A pair of women who survived concentration camps in China have testified before Congress about their experiences.
The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) held a hearing this week, titled “The Chinese Communist Party’s Ongoing Uyghur Genocide.” Among the numerous people who testified were Gulbahar Haitiwaji and Qelbinur Sidik, both of whom survived concentration camps in Xinjiang.
Haitiwaji testified that she had safely left China for France, only to be called back under the guise of signing paperwork for her retirement pension. Haitiwaji, a Uyghur woman, complied and returned to China, where she was then detained and imprisoned for years.
“I endured constant interrogations and brutalities,” she said. “I was chained to my bed for 20 days as punishment once.”
In the camps, they slept on bunk beds with no mattresses, and used a bucket as a toilet, without any toilet paper. Cameras monitored their every move. They were also forced to endure 11 hours of government propaganda and were forced into other horrors. When they were interrogated, their heads were covered with black hoods while they were placed into what they called a “tiger chair” — a metal chair into which victims are strapped and unable to move.
“I felt I was losing my sense of self, losing my ability to even remember the faces of my family members,” she said. “When my head was shaved, I was certain I would be executed. When I was given mysterious vaccinations, I was certain they were poisoning us, although it became clear later that they were sterilizing us. Instead of killing us swiftly, the tactics being used were to make us slowly disappear.”
Sidik, meanwhile, is Uzbek and a member of the Uyghur community and had previously worked as a teacher. In 2017, she was told that she was being reassigned to a new teaching assignment, only to find out that she was being sent to a concentration camp to teach Uyghurs. “It is hard for me to remember all of the prisoners, but some of their faces haunt me,” she said in her testimony, using a translator. The torture rooms were next door to the classrooms, so they could hear the screams of the prisoners through the walls.
“The horrible thing is when these female prisoners were taken for interrogation, they faced gang rape by the guards,” she said through tears. “And the worst thing is they – the guards or police – use electric batons to insert their private parts to rape and torture them.”
Sidik also echoed Haitiwaji’s claims that Uyghurs were given medication meant to sterilize them. She estimated that 10,000 women were given injections each Monday. “After they took that medicine, their period would stop,” she said. “Even some women who were breastfeeding, the breast milk will stop.” In 2019, she was sterilized as well.
Both women begged other nations to take action and help the Uyghur people. “Please rescue Uyghur and other Turkic refugees, like Canada has done,” Haitiwaji said. “Please stop American companies from continuing to be complicit in surveilling our people and profiting from their labor.”
