden.
— There are many people who call me and tell me to stop my activity that has to do with China. That I should keep quiet, that it is good for me and my family and my children. When I go by train or bus, I always think about who I have around me.
This facility in Ürümqi in Xinjiang has room for 10,000 prisoners. When AP’s reporters were on a staged visit to the authorities in 2021, they saw Uyghur men sitting in rows in a hall watching black and white films about the history of the Communist Party. Stock image. A little leaky
Sayragul Sauytbay has testified about how she was placed in one of the Chinese state’s large detention camps in the province of Xinjiang. At least one million people from mainly Muslim minority groups are estimated to have been held in such camps or in prisons over the past six years. Some estimate it to be two or three million.
What happens in the camps in Xinjiang has been and is notoriously difficult for journalists and other independent parties to investigate. China has vigorously denied all allegations of abuse. People who have managed to get out of there, and relatives in other countries, testify about how they are persecuted and threatened around the world.
“China’s transnational oppression is very strong,” says Dolkun Isa, president of the World Uyghur Congress (WUC), which represents exiled Uighurs in the world.
— China is trying in many different ways to suppress and pressure the Uyghur group – and especially Uyghur human rights activists – into silence. Most have family members held hostage in their home country.
In 2010, a 62-year-old Uighur man was convicted in a Swedish court for spying on other Uighurs in Sweden. Dolkun Isa points to reports that China operates its own police stations in some 50 countries around the world to monitor Chinese citizens. Such a police station has been identified in Stockholm.
Kelbinur Sidik (left) and Sayragul Sauytbay (right) have testified about China’s internment camps for many parliaments, this week in Sweden’s Riksdag. Is labeled a terrorist
Several Uyghur representatives in Sweden testify about strange phone calls and how the Security Police has contacted them out of concern for their safety.
Dolkun Isa warns Sweden “from own experience”. China has long labeled him a terrorist and had an international arrest warrant issued against him for 21 years.
Today, the Uyghur leader lives in Germany. He claims not to know how many of his relatives in China are still alive. In recent years, he has received word indirectly that his parents have died in camps and that his brothers have been sentenced to prison or disappeared.
— This is my family tragedy. But my case is not unique, all Uighurs in the world have similar problems, he says.
— This is why many choose to remain silent, because as soon as they speak out, they or their families have to pay a price.
Demonstration students wear masks with the flag of East Turkestan during a protest outside the Chinese embassy in the Indonesian capital Jakarta, in January 2022. File photo. East Turkestan existed as a state during the 1930s and 1940s and today corresponds to the region of Xinjiang. Sensitive in the UN
China regards the treatment of minority groups as an internal matter and consistently dismisses all accusations as anti-China lies.
When the UN’s constantly controversial human rights body investigated the issue, it took its time. Human rights chief Michelle Bachelet said she was under enormous pressure from all sides and the report was finally released a few minutes past midnight last August last year – Bachelet’s last day on the job.
There are reasons to believe that violations of human rights are being committed within the framework of systematic oppression, according to the UN the report. The word “genocide” – as the representatives of the minority groups and countries used by the United States – does not appear at all.
“The language in the report was very weak,” says Dolkun Isa.
Then the formal discussion was over. In a next step, the Human Rights Council was to discuss the letter, but China and a narrow majority of the member states stood in the way and stopped it.
50 countries, including Sweden, instead expressed their concern about the ongoing situation in Xinjiang in a joint statement. However, Dolkun Isa wants to see more concrete measures, such as the Swedish Riksdag recognizing an ongoing genocide.
In March, Isa appeared before the Human Rights Council in Geneva to urge it to speak about the sensitive report. Then he was interrupted early on by China’s representative who objected that the Uyghur leader was an “anti-Chinese separatist” who should not be allowed to speak.
Dolkun Isa was a student activist in China in the late 1980s, but left the country in 1994. Today, he is the president of the World Uyghur Congress (WUC).
Like Sayragul Sauytbay, Kelbinur Sidik was taken to China’s large camp and later managed to escape. She lives in the Netherlands and wants to tell the world what she has been through.
“I have of course been subjected to threats and pressure in the Netherlands since I started testifying, but I was told early on by the authorities that I had been placed on a protection list,” she says and tells how her contact with relatives in China has been cut off.
Sidik has testified before the US Congress and other parliaments around the world, as well as before an informal Uyghur tribunal where the suspected crimes have been rectified.
“I have paid a huge price for my activism, but have never regretted the decision to step forward,” she says.
Sayragul Sauytbay says she sometimes meets people in Sweden who do not know what is going on in Xinjiang, or East Turkestan as it is called among the Turks. Some know approximately – but feel that it does not affect them, she says.
— That is why I try in every way to use my voice to tell what China is doing and what is happening in the concentration camps.
A guard in a guard tower at a camp facility in Xinjiang. File photo from March 2021.