Allegations of shackled students and gang rape inside China s detention camps
Updated 10:14 AM ET, Fri February 19, 2021
Hong Kong (CNN)On the first day of her new teaching job at a Chinese government-run detention center in Xinjiang, Qelbinur Sidik said she saw two soldiers carry a young Uyghur woman out of the building on a stretcher. There was no spark of life in her face. Her cheeks were drained of color, she was not breathing, said Sidik, a former elementary school teacher who says she was forced to spend several months teaching at two detention centers in Xinjiang in 2017.
A policewoman who worked at the camp later told her the woman had died from heavy bleeding, though she didn t say what caused it. It was the first of many stories the policewoman would tell Sidik during the teacher s three-month assignment at the heavily-fortified building that housed female detainees.
When I visited it a few years ago, open drains were spilling water onto crowded lanes. (The next monsoon season, three young boys fell into the drains and died.) The tin roofs of the houses overlapped one another like fish scales; a roadside tap dripped a brown fluid that passed for potable water. When a toddler ran out from an open door onto the street, a neighbor caught him and lifted him up. Someone in the family I counted six people in a single room, including an elderly couple sent another child to retrieve him. In that episode alone, I later realized, I had witnessed at least nine one-on-one contacts.
Gang raped, shackled and broken students: Inside China’s ‘horrific’ Uighur detention camps
Sun Online Desk
24th February, 2021 11:00:36
This file photo shows a facility believed to be a re-education camp where mostly Muslim ethnic minorities, like Uighurs, are detained in Xinjiang
A woman who claims to have been forced to teach Mandarin to classes of “loudly crying” men and women inside China’s Uighur detention camps has given a rare glimpse into what goes on behind their closed, locked and guarded doors.
Qelbinur Sidik, a teacher, said she was summoned to a meeting at the Saybagh District Bureau of Education in 2016 and told she would soon be working with “illiterates”. By 2017, she was routinely teaching Madarin to classes of “shackled” students inside two government-run camps.
China: Inside Xinjiang detention camps, allegations of shackled students and gang rape msn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from msn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.