Former Uighur prisoners of China camps speak out

Former Uighur prisoners from China's so-called re education camps have spoken about their confinement and torture. Thousands of this predominantly Muslim Turkic ethnic group found shelter in Turkey after fleeing a crackdown by the Chinese regime.

Istanbul: Writer and poet Abduweli Ayup teaches Uighur songs to a group of children in a school in Istanbul.

Many of these children at the Hira Language Centre don't live with their parents anymore since they were arrested after going back to Xinjiang to visit relatives.

Thousands of members of this predominantly Muslim Turkic ethnic group have found shelter in Turkey after fleeing a crackdown by the Chinese regime.

Teaching his mother language is a passion and a mission for Ayup, a 46 year-old Uighur linguist who was detained and tortured for fifteen months in 2014 by the Chinese authorities.

Uighur is protected by China's constitution as one of the official languages, together with Chinese Mandarin, in the western autonomous region where Uighurs have lived for centuries.

However, Ayup was detained, interrogated and tortured after teaching and creating a network of kindergartens for Uighur children to learn their mother language.

The American-educated linguistic immediately wrote three books about his 15 months of detention soon after he fled to Turkey with his wife and two daughters in August 2015.

He proudly shows his entire works on Uighur identity, politics and language inside Hira's Uighur bookstore in Kucukcekmece, a neighbourhood in Istanbul where many members of this minority have settled and opened businesses.

The poet from Kashgar knew that at some point he would be detained, interrogated and tortured because of his educational activities, but he never expected to be sexually abused by his cellmates.

"Torture is a part of the interrogation, so I didn't expect them to respect me and treat me as a normal man. But I didn't expect they would do those kind of evil things to me. The first night those three guards ordered about twenty criminals, prisoners, surrounded me and abused me," explains Ayup.

The detention centre where he was held turned into a so-called re education camp two years ago.

Chinese authorities call the heavily-guarded internment camps for Muslim minorities in the far west Xinjiang region, allegedly aimed at erasing radicalisation, "vocational training centres".

According to human rights groups and researchers, around one million individuals from the predominantly Muslim Uighur and Kazakh ethnic groups are held in a network of compounds spread throughout the region.

Former inmates like Ayup describe a ban on religious activities, harsh conditions, political indoctrination and psychological and physical torture.

Activists say the aim of Beijing is to assimilate these groups and other minorities, including Tibetans, with the massive Han Chinese majority.

However, China maintains that current measures are necessary for combating latent religious extremism and terrorism.

In March, following international criticism against these camps, Chinese authorities claimed that these centres will gradually disappear.

The camps in the far west Xinjiang region have elicited an international outcry following Ayup's and other former prisoners' testimonies, to the point that Chinese authorities released a video in February of singer Abdurehim Heyit, imprisoned since 2017, after some reports claimed he died in prison.

Fifty-seven year old Uighur scholar Ferhat Kurban Tanridagli has been friends with the imprisoned singer since their high school days in Kashgar.

From his office in Istanbul, he looks with nostalgia at pictures of the two of them, and his wife Gulzadem Tanridagli, singing Uighur songs in the 1980s in Beijing.

"When we were afraid about his death, the Chinese government released a 24 second video of him. If his condition is like that shown in the video, for a musician, it is the same as death," says Tanridagli, who is Secretary General of Uighur Academy and Sino Turk News.

Around 10,000 Uighur households have settled officially in Turkey in the last decade, although according to researchers and the World Uighur Congress, an Uighur advocacy group based in the USA, the actual figure may well reach 34,000.

However, the rights of these Uighurs are not fully protected, as the majority of them lack working permits, a necessary tool to apply for Turkish citizenship after five years.

In February, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusuglu voiced concern at a UN meeting in Geneva over China's alleged persecution and mistreatment of Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in its territory, and called on Beijing to protect their identity and freedom of religion.

Over the past decade, violence blamed on Uighur radicals by Beijing - including riots and a bus stop stabbing - has killed hundreds.

Former prisoners like Gulbahar Jelil, an ethnic Uighur born in Kazakhstan, say they were unfairly accused of terrorism and tortured in re education camps.

Fifty-five year old Jelil was a businesswoman, often travelling from Kazakhstan to China's Xinjiang region for business, when she was detained in May 2017 under suspicion of terrorist activities. She spent over a year and three months in a re-education camp.

She recalls her first interrogation after three months of imprisonment:

"I did not know whether I would go back to my cell again or if they'd brought me to shoot me down. But they brought me to one of the underground interrogation rooms. I was sitting on the iron chair which has its own foot cuff and they chained my feet, they put that five kilogram chain on my feet and that was the most inhumane thing that I felt at that time," explains Jelil, adding that she ended up in hospital after her ordeal.

"They constantly said 'confess, you knew this and those people'," she says.

China's far west region of Xinjiang is home to over 12 million Muslim, Turkic-speaking Uighurs, who have long reported discrimination at the hands of the country's majority Han Chinese.

Before the Communist period, the region enjoyed a few years of self-proclaimed independence.

Tandiragli says there is no universally accepted number of Uighurs imprisoned in the camps.

"UN and HRW (Human Rights Watch) said one million, Chinese in social media said 2 million. If it is one million, it is not a small number either," he says.

"Some stay alone in cages, and some are locked up in small cells together with another 30 people. All of them are locked with heavy iron chains, even women."