generalspeaking

Descending Deniability

"[We -- military colleagues would] kick them, beat them [until they're] bruised and swollen [and] until they kneel on the floor, crying."

"If you want people to confess, you use the electric baton with two sharp tips on top."

"We would tie two electrical wires on the tips and set the wires on their genitals while the person is tied up."

"Some people see this as a job, some are just psychopaths."

"They were pretending to serve the people, but they were a bunch of people who wanted to achieve a dictatorship."

"[I can never return to China] -- they'll beat me half to death. I'd be arrested. There would be a lot of problems. Defection, treason, leaking government secrets, subversion. [I'd get] them all."

"The fact that I speak for Uyghurs [means I] could be charged for participating in a terrorist group. I could be charged for everything imaginable."

Self-exiled Chinese Han former policeman 'Jiang'

"The prison guards, they asked me to take off my underwear [before telling him to bend over] Don't do this, I cried. Please don't do this. [He passed out during the attack and woke up surrounded by his own vomit and urine]."

"I saw the flies, just like flying around me. I found that the flies are better than me. Because no one can torture them, and no one can rape them."

"I saw that those guys [were] laughing at me, and [saying] he's so weak. I heard those words." 

"[The next day, the prison guards asked him] Did you have a good time?"

"It's the scar in my heart, I will never forget."

Abduweli Ayup, Uyghur from Xinjing Province

 

"The agony and the suffering we had [in the camp] will never vanish, will never leave our mind."

"They put me in a tiger chair. They hung us up and beat us on the thigh, on the hips with wooden torches, with iron whips."

"When they put the chains on my legs the first time, I understood immediately I am coming to hell [heavy chains were attached to prisoners' hands and feet, forcing them to stay bent over, even when they were sleeping]."

"I survived from this psychological torture because I am a religious person. I would never have survived this without my faith. My faith for life, my passion for freedom kept me alive."

Omir Bekali, former Xinjiang detainee

Jiang

Perhaps the world gives pause, hearing the accounts of former Uyghur detainees of the torture they endured in Xinjiang Province throughout China's re-education program for Muslim Uyghurs whom Beijing believes poses a terrorist and separatist threat to the country. Former victims telling their stories, so unbelievably cruel, intolerable that a government, that of China's Communist Party would induce imprisoned, helpless people to 'confess' to the crime of being an ethnic, a Muslim and a conspirator in a plan to destabilize China.

 

But a Han Chinese, a former police detective who had been assigned like a hundred-thousand other police to travel from the mainland center to remote Xinjiang with its majority Muslim population, to restore 'harmony' by imprisoning and exacting confessions from demoralized, frightened, tortured people for whom the experience was so devastating he fled his native country to self-exile, feeling compelled to tell the world of the cultural-religious genocide taking place there. 

 

Details of cruelty and devastation visited upon millions of people through 'opportunities' to rewire their value system, influence the rejection of their religion, disperse them elsewhere, dividing families, sterilizing women, shaming and brutalizing men. From the lips of someone who had lent himself on orders to the process. And who recoiled at the human damage he witnessed, beatings he himself took part in out of fear of survival; can his testimony be disbelieved?

 

He spoke of Uyghur Muslims hanged from cell ceilings, tortured with electric batons, ordered to submit to rape by fellow prisoners. The interview with CNN took place remotely, the former policeman giving his testimony from his haven in Europe, under an assumed name. Presumably protecting his identification in fear of reprisals against himself, against family members remaining in China. Jiang worked in one of the many internment camps in Xinjiang. 

 

When he first arrived he felt a sense of patriotism among the other police recruits to staff detention centres. That lasted as long as his first encounters with reality, witness to rampant abuse. Some detainees as young as 14 subjected to human rights atrocities. Every new detainee was inducted into a beating during an initial interrogation meant to extract a confession. Many of whom became intimately introduced to the infamous 'tiger chair' where a prisoner's hands and feet are strapped to a chair for days. Waterboarding, sleep deprivation and hanging from ceilings other devices of 'interrogation'.

 

He now understands fully that none of the detainees was guilty of anything, arrested to meet government quotas. Once a confession was extracted inmates would be forwarded on to one of the hundreds of internment camps coloquially referred to as "vocational training" centres, where the work of freeing Uyghurs from the burden of their traditions, culture and religion would continue apace, to make good Chinese citizens of them.

 

A guard patrols Number 3 Detention Center in Dabancheng in western China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region

 

 

Labels: 'Re-education", Chinese Communist Party, Majoriity Muslim Population, Torture, Uyghur imprisonment, Xinjiang Province

posted by Pieface @ Thursday, October 07, 2021