Uighur details atrocities in China’s ‘re-education camps’

FPI / March 3, 2021

A Chinese Uighur who has political refugee status in France has described the atrocities she and more than a million of her people have suffered at the hands of communist China in Xinjiang "re-education camps."

Gulbahar Haitiwaji had lived in France for ten years with her husband and daughters, but preferred to keep her Chinese passport so she could visit her elderly mother. In November 2016, she bought a ticket to China, where she was detained and moved to a re-education camp for Uighurs.

Gulbahar's account was part of Italian journalist Giulio Meotti's Feb. 28 report for Gatestone Institute detailing Chinese payoffs of Western academics.

She was moved from one detention center to another. First the pre-trial detention center, with the rules hanging on the wall: "It is forbidden to speak Uighur; it is forbidden to pray; it is forbidden to go on a hunger strike."

Gulbahar said she was forced to defecate into a plastic bucket in front of the other detainees.

She was chained to her bed for 20 days in 2017. She was then taken to a new "vocational training center," the name given to the concentration camps by the communist regime.

The Baijintan Camp — three buildings "as big as small airports" on the edge of the desert — is surrounded by fences topped with razor wire. Prisoners no longer see daylight, only neon. Cameras follow the detainees' every movement, Gulbahar said.

"Thanks to our great country. Thanks to our dear President Xi Jinping," the detainees are forced to chant from dawn to dusk.

After taking on new names (Gulbahar became "Number 9"), their clothes and hair are removed. Chinese re-education then begins to take hold of their mind. A camp guard shows the group of inmates a wall: "What color is it?", he asks. "White", they reply. "No, it is black. It is I who decide what color it is."

Then come strange "vaccinations," Gulbahar said. "Women no longer menstruated. Once I returned to France, I really felt the existence of sterilization."

Joe Biden recently all but endorsed the atrocities being carried out by the communist regime, saying what is occurring at the gulags is merely "a different norm."

"The central principle of Xi Jinping is that there must be a united, tightly controlled China. And he uses his rationale for the things he does based on that,” Biden said.

Gulbahar had a different take.

"Xi Jinping wants Xinjiang without the Uighurs," said Gulbahar, who is the first Uighur to have been released and repatriated to France.

Gulbahar was detained for two years before being released under pressure from France. Early this year, she published a chilling account, "Rescapée du goulag chinois" ["Survivor of a Chinese Gulag"].

Free Press International