Uyghur women have been disproportionately singled out for abuse in Xinjiang

On March 1, a week before International Women’s Day, which is celebrated by the Chinese Communist Party, Radio Free Asia reported on a 62-year-old Uyghur woman who is five years into a 21-year prison term for the “crime” of arranging Islamic instruction for her children 25 years ago. Her treatment shines the spotlight afresh on the plight of Uyghur women in their homeland under the “New Era” policies of Xí Jìnpíng 习近平.

A resident of Ghulja County near China’s western border with Kazakhstan, Ayshemhan Abdulla was given seven consecutive years in jail for each of the three children she dared to send to private Quranic classes in 2003, according to Radio Free Asia. Her children were taken to an internment camp for one year.

Radio Free Asia reporter Shohret Hoshur told The China Project that Abdulla’s case had only just come to light because of the difficulty getting information out of Xinjiang. He had confirmed the sentence with a security official from her village. The official also verified the death in prison from diabetes of another elderly woman from the same village who had been sentenced to 18 years for similar offenses.

For exiled Uyghurs waiting for news of their relatives, updates trickling through the grapevine often come years after the event, and are rarely positive.

Much has been made about conditions in the so-called “reeducation” camps for both men and women. Routine torture, beatings, interrogation, sleep deprivation, and starvation have been described by former camp detainees, teachers, and officials. But for those whose female relatives have been incarcerated, reports of targeted gender-based violence are especially chilling.

Rushan Abbas, the director of Campaign for Uyghurs, whose own sister, Dr. Gulshan Abbas, was sentenced to 20 years in jail in retaliation for Rushan’s advocacy work, renewed calls this year to fight for justice for Uyghur women in her homeland, whose plight she feels has been ignored. “Women are facing double oppression,” she said, “not only as members of a persecuted ethnic group, but also as women who are targeted for gender-based violence.”

How to “deal with” Uyghur women and their expressions of cultural and religious identity has obsessed successive Chinese leaders, culminating in Xi Jinping’s “People’s War on Terror,” where being a Uyghur and a Muslim, particularly a Muslim woman, has become a dangerous combination. Clampdowns and campaigns to bring them into line were stepped up after ethnic riots in 2009 where official figures put the dead at around 200 and the injured at more than 1,700. Head coverings — normal cultural markers in Central Asia — became a sign of “extreme religion.”

Long skirts and hair styles were next to come under the hammer in the $8 million multimedia campaign “Project Beauty,” designed to let women’s locks “flow” and reveal their “beautiful faces” by abandoning “old and outdated customs” and becoming “practitioners of modern culture.” Xinjiang women were urged on billboards in Kashgar to join “1.3 billion Chinese sons and daughters to realize the great Chinese dream.” Beauty pageants were staged in far-flung communities for girls and middle-aged women to parade in jeans and mini skirts as signs of having joined the 21st century, and hundreds of beauty salons were opened around the province for girls to pursue hair styling and makeup careers.

With the arrival of Chén Quánguó 陈全国 as head of the region in 2016, crimes against women became more targeted and visible. Measures that last year’s UN report on Xinjiang designated as possible crimes against humanity included forced abortions, mandatory sterilization, and a campaign of coerced marriage.

In tandem with mass roundups for “crimes” such as following banned authors, mosque attendance, hanging a picture of the Ka’aba, a Muslim pilgrimage site in Mecca, and giving children Islamic names, the government rolled out a family twinning program to “promote ethnic unity.” One million Han Chinese cadres were billeted across the region to monitor firsthand the everyday lives of Uyghur families: to live, eat, and sleep with them.

Unscrupulous visitors were handed a license to abuse women and girls whose menfolk had been detained. Reports of sexual assault were rife.

Staying sometimes up to a month at a time, the so-called relatives were given carte blanche to spy on their hosts’ religious practices, political views and day to day habits. Everything was recorded, smiling group photos were de rigueur and videos monitored meal times, home decor and all the comings and goings of family life. Single women households and their daughters were particularly vulnerable. Protest was not an option.

When orders rang out for women between the ages of 19 and 59 to be fitted with IUDs or be sterilized, Qelbinur Sedik, a former camp teacher now in exile in Europe, had no choice but to obey. She was warned in a government text to turn up or else, even though at 50 she was well past childbearing age.

“If anything happens, who will take responsibility for you? Do not gamble with your life, don’t even try,” it read. “These things are not just about you. You have to think about your family members and your relatives around you,” the message said. “If you fight with us at your door and refuse to collaborate with us, you will go to the police station and sit on the metal chair!” (The “metal chair” refers to steel “tiger chairs” used for interrogation that have leg irons and handcuffs to restrain the body, often in painful positions.)

After Qelbinur Sedik escaped China and reached Europe, where she told the Dutch Uyghur Human Rights Foundation her story in 2020, Beijing condemned her testimony as lies.

But there have been multiple accounts of pregnant women who had exceeded their quota of children being forced to undergo abortions, some in their third trimester. Stories abound of women forced to go into hiding or give their children away, and even of women giving birth to live children, only to see their babies dispatched in front of them.

While hundreds of thousands were disappearing into the black hole of the internment camp system, the exact nature of their fate was not known until a trickle of witnesses, very often Kazakhs who escaped as part of repatriation agreements, made it out to the West with their stories. Sworn to secrecy amid threats that relatives would suffer if they talked, but burdened by what they had seen, the stories started to tumble out. Some wrote books, some are included in anthologies of testimonies, and others contributed to the Uyghur Tribunal in London, whose collection of 500 witness testimonies forms part of the most significant body of knowledge in the world on the subject.

All the evidence points to a deliberate campaign of sexual violence against women composed of both physical and psychological abuse. Those bearing witness to what they saw in the camps have been left with traumas that the years have not eased. Many say they witnessed or experienced gratuitous violence of a sexual nature, gang rape, mystery injections and pills, disappearances, torture, and the deaths of other inmates from brutality or neglect.

Tursunay Ziyawudun described feeling like a “walking corpse” after being subjected to serial rapes and seeing the effects of similar torture on other inmates, many of whom died. “I can’t cry and I can’t die. I must see them pay for this,” she told the Uyghur Tribunal. “My soul and heart are dead…Their aim is to destroy everyone.”

Pretty young girls were handpicked to service Han Chinese clientele throughout the nights. Gulzire Awulqanqizi, testifying in the volume of “100 Camp Testimonies” compiled by the Uyghur Transnational Justice Database, tells how she was forced to chain the arms of the chosen girls and to clean them up afterward.

A former teacher in the camps, Sayragul Sauytbay, described in her own witness statement how 100 prisoners were assembled one day to watch the repeated gang rape of a young girl by a series of prison guards. Detainees were tested for their reactions and those who resisted, clenched their fists, closed their eyes, or looked away were taken for punishment. “I felt I died. I was dead,” she said.

Qelbinur Sidik, a Uyghur woman now in exile in the Netherlands, told The China Project that her two periods as a teacher in the camps have left her with deep psychological trauma that she cannot shake off. “I saw things I will never forget,” she said. “I saw unimaginable torture and cruelty. I saw girls and women with shaved heads, not allowed to speak to each other or to use their names. They became like robots, like walking dead.” Girls would be taken out of class and return hours later, their clothes stained with blood and unable to sit down. She knew what had happened to them, but was forced to keep it to herself.

Despite three years in the West, Sidik still lies awake at night unable to rid her mind of the faces of the women she taught. She has developed myriad health problems and mental health issues. “Not a minute goes by that I do not remember what I saw and heard,” she said. She says she hasn’t laughed since leaving, as if signs of happiness would betray the memory of those she left behind. Guilt haunts her.

Rushan Abbas would like to see feminist groups around the world stand up for Uyghur women. “These are people fighting for their dignity and freedom,” she said. The situation is ongoing. It has not stopped. The so-called “pair up and become family” program is still in full swing and she hears reports regularly of Uyghur girls forced to marry Han Chinese men. “These are all part of the CCP’s assimilationist policies in the region and the continuing genocide of my people.

“Campaign for Uyghurs calls on the international community, women’s and human rights activists, to recognize the severity of the situation in East Turkistan, especially toward Uyghur women, and take tangible actions to hold China accountable for its crimes.”