Indoctrination, Rape, Genocide: The Imprisonment of the Uighur Muslims
It’s easy to deny that an ethnic genocide could ever occur in the 21st century, and it’s common to wonder how something like the Holocaust could have taken place less than 100 years ago. Somehow we have been taught that racism is a thing of the past. However, re-education camps, such as those used in World War II are still in operation. Today, it is not Hitler, but another sadistic, scapegoating dictator who is imprisoning Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, China.
The Uighurs are Turkic ethnic group that generally occupy Central and East Asia, specifically Xinjiang. The majority are Muslim and follow the rules of Islam. So, apart from the five pillars of Islam (profession of faith, prayer, alms, fasting, and pilgrimage), they do not steal, lie, commit adultery, gamble, eat pork or drink alcohol. Men and women are encouraged to dress modestly, and some women must cover their head or face.
Xinjiang, the location of the re-education camps, is on the border of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. 25 million Muslims make up the majority of the population (most of them Uighurs) and have faced cultural and religious discrimination for a long time.
On March 1st, 2014, alleged Uighur attackers stabbed more than 140 people, killing 31 in a Xinjiang train station. Because this wasn’t the first attack, and due to the attacker’s ethnic origins, the Chinese president, Xi Jinping felt it was a reason to promote xenophobia and racism against the Uighurs, which has evolved into a genocide. In a speech to officials, he is cited as saying that they must use “the organs of dictatorship” and show “absolutely no mercy”, urging the party to exemplify America’s post 9/11 “war on terror” against their new enemies.
President Xi went as far as to say that people involved in religious extremism “have their consciences destroyed, lose their humanity, and murder without blinking an eye.” Though his own extremism isn’t religious, after hearing the hate speech Xi spews, one could assume that his own conscience has been destroyed, that he’s lost his humanity, and he is now murdering without hesitation.
Though he is as hypocritical as they come, Xi Jinping can get away with the crimes he’s committing the same way that every other genocidal leader has: brainwashing, scapegoating, and gathering more tainted power as each body falls.
The re-education camps began after the attacks in 2014, and now hold up to 1 million Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other ethnic minorities.
The Uighurs began to disappear after Chen Quanguo, a party boss, instructed officials to “round up everyone who should be rounded up.” The party anticipated a reaction from the families and told officials to “keep them quiet,” along with giving them detailed instructions on how to respond to families while still revealing as little incriminating information as possible. Families were told that their relatives were receiving “treatment” for exposure to radical Islam.
In leaked documents from the Chinese government, the “treatment” mentioned by officials was referred to as chuzhi, a euphemism for punishment.
The rhetoric of Islam as a disease continued when officials informed families that their relatives had been “infected” by the “virus” of Islam and had to be cured. The line that stands out the most from the leaked documents is the response that officials were instructed to give when asked if the missing Muslims had committed a crime: the official would respond that they hadn’t committed a crime, but that their minds had been infected by unhealthy thoughts, again, enforcing the idea that Islam is a disease or mental disorder that warrants being imprisoned. The “virus” is instructed to be handled using “a period of painful interventionary treatment.”
The reason for the camps is President Xi trying to prevent China from collapsing the way that the Soviet Union did in the 90’s. He blames spineless, ideological leadership for the downfall of the Soviet Union and will combat that with homicidal and cowardly dictatorship.
The officials were told to keep things quiet in order to halt the uproar that this would cause. In other words, they lied to the public about what was actually going on in the camps: “The party told the public one story while mobilizing around a much harsher narrative internally.” (New York Times)
Inside the camps, prisoners are subject to years of indoctrination and interrogation with the objective of converting them from Islam into loyal supporters of the party. To do this, the prisoners were forced to disobey their religion.
To indoctrinate the Uighurs, teachers were brought in to “re-educate” them, meaning, stripping them of their religion, language, culture, and community. They were forced to watch communist propaganda and were withheld food when they were unable to memorize passages about President Xi. For context, the leaked internal documents describe the re-education process as “washing brains, cleansing hearts, strengthening righteousness, and eliminating evil.”
“Wipe them out completely. Destroy them root and branch.” (Wang Yongzhi, party secretary at Yarkland re-education camp)
Outside of the camps, Uighurs are still treated like they’re a disease and are unknowingly re-educated. The government sends the “smartest of the Uighurs” to universities in order to create a generation that is loyal to the Communist Party.
And when the Communist Party isn’t trying to brainwash this generation of Uighurs, they’re trying to halt the next generation; Inside the camps, the detainees were forced to undergo unexplained medical tests, take pills, and injected every two weeks with a so called “vaccine” that brought on nausea and numbness. Many of the women were unwillingly given IUD’s or were sterilized.
System of Mass Rape, Sexual Assault, and Torture
Tursunay Ziawudun, a Muslim woman, spent nine months in the web of Xinjiang concentration camps. Inside, she was raped, tortured, and forced to watch other Uighur women undergo the same treatment. She reports men in masks (not for Covid) and suits, not uniforms, coming into the cells at night and choosing women to go to a “black room” with no surveillance cameras. Women were taken to the room every night and raped by one or more Chinese men. Women were commodified, and the men would “pay money to have their pick of the prettiest young inmates.”
Some of the women were taken to be raped and never returned.
To intensify the women’s self loathing and desperation, the Chinese men would force other women to strip their victims, handcuff them, and clean the room after they were done. A Kazakh woman who was forced to assist the men in the rapes testifies that there is a system of organized rape designed to “destroy everyone’s spirit.” (BBC News)
Besides the emotional pain the rapes cause, there is unimaginably painful physical torture. Ziawudun reports being taken from her room one night and tortured with an electrical shock stick inside of her genital tract. Moreover, the guards left scars all over the women’s bodies from biting them.
One of the teachers at the camps was told by a policeman that the Chinese men were raping, gang raping, and electrocuting the female detainees. The policewoman told her that there were four kinds of electric shock: “the chair, the glove, the helmet, and anal rape with a stick.”
Sayragul Sauytbay, another teacher, watched police take turns raping a young detainee in front of 100 other women. The woman called out for help but if any of the onlookers reacted they were punished by the guards.
The rapes evolved from just a nightly activity to something more constant, and it was reported that screams echoed through the buildings.
Ziawudun claims that of the few who are released, almost all of them turn to alcohol. She says that she frequently sees former detainees passed out on the street. On her first night in the camp she was taken to be raped with another woman. She says that that woman is now consumed by addiction, “like someone who simply existed, otherwise she was dead, completely finished by the rapes.”
Ziawudun believes that the government’s plan succeeded. China’s goal was to indoctrinate and torture them, destroy their identity so that they are unrecognizable. And they got what they wanted because, according to her, although “they say people are released…everyone who leaves the camps is finished.”
China’s Response
In response to the accusations of mass detention and forced sterilization, China is in denial, saying that the claims are “lies and absurd allegations.”
“The Chinese government protects the rights and interests of all ethnic minorities equally,” said a Chinese spokeswoman, and that the government “attaches great importance to protecting women’s rights.”
It is without a doubt that orders for the Muslims to be rounded up and imprisoned in the concentration camps came from Xi Jinping, but no one knows for sure if part of the indoctrination process he outlined involved rape. That being said, he did call on officials to have “absolutely no mercy.”
It becomes clearer and clearer everyday that our world is racist and xenophobic. What is not clear is how it is still possible for bigotry and intolerance to still be prevalent when we’ve seen the implications of the past. How is it possible for one to live their life peacefully, practice their religion in a country they were told was safe, but still be taken, imprisoned, tortured, raped, and indoctrinated? The treatment of marginalized people is too cruel to take place in the same world that is so proud of saying that they’re not racist. So, why are they lying?
You would think that we’d have gotten over such things after the Holocaust, the Atlantic Slave Trade, Apartheid, Jim Crow… but the list keeps getting longer while our patience becomes thinner, and our memory fails us. We keep making the same mistakes over and over again, and each time we lose a couple million lives, only to fill the next few pages in a textbook.
Although I haven’t lived very long, I feel that I’ve already seen a lifetimes worth of indescribable ignorance which seems to always yield death along with the centuries of prejudice that it precedes. There is a long list of atrocities that I could pick from to deem the worst, and if I did, it would be this.
Though I’ve seen many compare the internment of the Uighur Muslims to the Holocaust, you have to consider that one was combatted with a world war while the other is receiving little attention, outrage, and unrest. After considering that the Uighur’s story isn’t being broadcasted to the masses, you can join the few who are trying to do what the biggest political powers won’t bother to do: liberate them.
At the moment there is no gun to draw or war to join, instead there is information to spread, and minds to change. Every movement must start small, but even the smallest things can make the biggest change.
