‘Uyghur Tribunal’ hears allegations of rampant China abuses
June 08, 2021A London panel investigating the plight of Uyghurs in China on Friday heard witness testimony of torture and gang rapes, in a process slammed by Beijing as a mendacious smear.
Witnesses described squalid conditions and brutality in camps in the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang, with one claiming a woman had died after undergoing forced sterilisation.
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Qelbinur Sidik, an ethnic-Uzbek teacher from Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi, said she was ordered by Communist Party bosses to teach Chinese in two fetid and crowded “re-education” camps — one male and one female — for Uyghurs.
The so-called students were made to wear shackles during hours-long classes, she told the tribunal.
Female prisoners were allegedly abused when they were taken for interrogation. “They were not only tortured but also raped, sometimes gang-raped,” Sidik said.
Forced sterilisation of Uyghur women was common and in one instance, a female prisoner died from the process, she added.
Sidik said she was also subjected to forced sterilisation before she was given a visa to visit her daughter in the Netherlands and fled China.
“The things that I have witnessed and I experienced, I cannot forget even for a day,” she said. “I am a woman myself, I have a daughter. I don’t wish anyone to suffer like that.”
“The police, the guards in the camp, they didn’t see the male prisoners as human beings,” Sidik said. “They enjoyed watching them being humiliated and their suffering was for them their joy.”