![]() ![]() This file photo taken on May 31, 2019, shows a watchtower on a high-security facility near what is believed to be a re-education camp where mostly Muslim ethnic minorities are detained, on the outskirts of Hotan, China. State Department spokeswoman said in a statement last week. “We are deeply disturbed by reports, including first-hand testimony, of systematic rape and sexual abuse against women in internment camps for ethnic Uighurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang,” a U.S. officials say, “these atrocities shock the conscience and must be met with serious consequences.” government allowed her to come to the United States.Ĭhina’s foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said last week that Ziyawudun’s rape claim “has no factual basis at all.” In Kazakhstan, her application for asylum was denied, but she was able to remain with family despite the constant risk of sudden deportation back to China. In September 2019, the Chinese government allowed her to travel for only one month to Kazakhstan to stay with her husband. She said the Chinese authorities freed her under pressure because of her husband’s campaigning in Kazakhstan. In December 2018, after nine months in the camp, Ziyawudun was released. “On four different occasions, I was taken to an interrogation room, where I was beaten, my private part was electrocuted unbearably by an electric baton and I was gang raped,” Ziyawudun told VOA, adding that some of her fellow detainee women never came back to the cell after their visit to the interrogation room, and the ones who returned were asked to keep quiet or face consequences. ![]() ![]() Uighur protester Mirza Ahmet Ilyasoglu holds photographs of relatives he says they have not heard from in years, speaks near the Chinese Embassy in Ankara, Turkey, Feb. Her husband didn’t return to China as Chinese authorities had demanded, and in March 2018 as a punishment for his decision, Ziyawudun for the second time was taken into the internment camp where she witnessed what she called “the most barbaric and inhumane sexual abuses against and other cellmates.” Ziyawudun and her husband, an ethnic Kazakh, both natives of Xinjiang, first moved to neighboring Kazakhstan to open a medical clinic in 2011.īut in November 2016, when they returned to China, local officials in Xinjiang seized their passports and in April 2017 sent Ziyawudun to an internment camp for “reeducation” for traveling to and living in Kazakhstan, one of 26 countries Chinese authorities in Xinjiang deem sensitive.Īfter several weeks, Ziyawudun was released from the camp, and in June 2017, the police released her husband’s passport, allowing him to go to Kazakhstan for two months while keeping Ziyawudun in China as a guarantee for his return to Xinjiang without engaging in any “anti-China activities” in Kazakhstan. Ziyawudun’s story was first reported by the BBC last week. ![]() In leaked internal government documents, China has called such facilities “transformation through education centers” aimed at “washing brains, cleansing hearts, strengthening righteousness and eliminating evil,” and later described them internationally as “vocational training centers” to “counter terrorism and religious extremism.” International rights groups estimate that over one million Uighurs and other Turkic-speaking minority groups in Xinjiang have been held in internment camps since early 2017. government to respond to China's alleged abuses of the Uighurs, July 3, 2020. Rushan Abbas, Executive Director of Campaign for Uyghurs, speaks to a group gathered near the White House to call on the U.S. ![]()
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