Confessions of a Xinjiang Camp Teacher
Qelbinur
Sedik reveals the horrors she witnessed in the camps, where she was forced to
teach Mandarin in 2017.
By Ruth Ingram
August 17, 2020
In this Dec.
3, 2018, file photo, residents line up inside the Artux City Vocational Skills
Education Training Service Center which has previously been revealed by leaked
documents to be a forced indoctrination camp at the Kunshan Industrial Park in
Artux in western China’s Xinjiang region.
Credit: AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, FileADVERTISEMENT
Qelbinur Sedik has witnessed wanton
cruelty, gratuitous violence, humiliation, torture, and death meted out to her
people on an unimaginable scale — but has been forced to keep the crushing
secret until now.
When she first arrived in Europe,
she was so traumatized she could barely speak about her ordeal. Then she found
the Dutch Uyghur Human Rights Foundation (DUHRF), where people patiently
listened through her many tears. The DUHRF wrote down her story, calling it
“Qelbinur Sidik: A Twisted Life.” Through it, she now feels ready to tell the
world what she saw in the internment camps of Xinjiang.
This account is based on excerpts
from the memoir and my own interviews with her.
Her personal story begins 51 years
ago in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region (XUAR) in northwestern
China. A middle child in a family of six children, she remembers her childhood
warmly. Her parents emphasized honesty and education, and each child grew up to
become a valued member of society, some even taking government jobs.
She started her teaching career in
the Chinese language department of Number 24 Primary School in the Saybagh
region of downtown Urumqi. By April 2018, she had worked there for 28 years.
But as a rookie teacher in 1990, with life before her, she could never have
envisaged the tidal wave of destruction that would engulf her people and its culture.
Enjoying
this article? Click here to
subscribe for full access. Just $5 a month.
Rumblings of change had already
started in 2004, when schools were ordered to become bilingual in both Mandarin
and Uyghur, but Qelbinur — as a Chinese teacher in the capital where most
schools taught in both languages anyway — took little notice. Rumors spread via
friends in 2016 that people had been arrested for praying also made little
impact. When a colleague confided in her that women were being called together
in groups for sterilization procedures, she found it hard to take in.
“We thought that things like that
couldn’t happen to us,” she said.
But gradually the signs were
impossible to ignore. Once Chen Quanguo was imported to govern Xinjiang, after
quelling Tibet, the tide of surveillance, mass arrests, compulsory health
checks, removal of children to state orphanages, and dismantling of the culture
and religion was unstoppable.
From September to November 2016,
Qelbinur’s school began selecting its best teachers, not only for teaching
skills but for their political ideology and family background. She passed with
flying colors.
On February 28, 2017, as Qelbinur
recounted in her memoir, she was summoned to the town hall. She was told she
would be teaching Chinese to “illiterates,” but strangely, for this mission she
was made to sign a confidentiality agreement. A secret rendezvous was fixed for
March 1, at 7 a.m., where she was told to wait at a bus stop and call a police
officer to pick her up.
Remembering the story as if it were
yesterday, she described the scene awaiting her after her journey.
“We rolled up to a four-story
building on the outskirts [of Urumqi], behind a mountain. It was surrounded by
walls and barbed wire. We entered via a metal electric door. There were armed
police officers, and a dozen employees, administrators, nurses, teachers,
directors. I was taken to a control room,” she told DUHRF.
“An employee shouted: ‘The lesson is about to
start!’”
In front of her were CCTV screens on
the wall where she could see 10 cells of roughly 10 people each. “They were
plunged into darkness, their windows boarded up with metal plates,” she said.
“There were no beds, just blankets on the floor.”
She made out a total of 97
prisoners, who had been locked up since February 14. She noticed they all
still had their hair and beards. Among them she picked out seven women, three
of whom were extremely elderly.
Enjoying
this article? Click here to
subscribe for full access. Just $5 a month.
She waited for what would happen
next.
“The adult pupils came into the
classroom 10 by 10, chained hand and feet. When they were all seated on
little plastic chairs, without tables, I was let in. There were several men
over 70 with long beards. Normally I have to show them respect. But they kept
their heads down. Some were crying. I said: ‘Salam alaikum’ [a religious
greeting among Muslims]. No one answered me. I immediately understood that I
had said something terribly forbidden.” She looked at the eight surveillance
cameras and continued.
“I introduced myself and said, “I’m
here for you to learn Chinese in Pinyin.” I wrote “A, B, C, D…” on the board,
all the while praying to God to get me out of this hell alive. They repeated
after me, A, B, C, D….”
ADVERTISEMENT
After two hours, Qelbinur asked for
a break to get some water. She still has the bottle she used for water in the
classroom. As she recounted these events she stared at the container with dread
— a translucent, turquoise “Hello Kitty” brand bottle scattered with hearts and
happy characters. A silent witness to the ghoulish scene.
Lunch arrived at noon and she
helped to distribute the watery rice gruel and a statutory single steamed bun.
She tried to add another bun each for two elderly inmates but nearly got caught
out when a policeman noticed two missing. Terrified, she was rescued by a
colleague owning up to having miscounted. When she tried to make herself tea,
she was told the prisoner’s water was not boiled enough for human consumption.
“It was the longest day of my life,”
Qelbinur said.
She struggled through the first
six-month contract. The first three weeks she got to know her 97 students and
the numbers printed on their orange shirts.
One student stood out: Osman. He had
been one of the richest men in the capital Urumqi, before his fortune was
frozen by the state. He was handsome and smart. Qelbinur recalls him begging
her to let him stay a few more minutes after class to enjoy the sun’s rays
piercing through the 20 cm chink in her window. One day he disappeared and she
was told he had died of a brain hemorrhage.
Another youth, Selim, tried hard in
class, hoping to gain early release. He too died of an untreated infection
before he could get to a hospital. Both young men died during her first three
weeks.
The numbers in her classes dwindled
daily. “At first, they were in good health,” she said. “I saw them wither away.
Some couldn’t even walk anymore.”
On March 20, the first floor of the
camp filled with new arrivals. Whereas her first group had been religious and
often elderly, the second group were intellectuals, business people, or
students whose Chinese was perfect. Their crime, it seemed, was consulting
Facebook, banned in China.
Her educational mission was now
beginning to make no sense at all. Her task with this group was to teach them
communist songs and the national anthem.
She described how the students were
humiliated as they were forced to enter the classroom on all fours, crawling
under a chain that kept the door ajar. “I met their gaze; it was excruciating,”
she remembers. Every hour she was sent another group of 100.
The regime for this batch was no
less demeaning. Prisoners had the right to go to the bathroom three times a
day, at fixed times. They had one 15 minute shower per month.
Qelbinur Sedik, a former internment
camp teacher in Xinjiang, is now in exile in Europe.
ADVERTISEMENT
Enjoying
this article? Click here to
subscribe for full access. Just $5 a month.
Qelbinur told the DUHRF that she was
forced to live a secret double life. The weeks went by and she confided in no
one but her husband. As the network of camps — and random arrests to fill them
— accelerated, so did the crushing web of surveillance outside that kept track
of every movement, every face, and every voice of those who were still free.
Police checks and roundups were commonplace. Everyone was waiting for a knock
on their door. “Even my neighborhood became an open-air prison,” she said,
telling how one day she saw police pounce on five young men chatting on the
sidewalk, and arrest two of them.
Simply calling overseas became a
crime. In May 2017, her neighbor was taken away handcuffed by a gang of five
policemen one night for asking a Han Chinese colleague to call his son in
Kyrgyzstan, begging him not to come home. The Han workmate was released after
three months, but nothing more was heard of the neighbor.
Of the 600 Uyghur residents of
Qelbinur’s community, 190 disappeared in two years. Chinese migrants started to
fill the empty apartments.
Back at the camp, new inmates kept
arriving. After six months she estimated, there were more than 3,000 prisoners.
They were crammed 50 or 60 per cell and groups of two or three, sometimes up to
seven, were called out for interrogation during the day.
The torture room was in the
basement.
A police officer colleague at the
camp told her about the methods used. “He explained to me that there are four
kinds of electric shock: the chair, the glove, the helmet, and anal rape with a
stick.”
“The screams echoed throughout the
building,” she said. “I could hear them during lunch and sometimes when I was
in class.”
Amidst this turmoil, suddenly in
July 2017, Qelbinur received a summons from the family planning department for
the much vaunted “free” annual gynecological check up. She still has the message
on her phone. Despite being 51 and long past child-bearing age, the check up
was compulsory for all women between 18-59. The warning was self-explanatory:
“If you do not cooperate, you will be punished.”
“I was working in a camp. I knew
what would happen if I refused,” Qelbinur remembered.
When July 18 came, by 8 a.m. there
was already a long queue outside the hospital. All the women were Uyghur;
“there was not a single Han Chinese among them,” Qelbinur recalled
When her turn came, there was no
promised gynecological examination. Instead she was forcibly fitted with an
IUD. Detailing the violent and humiliating procedure to DUHRF, she painted a
horrific picture. “I was made to lie down and spread my legs, and the device
was inserted. It was terribly violent. I was crying, I felt humiliated,
sexually and mentally assaulted.”
The irony was that with a single
daughter Qelbinur would have been allowed a second child. Despite a complicated
rigmarole of obtaining three authorizations from the police, her employer, and
the local town hall, it would have been possible.
Her camp ordeal was not yet over. In
September 2017, at the end of her first contract, Qelbinur was assigned to a
women’s facility in Urumqi. As she approached the unremarkable six story
building she noticed the words,“Retirement Center” written in large letters
over the gate.
“It was a huge camp,” she recalled.
“There were about 10,000 women with shaved heads, of whom only about 60 were
over 60. Most of them were young, pretty, well brought up.”
It was a camp for those who had
studied abroad in Korea, Australia, Turkey, Egypt, Europe, or the United
States. All highly educated and speaking several languages, they were detained
on arrival in Xinjiang after returning to visit their families. Qelbinur
suddenly feared for her own daughter, who was studying overseas. “I had decided
to kill myself if China forced her to return,” she said.
Enjoying
this article? Click here to
subscribe for full access. Just $5 a month.
Sanitary conditions at this camp
were vile, Qelbinur recalled. The air reeked from a single toilet bucket in
each cell that was emptied once a day. One minute was allowed for face washing
in the morning and showers rationed to once a month.“The atmosphere was
pestilential,” she said. “Many were getting sick from the lack of hygiene.”
Monday mornings brought a 10,000
strong queue for the infirmary. Each inmate was injected intravenously with a
mystery substance, their blood was taken, and they were given a white pill to
swallow.
A nurse “was kind enough” to explain
that the detainees needed calcium (the injected liquid) because they lived in
the dark, the blood test was used to detect contagious diseases, and the pill
was to help them sleep. But Qelbinur had her doubts. “I asked myself: Why so
much calcium?”
One unforgettable day as Qelbinur
was going up to her classroom she passed a policewoman carrying the corpse of a
student. They stopped to talk to each other in a courtyard without cameras. “We
were the only two Uyghur employees,” she explained. The policewoman told her
that she worked in the birth control unit, where they gave out contraceptive
pills and even put them into the steamed bread so that the girls would not
notice. She said that inexplicably the student she was carrying had continued
to have her period and died of a hemorrhage. She swore Qelbinur to secrecy.
“Never talk about it,” the woman warned.
Qelbinur told me that after she
arrived in Europe, she could barely complete a sentence at first as she
recounted the suffering she witnessed firsthand. She would break down and sob
inconsolably. Members of the DUHRF waited patiently and suggested she write her
own personal diary of events when she could bring herself to.
One distressing journal entry
recounted when a girl of about 20 was called out of her class for an
“interview.” Qelbinur described with great difficulty how the girl returned two
hours later. “She was in so much pain that she couldn’t sit up,” she said. “The
policeman yelled at her, then took her away. I never saw her again.” A
policewoman working in the camp explained that every day four or five girls
were taken out and gang raped by the executives, “sometimes with electric batons
inserted into the vagina and anus.”
Unlike the first camp, where most of
the employees were Uyghurs or from other minorities, Qelbinur claimed that in
the camp for women, all the executives were Han Chinese men.
By November 2017, Qelbinur was
beginning to suffer the effects of the IUD and began to bleed profusely. She
also said she could no longer bear what she was witnessing in the camps. “I was
forbidden to talk about this daily horror to anyone.” Her husband advised her
to check into a hospital and she was forced to recommend one of her colleagues
as a replacement. She spent a month in the hospital.
Qelbinur never returned to the camp,
but still kept her ear to the ground for news of her former “students.” She was
distraught to hear about a group of young detainees released in Urumqi in
December 2017: “Some had been tortured so severely that they had to have an arm
or leg amputated. Others had gone mad.”
As her body began to mend, she
returned to her old job in February 2018, but it was not the happy reunion she
had been hoping for. Within a matter of days, she was summarily dismissed. She
was devastated.
As told to the DUHRF, she complained
that her 28-year teaching career, during which she had worked loyally beyond
the call of duty, seemed to have counted for nothing. “Before this, we thought
that the Chinese government was our government, that it was enough to obey the
law. But in fact, it is not important what you do, it is important who you
are,” she said bitterly.
The 11 Uyghur teachers were demoted to
man the school gates, and 100 Han Chinese teachers took the reins. On April 16,
2018 they were forced to sign documents agreeing to early retirement. “I was
not old enough, but there was no way of refusing,” Qelbinur said.
Unemployed, with her health in
tatters, she applied for a passport to attend her daughter’s wedding in Europe.
At the last moment, she was forbidden to leave the country.
Two days after the wedding date, she
was questioned by the police for five days. The daughter was accused of taking
part in illegal demonstrations and Qelbinur was shown a prohibited video on her
daughter’s Facebook page. They demanded that her daughter send them information
about her life in Europe, her contact details, and those of her university.
Like many other Uyghur students living abroad, who are harassed by the Chinese
authorities, her daughter complied.
In 2019, after bleeding again,
Qelbinur illegally removed her IUD with the help of a cousin running a
hospital. In September 2019, she finally obtained permission to leave China for
medical reasons, but to do so had to run the gauntlet of 23 different
departments.
Enjoying
this article? Click here to
subscribe for full access. Just $5 a month.
“Each time, I had to make a
commitment to return home after a month,” she said, “otherwise I would lose my
my retirement pension.” Both she and her husband were issued a three-month
Schengen visa, but authorities refused to let him leave.
Once she arrived in Europe in
October 2019, Qelbinur told me, the events of the past three years caught up
with her. She was exhausted, traumatized, and overwhelmed and became depressed.
Every time she thought of her family she would cry and for four months she was
silent. During this time every single family member deleted her from social
media, her husband disowned her, and she felt cast adrift.
Despite the fact that she could not
talk, neither could she forget and the events haunted her day and night. “The
knot in my heart was always there,” she confided. She was afraid to speak out
and deeply burdened with the weight of what she had been through. A relative
told her that she had been spared by God to tell the story, but she had no idea
what to say or where to start.
Eventually, she contacted the Dutch
Uyghur Human Rights Organization, which helped her through many tears to piece
together the events. “Finally, I decided to raise my head, and fight for my
people,” she said defiantly.
Qelbinur Sedik has seen what no
other human being should have to see. But she is not a lone witness. Thousands
like her still work in the internment camps of her homeland, witnesses to the
same ghastliness she was privy to. She is unique because few have escaped to
tell their story.
Even after arriving in Europe in
2019, the emotional scars linger painfully. She might have fled the physical
horror, but she would never consider herself fortunate. Her flight was
bittersweet.
Ruth Ingram is a researcher who has
written extensively for the Central Asia-Caucasus publication, Institute of War
and Peace Reporting, the Guardian Weekly newspaper and other publications.
No comments:
Post a Comment