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2018-05-17 20:37:04 UTC
CHINESE GOVT FORCES THE "ABRAHAMICS" TO ADAPT TO 21st CENTURY STANDARDS
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/china/worse-than-prison-a-rare-look-inside-chinas-detention-camps-to-brainwash-muslims/articleshow/64205285.cms
'Worse than prison': A rare look inside China's detention camps to
'brainwash' Muslims
May 17, 2018, 15:09 IST
ALMATY: Hour upon hour, day upon day, Omir Bekali and other detainees in
far western China's new indoctrination camps had to disavow their
Islamic beliefs, criticize themselves and their loved ones and give
thanks to the ruling Communist Party.
When Bekali, a Kazakh Muslim, refused to follow orders each day, he was
forced to stand at a wall for five hours at a time. A week later, he was
sent to solitary confinement, where he was deprived of food for 24
hours. After 20 days in the heavily guarded camp, he wanted to kill himself.
"The psychological pressure is enormous, when you have to criticize
yourself, denounce your thinking — your own ethnic group," said Bekali,
who broke down in tears as he described the camp. "I still think about
it every night, until the sun rises. I can't sleep. The thoughts are
with me all the time."
Since last spring, Chinese authorities in the heavily Muslim region of
Xinjiang have ensnared tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Muslim
Chinese — and even foreign citizens — in mass internment camps. This
detention campaign has swept across Xinjiang, a territory half the area
of India, leading to what a US commission on China last month said is
"the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world
today."
Chinese officials have largely avoided comment on the camps, but some
are quoted in state media as saying that ideological changes are needed
to fight separatism and Islamic extremism. Radical Muslim Uighurs have
killed hundreds in recent years, and China considers the region a threat
to peace in a country where the majority is Han Chinese.
The internment program aims to rewire the political thinking of
detainees, erase their Islamic beliefs and reshape their very
identities. The camps have expanded rapidly over the past year, with
almost no judicial process or legal paperwork. Detainees who most
vigorously criticize the people and things they love are rewarded, and
those who refuse to do so are punished with solitary confinement,
beatings and food deprivation.
The recollections of Bekali, a heavyset and quiet 42-year-old, offer
what appears to be the most detailed account yet of life inside
so-called re-education camps. The Associated Press also conducted rare
interviews with three other former internees and a former instructor in
other centers who corroborated Bekali's depiction. Most spoke on
condition of anonymity to protect their families in China.
Bekali's case stands out because he was a foreign citizen, of
Kazakhstan, who was seized by China's security agencies and detained for
eight months last year without recourse. Although some details are
impossible to verify, two Kazakh diplomats confirmed he was held for
seven months and then sent to re-education.
The detention program is a hallmark of China's emboldened state security
apparatus under the deeply nationalistic, hard-line rule of President Xi
Jinping. It is partly rooted in the ancient Chinese belief in
transformation through education — taken once before to terrifying
extremes during the mass thought reform campaigns of Mao Zedong, the
Chinese leader sometimes channeled by Xi.
"Cultural cleansing is Beijing's attempt to find a final solution to the
Xinjiang problem," said James Millward, a China historian at Georgetown
University.
Rian Thum, a professor at Loyola University in New Orleans, said China's
re-education system echoes some of the worst human rights violations in
history.
"The closest analogue is maybe the Cultural Revolution in that this will
leave long-term, psychological effects," Thum said. "This will create a
multigenerational trauma from which many people will never recover."
Asked to comment on the camps, China's Foreign Ministry said it "had not
heard" of the situation. When asked why non-Chinese had been detained,
it said the Chinese government protects the rights of foreigners in
China and they should also be law-abiding. Chinese officials in Xinjiang
did not respond to requests for comment.
However, bits and pieces from state media and journals show the
confidence Xinjiang officials hold in methods that they say work well to
curb religious extremism. China's top prosecutor, Zhang Jun, urged
Xinjiang's authorities this month to extensively expand what the
government calls the "transformation through education" drive in an
"all-out effort" to fight separatism and extremism.
In a June 2017 paper published by a state-run journal, a researcher from
Xinjiang's Communist Party School reported that most of 588 surveyed
participants did not know what they had done wrong when they were sent
to re-education. But by the time they were released, nearly all — 98.8
percent— had learned their mistakes, the paper said.
Transformation through education, the researcher concluded, "is a
permanent cure."
"PEOPLE'S WAR ON TERROR"
On the chilly morning of March 23, 2017, Bekali drove up to the Chinese
border from his home in Almaty, Kazakhstan, got a stamp in his Kazakh
passport and crossed over for a work trip, not quite grasping the
extraordinary circumstances he was stepping into.
Bekali was born in China in 1976 to Kazakh and Uighur parents, moved to
Kazakhstan in 2006 and received citizenship three years later. He was
out of China in 2016, when authorities sharply escalated a "People's War
on Terror" to root out what the government called religious extremism
and separatism in Xinjiang, a large Chinese territory bordering Pakistan
and several Central Asian states, including Kazakhstan.
The Xinjiang he returned to was unrecognizable. All-encompassing,
data-driven surveillance tracked residents in a region with around 12
million Muslims, including ethnic Uighurs and Kazakhs. Viewing a foreign
website, taking phone calls from relatives abroad, praying regularly or
growing a beard could land one in a political indoctrination camp, or
prison, or both.
The new internment system was shrouded in secrecy, with no publicly
available data on the numbers of camps or detainees. The US State
Department estimates those being held are "at the very least in the tens
of thousands." A Turkey-based TV station run by Xinjiang exiles said
almost 900,000 were detained, citing leaked government documents.
Adrian Zenz, a researcher at the European School of Culture and
Theology, puts the number between several hundreds of thousands and just
over 1 million. Government bids and recruitment ads studied by Zenz
suggest that the camps have cost more than $100 million since 2016, and
construction is ongoing.
Bekali knew none of this when he visited his parents on March 25. He
passed police checkpoints and handed over his decade-old Chinese
identity card.
The next day, five armed policemen showed up at Bekali's parents'
doorstep and took him away. They said there was a warrant for his arrest
in Karamay, a frontier oil town where he lived a decade earlier. He
couldn't call his parents or a lawyer, the police added, because his
case was "special."
Bekali was held in a cell, incommunicado, for a week, and then was
driven 500 miles (804 kilometers) to Karamay's Baijiantan District
public security office.
There, they strapped him into a "tiger chair," a device that clamped
down his wrists and ankles. They also hung him by his wrists against a
barred wall, just high enough so he would feel excruciating pressure in
his shoulder unless he stood on the balls of his bare feet. They
interrogated him about his work with a tourist agency inviting Chinese
to apply for Kazakh tourist visas, which they claimed was a way to help
Chinese Muslims escape.
"I haven't committed any crimes!" Bekali yelled.
They asked for days what he knew about two dozen prominent ethnic Uighur
activists and businessmen in Kazakhstan. Exhausted and aching, Bekali
coughed up what he knew about a few names he recognized.
The police then sent Bekali to a 10- by 10-meter (32- by 32-foot) cell
in the prison with 17 others, their feet chained to the posts of two
large beds. Some wore dark blue uniforms, while others wore orange for
political crimes. Bekali was given orange.
In mid-July, three months after his arrest, Bekali received a visit from
Kazakh diplomats. China's mass detention of ethnic Kazakhs — and even
Kazakh citizens — has begun to make waves in the Central Asian country
of 18 million. Kazakh officials say China detained 10 Kazakh citizens
and hundreds of ethnic Kazakh Chinese in Xinjiang over the past year,
though they were released in late April following a visit by a Kazakh
deputy foreign minister.
Four months after the visit, Bekali was taken out of his cell and handed
a release paper.
But he was not yet free.
"WE NOW KNOW BETTER"
Bekali was driven from jail to a fenced compound in the northern suburbs
of Karamay, where three buildings held more than 1,000 internees
receiving political indoctrination, he said.
He walked in, past a central station that could see over the entire
facility, and received a tracksuit. Heavily armed guards watched over
the compound from a second level. He joined a cell with 40 internees, he
said, including teachers, doctors and students. Men and women were
separated.
Internees would wake up together before dawn, sing the Chinese national
anthem, and raise the Chinese flag at 7:30 a.m. They gathered back
inside large classrooms to learn "red songs" like "Without the Communist
Party, there is no New China," and study Chinese language and history.
They were told that the indigenous sheep-herding Central Asian people of
Xinjiang were backward and yoked by slavery before they were "liberated"
by the Communist Party in the 1950s.
Before meals of vegetable soup and buns, the inmates would be ordered to
chant: "Thank the Party! Thank the Motherland! Thank President Xi!"
Discipline was strictly enforced and punishment could be harsh. Bekali
was kept in a locked room almost around the clock with eight other
internees, who shared beds and a wretched toilet. Cameras were installed
in toilets and even outhouses. Baths were rare, as was washing of hands
and feet, which internees were told was equated with Islamic ablution.
Bekali and other former internees say the worst parts of the
indoctrination program were forced repetition and self-criticism.
Although students didn't understand much of what was taught and the
material bordered on the nonsensical to them, they were made to
internalize it by repetition in sessions lasting two hours or longer.
"We will oppose extremism, we will oppose separatism, we will oppose
terrorism," they chanted again and again. Almost every day, the students
received guest lecturers from the local police, judiciary and other
branches of government warning about the dangers of separatism and
extremism.
In 4-hour sessions, instructors lectured about the dangers of Islam and
drilled internees with quizzes that they had to answer correctly or be
sent to stand near a wall for hours on end.
"Do you obey Chinese law or Sharia?" instructors asked. "Do you
understand why religion is dangerous?"
One by one, internees would stand up before 60 of their classmates to
present self-criticisms of their religious history, Bekali said. The
detainees would also have to criticize and be criticized by their peers.
Those who parroted official lines particularly well or lashed into their
fellow internees viciously were awarded points and could be transferred
to more comfortable surroundings in other buildings, he said.
"I was taught the Holy Quran by my father and I learned it because I
didn't know better," Bekali heard one say.
"I traveled outside China without knowing that I could be exposed to
extremist thoughts abroad," Bekali recalled another saying. "Now I know."
A Uighur woman told AP she was held in a center in the city of Hotan in
2016. She said she and fellow prisoners repeatedly were forced to
apologize for wearing long clothes in Muslim style, praying, teaching
the Quran to their children and asking imams to name their children.
Praying at a mosque on any day other than Friday was a sign of
extremism; so was attending Friday prayers outside their village or
having Quranic verses or graphics on their phones.
While instructors watched, those who confessed to such behavior were
told to repeat over and over: "We have done illegal things, but we now
know better."
OWING THE COUNTRY
Other detainees and a re-education camp instructor tell similar stories.
In mid-2017, a Uighur former on-air reporter for Xinjiang TV known as
Eldost was recruited to teach Chinese history and culture in an
indoctrination camp because he spoke excellent Mandarin. He had no choice.
The re-education system, Eldost said, classified internees into three
levels of security and duration of sentences.
The first group typically consisted of illiterate minority farmers who
didn't commit any ostensible crimes other than not speaking Chinese. The
second class was made up of people who were caught at home or on their
smartphones with religious content or so-called separatist materials,
such as lectures by the Uighur intellectual Ilham Tohti.
The final group was made up of those who had studied religion abroad and
came back, or were seen to be affiliated with foreign elements. In the
latter cases, internees were often were sentenced to prison terms of 10
to 15 years, Eldost said.
While he was teaching, Eldost once saw through the window 20 students
driven into the courtyard. Two rows of guards waited for them and beat
them as soon as they got out of the police van. He later heard that the
internees were recent arrivals who had studied religion in the Middle East.
Violence was not regularly dispensed, but every internee AP spoke to saw
at least one incident of rough treatment or beatings.
Eldost said the instruction was aimed at showing how backward
traditional Uighur culture is and how repressive fundamentalist Islam is
compared to a progressive Communist Party. The internees' confessions of
their backwardness helped drive the point home.
"Internees are told to repeat those confessions to the point where, when
they are finally freed, they believe that they owe the country a lot,
that they could never repay the party," said Eldost, who escaped from
China in August after paying a bribe.
Eldost said he tried in little ways to help his internees. Tasked with
teaching the Three Character Classic, a Confucian standard taught widely
in elementary schools, he would make up mnemonic devices to help his
students — including elderly or illiterate Uighur farmers who barely
knew their own language — recite a few lines. He also advised students
to stop habitually saying "praise God" in Arabic and Uighur because
other instructors punished them for it.
Every time he went to sleep in a room with 80 others, he said, the last
thing he would hear was the sound of misery.
"I heard people crying every night," he said. "That was the saddest
experience in my life."
Another former detainee, a Uighur from Hotan in southern Xinjiang, said
his newly built center had just 90 people in two classes in 2015. There,
a government instructor claimed said that Uighur women historically did
not wear underwear, braided their hair to signal their sexual
availability, and had dozens of sexual partners.
"It made me so angry," the detainee said. "These kinds of explanations
of Uighur women humiliated me. I still remember this story every time I
think about this, I feel like a knife cut a hole in my chest."
Kayrat Samarkan, a Chinese Kazakh from Astana who was detained while
running errands in a northern Xinjiang police station in December, was
sent to an internment camp in Karamagay in northern Xinjiang with 5,700
students.
Those who didn't obey, were late to class or got into fights were put
for 12 hours in a loose body-suit that was made of iron and limited
their movement, he said. Those who still disobeyed would be locked in a
tiger chair for 24 hours. As one form of punishment, he said,
instructors would press an internee's head in a tub of ice and water.
After three months, Samarkan couldn't take the lessons anymore, so he
bashed his head against a wall to try to kill himself. He merely fell
unconscious.
"When I woke up, the staff threatened me, saying if I did that again
they would extend my sentence to 7 years there," he said.
After 20 days, Bekali also contemplated suicide. Several days later,
because of his intransigence and refusal to speak Mandarin, Bekali was
no longer permitted to go into the courtyard. Instead, he was sent to a
higher level of management, where he spent 24 hours a day in a room with
8 others.
A week later, he went to his first stint in solitary confinement. He saw
a local judicial official walking into the building on an inspection
tour and yelled at the top of his lungs. He thought even his former
detention center, with the abuse he suffered, would be better.
"Take me in the back and kill me, or send me back to prison," he
shouted. "I can't be here anymore."
He was again hauled off to solitary confinement. It lasted 24 hours,
ending late afternoon on Nov. 24.
That's when Bekali was released, as suddenly as he was detained eight
months earlier.
A Baijiantan policemen who had always gone easy on Bekali during
interrogation appeared and checked him out of the facility.
"You were too headstrong, but what the department did was unjust," he
told Bekali as he drove him to his sister's home in Karamay.
Bekali was free.
FREEDOM, BUT NOT FOR HIS FAMILY
The next morning, a Saturday, the police opened their immigration office
for Bekali to pick up a unique, 14-day Chinese visa. His original had
long expired. Bekali left China on December 4.
Seeking compensation from the Chinese government is out of the question.
But Bekali keeps a plastic folder at home of evidence that might prove
useful someday: his passport with stamps and visas, travel records and a
handwritten Chinese police document dated and imprinted with red-ink seals.
The document is the closest thing he has to an official acknowledgement
that he suffered for eight months. It says he was held on suspicion of
endangering national security; the last sentence declares him released
without charge.
At first, Bekali did not want the AP to publish his account for fear
that his sister and mother in China would be detained and sent to
re-education.
But on March 10, back in China, the police took his sister, Adila
Bekali. A week later, on March 19, his mother Amina Sadik was led away.
In early April, Bekali called his father, Ebrayem. He told Bekali to
take good care of himself, as if to bid farewell before the inevitable.
Bekali changed his mind and said he wanted to tell his story, no matter
the consequences.
"Things have already come this far," he said. "I have nothing left to lose."
---
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https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/china/worse-than-prison-a-rare-look-inside-chinas-detention-camps-to-brainwash-muslims/articleshow/64205285.cms
'Worse than prison': A rare look inside China's detention camps to
'brainwash' Muslims
May 17, 2018, 15:09 IST
ALMATY: Hour upon hour, day upon day, Omir Bekali and other detainees in
far western China's new indoctrination camps had to disavow their
Islamic beliefs, criticize themselves and their loved ones and give
thanks to the ruling Communist Party.
When Bekali, a Kazakh Muslim, refused to follow orders each day, he was
forced to stand at a wall for five hours at a time. A week later, he was
sent to solitary confinement, where he was deprived of food for 24
hours. After 20 days in the heavily guarded camp, he wanted to kill himself.
"The psychological pressure is enormous, when you have to criticize
yourself, denounce your thinking — your own ethnic group," said Bekali,
who broke down in tears as he described the camp. "I still think about
it every night, until the sun rises. I can't sleep. The thoughts are
with me all the time."
Since last spring, Chinese authorities in the heavily Muslim region of
Xinjiang have ensnared tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Muslim
Chinese — and even foreign citizens — in mass internment camps. This
detention campaign has swept across Xinjiang, a territory half the area
of India, leading to what a US commission on China last month said is
"the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world
today."
Chinese officials have largely avoided comment on the camps, but some
are quoted in state media as saying that ideological changes are needed
to fight separatism and Islamic extremism. Radical Muslim Uighurs have
killed hundreds in recent years, and China considers the region a threat
to peace in a country where the majority is Han Chinese.
The internment program aims to rewire the political thinking of
detainees, erase their Islamic beliefs and reshape their very
identities. The camps have expanded rapidly over the past year, with
almost no judicial process or legal paperwork. Detainees who most
vigorously criticize the people and things they love are rewarded, and
those who refuse to do so are punished with solitary confinement,
beatings and food deprivation.
The recollections of Bekali, a heavyset and quiet 42-year-old, offer
what appears to be the most detailed account yet of life inside
so-called re-education camps. The Associated Press also conducted rare
interviews with three other former internees and a former instructor in
other centers who corroborated Bekali's depiction. Most spoke on
condition of anonymity to protect their families in China.
Bekali's case stands out because he was a foreign citizen, of
Kazakhstan, who was seized by China's security agencies and detained for
eight months last year without recourse. Although some details are
impossible to verify, two Kazakh diplomats confirmed he was held for
seven months and then sent to re-education.
The detention program is a hallmark of China's emboldened state security
apparatus under the deeply nationalistic, hard-line rule of President Xi
Jinping. It is partly rooted in the ancient Chinese belief in
transformation through education — taken once before to terrifying
extremes during the mass thought reform campaigns of Mao Zedong, the
Chinese leader sometimes channeled by Xi.
"Cultural cleansing is Beijing's attempt to find a final solution to the
Xinjiang problem," said James Millward, a China historian at Georgetown
University.
Rian Thum, a professor at Loyola University in New Orleans, said China's
re-education system echoes some of the worst human rights violations in
history.
"The closest analogue is maybe the Cultural Revolution in that this will
leave long-term, psychological effects," Thum said. "This will create a
multigenerational trauma from which many people will never recover."
Asked to comment on the camps, China's Foreign Ministry said it "had not
heard" of the situation. When asked why non-Chinese had been detained,
it said the Chinese government protects the rights of foreigners in
China and they should also be law-abiding. Chinese officials in Xinjiang
did not respond to requests for comment.
However, bits and pieces from state media and journals show the
confidence Xinjiang officials hold in methods that they say work well to
curb religious extremism. China's top prosecutor, Zhang Jun, urged
Xinjiang's authorities this month to extensively expand what the
government calls the "transformation through education" drive in an
"all-out effort" to fight separatism and extremism.
In a June 2017 paper published by a state-run journal, a researcher from
Xinjiang's Communist Party School reported that most of 588 surveyed
participants did not know what they had done wrong when they were sent
to re-education. But by the time they were released, nearly all — 98.8
percent— had learned their mistakes, the paper said.
Transformation through education, the researcher concluded, "is a
permanent cure."
"PEOPLE'S WAR ON TERROR"
On the chilly morning of March 23, 2017, Bekali drove up to the Chinese
border from his home in Almaty, Kazakhstan, got a stamp in his Kazakh
passport and crossed over for a work trip, not quite grasping the
extraordinary circumstances he was stepping into.
Bekali was born in China in 1976 to Kazakh and Uighur parents, moved to
Kazakhstan in 2006 and received citizenship three years later. He was
out of China in 2016, when authorities sharply escalated a "People's War
on Terror" to root out what the government called religious extremism
and separatism in Xinjiang, a large Chinese territory bordering Pakistan
and several Central Asian states, including Kazakhstan.
The Xinjiang he returned to was unrecognizable. All-encompassing,
data-driven surveillance tracked residents in a region with around 12
million Muslims, including ethnic Uighurs and Kazakhs. Viewing a foreign
website, taking phone calls from relatives abroad, praying regularly or
growing a beard could land one in a political indoctrination camp, or
prison, or both.
The new internment system was shrouded in secrecy, with no publicly
available data on the numbers of camps or detainees. The US State
Department estimates those being held are "at the very least in the tens
of thousands." A Turkey-based TV station run by Xinjiang exiles said
almost 900,000 were detained, citing leaked government documents.
Adrian Zenz, a researcher at the European School of Culture and
Theology, puts the number between several hundreds of thousands and just
over 1 million. Government bids and recruitment ads studied by Zenz
suggest that the camps have cost more than $100 million since 2016, and
construction is ongoing.
Bekali knew none of this when he visited his parents on March 25. He
passed police checkpoints and handed over his decade-old Chinese
identity card.
The next day, five armed policemen showed up at Bekali's parents'
doorstep and took him away. They said there was a warrant for his arrest
in Karamay, a frontier oil town where he lived a decade earlier. He
couldn't call his parents or a lawyer, the police added, because his
case was "special."
Bekali was held in a cell, incommunicado, for a week, and then was
driven 500 miles (804 kilometers) to Karamay's Baijiantan District
public security office.
There, they strapped him into a "tiger chair," a device that clamped
down his wrists and ankles. They also hung him by his wrists against a
barred wall, just high enough so he would feel excruciating pressure in
his shoulder unless he stood on the balls of his bare feet. They
interrogated him about his work with a tourist agency inviting Chinese
to apply for Kazakh tourist visas, which they claimed was a way to help
Chinese Muslims escape.
"I haven't committed any crimes!" Bekali yelled.
They asked for days what he knew about two dozen prominent ethnic Uighur
activists and businessmen in Kazakhstan. Exhausted and aching, Bekali
coughed up what he knew about a few names he recognized.
The police then sent Bekali to a 10- by 10-meter (32- by 32-foot) cell
in the prison with 17 others, their feet chained to the posts of two
large beds. Some wore dark blue uniforms, while others wore orange for
political crimes. Bekali was given orange.
In mid-July, three months after his arrest, Bekali received a visit from
Kazakh diplomats. China's mass detention of ethnic Kazakhs — and even
Kazakh citizens — has begun to make waves in the Central Asian country
of 18 million. Kazakh officials say China detained 10 Kazakh citizens
and hundreds of ethnic Kazakh Chinese in Xinjiang over the past year,
though they were released in late April following a visit by a Kazakh
deputy foreign minister.
Four months after the visit, Bekali was taken out of his cell and handed
a release paper.
But he was not yet free.
"WE NOW KNOW BETTER"
Bekali was driven from jail to a fenced compound in the northern suburbs
of Karamay, where three buildings held more than 1,000 internees
receiving political indoctrination, he said.
He walked in, past a central station that could see over the entire
facility, and received a tracksuit. Heavily armed guards watched over
the compound from a second level. He joined a cell with 40 internees, he
said, including teachers, doctors and students. Men and women were
separated.
Internees would wake up together before dawn, sing the Chinese national
anthem, and raise the Chinese flag at 7:30 a.m. They gathered back
inside large classrooms to learn "red songs" like "Without the Communist
Party, there is no New China," and study Chinese language and history.
They were told that the indigenous sheep-herding Central Asian people of
Xinjiang were backward and yoked by slavery before they were "liberated"
by the Communist Party in the 1950s.
Before meals of vegetable soup and buns, the inmates would be ordered to
chant: "Thank the Party! Thank the Motherland! Thank President Xi!"
Discipline was strictly enforced and punishment could be harsh. Bekali
was kept in a locked room almost around the clock with eight other
internees, who shared beds and a wretched toilet. Cameras were installed
in toilets and even outhouses. Baths were rare, as was washing of hands
and feet, which internees were told was equated with Islamic ablution.
Bekali and other former internees say the worst parts of the
indoctrination program were forced repetition and self-criticism.
Although students didn't understand much of what was taught and the
material bordered on the nonsensical to them, they were made to
internalize it by repetition in sessions lasting two hours or longer.
"We will oppose extremism, we will oppose separatism, we will oppose
terrorism," they chanted again and again. Almost every day, the students
received guest lecturers from the local police, judiciary and other
branches of government warning about the dangers of separatism and
extremism.
In 4-hour sessions, instructors lectured about the dangers of Islam and
drilled internees with quizzes that they had to answer correctly or be
sent to stand near a wall for hours on end.
"Do you obey Chinese law or Sharia?" instructors asked. "Do you
understand why religion is dangerous?"
One by one, internees would stand up before 60 of their classmates to
present self-criticisms of their religious history, Bekali said. The
detainees would also have to criticize and be criticized by their peers.
Those who parroted official lines particularly well or lashed into their
fellow internees viciously were awarded points and could be transferred
to more comfortable surroundings in other buildings, he said.
"I was taught the Holy Quran by my father and I learned it because I
didn't know better," Bekali heard one say.
"I traveled outside China without knowing that I could be exposed to
extremist thoughts abroad," Bekali recalled another saying. "Now I know."
A Uighur woman told AP she was held in a center in the city of Hotan in
2016. She said she and fellow prisoners repeatedly were forced to
apologize for wearing long clothes in Muslim style, praying, teaching
the Quran to their children and asking imams to name their children.
Praying at a mosque on any day other than Friday was a sign of
extremism; so was attending Friday prayers outside their village or
having Quranic verses or graphics on their phones.
While instructors watched, those who confessed to such behavior were
told to repeat over and over: "We have done illegal things, but we now
know better."
OWING THE COUNTRY
Other detainees and a re-education camp instructor tell similar stories.
In mid-2017, a Uighur former on-air reporter for Xinjiang TV known as
Eldost was recruited to teach Chinese history and culture in an
indoctrination camp because he spoke excellent Mandarin. He had no choice.
The re-education system, Eldost said, classified internees into three
levels of security and duration of sentences.
The first group typically consisted of illiterate minority farmers who
didn't commit any ostensible crimes other than not speaking Chinese. The
second class was made up of people who were caught at home or on their
smartphones with religious content or so-called separatist materials,
such as lectures by the Uighur intellectual Ilham Tohti.
The final group was made up of those who had studied religion abroad and
came back, or were seen to be affiliated with foreign elements. In the
latter cases, internees were often were sentenced to prison terms of 10
to 15 years, Eldost said.
While he was teaching, Eldost once saw through the window 20 students
driven into the courtyard. Two rows of guards waited for them and beat
them as soon as they got out of the police van. He later heard that the
internees were recent arrivals who had studied religion in the Middle East.
Violence was not regularly dispensed, but every internee AP spoke to saw
at least one incident of rough treatment or beatings.
Eldost said the instruction was aimed at showing how backward
traditional Uighur culture is and how repressive fundamentalist Islam is
compared to a progressive Communist Party. The internees' confessions of
their backwardness helped drive the point home.
"Internees are told to repeat those confessions to the point where, when
they are finally freed, they believe that they owe the country a lot,
that they could never repay the party," said Eldost, who escaped from
China in August after paying a bribe.
Eldost said he tried in little ways to help his internees. Tasked with
teaching the Three Character Classic, a Confucian standard taught widely
in elementary schools, he would make up mnemonic devices to help his
students — including elderly or illiterate Uighur farmers who barely
knew their own language — recite a few lines. He also advised students
to stop habitually saying "praise God" in Arabic and Uighur because
other instructors punished them for it.
Every time he went to sleep in a room with 80 others, he said, the last
thing he would hear was the sound of misery.
"I heard people crying every night," he said. "That was the saddest
experience in my life."
Another former detainee, a Uighur from Hotan in southern Xinjiang, said
his newly built center had just 90 people in two classes in 2015. There,
a government instructor claimed said that Uighur women historically did
not wear underwear, braided their hair to signal their sexual
availability, and had dozens of sexual partners.
"It made me so angry," the detainee said. "These kinds of explanations
of Uighur women humiliated me. I still remember this story every time I
think about this, I feel like a knife cut a hole in my chest."
Kayrat Samarkan, a Chinese Kazakh from Astana who was detained while
running errands in a northern Xinjiang police station in December, was
sent to an internment camp in Karamagay in northern Xinjiang with 5,700
students.
Those who didn't obey, were late to class or got into fights were put
for 12 hours in a loose body-suit that was made of iron and limited
their movement, he said. Those who still disobeyed would be locked in a
tiger chair for 24 hours. As one form of punishment, he said,
instructors would press an internee's head in a tub of ice and water.
After three months, Samarkan couldn't take the lessons anymore, so he
bashed his head against a wall to try to kill himself. He merely fell
unconscious.
"When I woke up, the staff threatened me, saying if I did that again
they would extend my sentence to 7 years there," he said.
After 20 days, Bekali also contemplated suicide. Several days later,
because of his intransigence and refusal to speak Mandarin, Bekali was
no longer permitted to go into the courtyard. Instead, he was sent to a
higher level of management, where he spent 24 hours a day in a room with
8 others.
A week later, he went to his first stint in solitary confinement. He saw
a local judicial official walking into the building on an inspection
tour and yelled at the top of his lungs. He thought even his former
detention center, with the abuse he suffered, would be better.
"Take me in the back and kill me, or send me back to prison," he
shouted. "I can't be here anymore."
He was again hauled off to solitary confinement. It lasted 24 hours,
ending late afternoon on Nov. 24.
That's when Bekali was released, as suddenly as he was detained eight
months earlier.
A Baijiantan policemen who had always gone easy on Bekali during
interrogation appeared and checked him out of the facility.
"You were too headstrong, but what the department did was unjust," he
told Bekali as he drove him to his sister's home in Karamay.
Bekali was free.
FREEDOM, BUT NOT FOR HIS FAMILY
The next morning, a Saturday, the police opened their immigration office
for Bekali to pick up a unique, 14-day Chinese visa. His original had
long expired. Bekali left China on December 4.
Seeking compensation from the Chinese government is out of the question.
But Bekali keeps a plastic folder at home of evidence that might prove
useful someday: his passport with stamps and visas, travel records and a
handwritten Chinese police document dated and imprinted with red-ink seals.
The document is the closest thing he has to an official acknowledgement
that he suffered for eight months. It says he was held on suspicion of
endangering national security; the last sentence declares him released
without charge.
At first, Bekali did not want the AP to publish his account for fear
that his sister and mother in China would be detained and sent to
re-education.
But on March 10, back in China, the police took his sister, Adila
Bekali. A week later, on March 19, his mother Amina Sadik was led away.
In early April, Bekali called his father, Ebrayem. He told Bekali to
take good care of himself, as if to bid farewell before the inevitable.
Bekali changed his mind and said he wanted to tell his story, no matter
the consequences.
"Things have already come this far," he said. "I have nothing left to lose."
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