A horrifying report released last week by the BBC describes the “mass rape, sexual abuse, and torture” that have become commonplace in China’s “transformation through re-education” camps in Xinjiang province.
The camps exist for the purpose of mass incarceration and indoctrination of Uyghur Muslims and other minorities. But, as the BBC’s reporting shows, they’re also genocidal torture dens where Communist prison guards habitually and violently slake their lust on the bodies of the inmates.
The authors of the report, Matthew Hill, David Campanale, and Joel Gunter, were able to speak to several former prisoners and one former guard, exposing the propaganda line of the CCP — that these camps are “vocational schools” — for the lie that it has always been.
One former prisoner, an ethnic Kazakh woman who was detained for 18 months, was given the job of stripping Uyghur women and handcuffing them before leaving them alone with Chinese men.
“My job was to remove their clothes above the waist and handcuff them so they cannot move,” she said. “Then I would leave the women in the room and a man would enter – some Chinese man from outside or policeman. I sat silently next to the door, and when the man left the room I took the woman for a shower.” A refusal to play this role on her part would’ve resulted in severe, possibly similar, punishment. The rapists “would pay money to have their pick of the prettiest young inmates,” she noted.
Tursunay Ziawudun was one of the victims. She was brought to a Chinese man and taken to “the dark room” — one of the few places in the camp that wasn’t surveilled with video footage 24/7:
The woman took me to the room next to where the other girl had been taken in. They had an electric stick, I didn’t know what it was, and it was pushed inside my genital tract, torturing me with an electric shock.
A “teacher” who worked in the camps told the BBC that there were “four kinds of electric shock . . . the chair, the glove, the helmet, and anal rape with a stick.” “The screams echoed throughout the building,” she said. “I could hear them during lunch and sometimes when I was in class.”
Ziawadun stressed that electric shock and rape were not the only means of torture in the camps:
They don’t only rape, but also bite all over your body. . . . They did not spare any part of the body, they bit everywhere leaving horrible marks. . . . I have experienced that three times. And it is not just one person who torments you, not just one predator. Each time they were two or three men.
In a piece written for Bitter Winter yesterday, Massimo Introvigne notes that habitual rape and torture by CCP officers isn’t limited to the Xinjiang camps, to Uighur Muslims, or even to women:
[Former inmates from across China] also insisted that the horrific scenes of rape and torture described in the BBC report do not happen only in Xinjiang, nor are Muslim women the only victims. Female inmates from the banned religious movements labeled xie jiao, such as The Church of Almighty God and Falun Gong, are also raped. Their stories are remarkably similar to those told to the BBC by the Uyghur and ethnic Kazakh women who encountered rape in the Xinjiang camps. The same combination of obsessive indoctrination and sexual abuse is used to deprogram or “de-convert” from their beliefs female devotees of The Church of Almighty God and Falun Gong all around China.
We in the civilized world like to commemorate the atrocities of the Holocaust with the slogan “Never Again.” It’s a conscience-quenching promise we make as a society never to allow the specters of Dachau or Auschwitz to rise again on the horizon of human history. But putting an end to the Holocaust meant the waging of the bloodiest war in human history and the sacrifice of mothers’ sons unnumbered. The Allies had to mount a land invasion of the entire European continent and roll their tanks all the way to the heart of history’s most evil empire. Are we really willing to contemplate war with China in order to free these poor souls from their Communist captors? How many loved ones would you sacrifice to a Chinese bomb or bullet to see them walk free? If the answers are “no” and “none,” then we ought to stop congratulating ourselves on our collective resolve to head off another Shoah. We’re not serious in the least about doing so.