This Refugee Witnessed Atrocities in a Chinese Internment Camp. Years Later, She’s Still Demanding Justice
- Obtenir le lien
- X
- Autres applications
From November 2017 to March 2018, Dr. Sayragul Sauytbay was imprisoned at one of China’s internment camps in Xinjiang where she witnessed mass atrocities few have lived to tell the world about.
An educator of Kazakh descent, Sauytbay was forced to be a language instructor at one of the camps until she pulled off a miraculous escape to neighboring Kazakhstan. Today, she remains haunted by the torture, rape, beatings, forced confessions, and other horrors she experienced, saw, and heard at the internment camp in Xinjiang, which she refers to as East Turkistan because it remains the home of Turkic ethnic groups.
Through a translator, Sauytbay spoke with National Review at length about her experience in the Chinese camp, the persecution she faced in Kazakhstan after escaping, and her current life in Sweden as vice president of the East Turkistan government-in-exile, an activist-led entity that advocates for democracy and independence in the region.
The first Trump administration gave Sauytbay the International Women of Courage Award in 2020 in recognition of her bravery in shedding light on CCP atrocities. Five years after the first Trump administration declared the Chinese persecution of Uyghurs to be genocide, Sauytbay is telling her story once again in hopes that the current geopolitical instability amid U.S. intervention in Venezuela and unrest elsewhere will inspire change in her home country.
Beginning in January 2017, Sauytbay says Chinese authorities started to raid her home, interrogate her, and occasionally beat her. At the time she was overseeing five kindergartens in Xinjiang as an educator. At that point, Sauytbay's husband and two children had already fled to Kazakhstan, where they became citizens and lost contact with her. Sauytbay was prevented from leaving the country with her family.
In November 2017, authorities decided to bring her into one of the camps as a language instructor and gave her no choice but to accept her new role. Inside the camp, rape and sexual assault occurred regularly because the guards are given permission to commit whatever atrocities they want. Guards would pick out women at night and keep them until the morning, when they’d come back beaten and bleeding in sensitive places, she recounted.
There was also a “dark room” with an electric chair and another chair with its nails sticking out. Sauytbay says she was brought into the room on one occasion to be interrogated and tortured for a few hours. Cameras are constantly tracking the prisoners inside and outside of the facility, except when they enter the torture room. Sauytbay regularly heard screams coming from the room after victims were dragged inside.
One extremely graphic incident stands out in particular for Sauytbay. One day, the guards brought roughly 200 detainees into a conference center at the camp, where they were forced to watch a woman in her 20s get gang-raped after giving a forced confession to fake crimes. All the attendees were made to watch the assault. Since then, Sauytbay has had difficulty sleeping and regularly experiences nightmares based on her time in the camp.
“I’m constantly reminiscing, the screaming of the people, begging for help, the atrocities. There I myself am, in some of my dreams, I’m trying to reach out and try to save them, and . . . there’s nothing that I can do. And so, this is the psychological impact that it has taken on me, personally, despite, even after seven, eight years and trying to seek all sorts of medical help for this, it still has not been able to, you know, I still haven’t been able to overcome it,” she said.
In March 2018, she was brought into a nearby city and officially removed from her job as a camp language instructor. Police interrogated and beat her, while handing down a one- to three-year stint as a detainee in a camp rather than an instructor. It was that moment when Sauytbay carried out her extraordinary escape to Kazakhstan because she calculated that she would not make it out of the camps alive anyway.
“I said, if I go there, back to this death camp, I’m going to end up dying. Because I’ve witnessed a lot of people dying in these camps, and I knew that I wouldn’t survive very long if I went through what the actual detainees were going through. And so I decided to take a risk to flee into Kazakhstan, because either way, if I succeed, I will be able to see my children again. If not, the worst thing that can happen is that they’re going to kill me, which would either way happen if I was sent to the camp,” she said.
Her situation hardly improved when she reached Kazakhstan. Sauytbay was quickly detained and imprisoned, barely staving off deportation because of outrage from Kazakh media, human rights organizations, and the broader publicly. Three times she applied for asylum in Kazakhstan, and each time she was rejected. After the third attempt, she faced the renewed possibility of deportation until the international community got involved and worked with the Swedish government to relocate her there in July 2019.
Once she arrived in Sweden, Sauytbay began speaking out and testifying regularly to various parliaments about her experience. She has come to the U.S. to meet with officials and congressional lawmakers as well. In November 2023, she was elected vice president by the East Turkistan parliament in exile to continue her advocacy. Sauytbay considers the Chinese government an occupying force in East Turkistan and believes the Chinese Communist Party deserves accountability for crimes against humanity.
To that end, the East Turkistan government-in-exile has brought the case before the International Criminal Court. They have met repeatedly with ICC prosecutors and submitted evidence. Attempting to gain support, they have met with numerous governments to talk about the case. Sauytbay says the ICC has told them that it is waiting for more public pressure from states to begin pursuing the case. The ICC declined to comment on the specifics of the case.
The Chinese government has thoroughly rejected accusations of genocide against Uyghurs. China justifies the camps on the grounds that they are necessary to combat Islamic terrorism and separatism in the region, although the U.S. government dismissed those fears as pretextual. Genocide Watch issued a report last month that argued China’s treatment of the Uyghurs features several stages of genocide, such as discrimination, persecution, extermination, and denial.
When reached for comment, the Chinese Embassy denied the existence of internment camps in Xinjiang and claimed paid anti-Chinese actors are promoting fabricated stories to advance Western interests. The embassy said the local government in Xinjiang has taken anti-terrorism measures including the creation of “vocational training centers” to root out extremism. Additionally, the embassy claimed the de-radicalization process had achieved “remarkable results” as shown by Xinjiang’s lack of terrorist incidents over the past several years.
“Sayragul Sauytbay claimed that she had taught at a vocational training center, but later changed her story, claiming she was detained in a so-called ‘concentration camp.’ In fact, Sayragul Sauytbay never taught at a vocational training center, nor did she ever study there,” a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy told NR.
“On April 5, 2018, she illegally left the country, and her actions constitute suspected illegal border crossing. In addition, she is suspected of loan fraud in China and still owes nearly 400,000 RMB in unpaid debt. Public information shows that she is the leader of the so-called ‘East Turkestan exile government’ and has long been engaged in anti-China separatist activities.”
Xinjiang is home to 11 million Uyghur Muslims, and more than 1 million of them have been placed in the reeducation camps. Outside the camps, Chinese authorities have imposed surveillance, forced sterilizations, religious restrictions, family separation, and other abuses. Sauytbay told National Review that China’s campaign against the Turkic ethnic groups began in the late 1980s with forced abortion and sterilization, and over time it escalated into what it is today. Chinese authorities claim the detainees “graduated” in 2019, but independent reports suggest internment is ongoing.
A 2025 report from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum suggests at least half a million Turkic individuals are imprisoned or experiencing extrajudicial internment, with the figure potentially being much higher. The Holocaust Museum found that the Chinese government expanded its detention centers and formal prisons after it closed most of the reeducation camps in 2019. Many of the inmates at the forced-education camps were transferred to forced labor, to formal prisons, or back to their homes. Chinese government statistics claim prison sentences in Xinjiang have declined to levels similar to those for other provinces beginning in 2022, but those statistics are impossible to verify.
The U.S. passed legislation in 2021 to prevent Chinese goods made with forced Uyghur labor from entering America, a rare issue that united Republicans and Democrats alike. As a GOP senator from Florida, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was a leading proponent of the legislation. Last summer, the Trump administration bolstered enforcement of the law by adding multiple sectors to its high-priority list.
 |
| THIS BREAKING NEWS ITEM IS PRESENTED BY  |
| |
 |
|
- Obtenir le lien
- X
- Autres applications
Commentaires
Enregistrer un commentaire
Thank you to leave a comment on my site