Survivors narrate rapes and horror in Xinjiang 4:35
(CNN) -
The raids began after midnight in Xinjiang.
Hundreds of police officers armed with rifles went from house to house in Uighur communities in China's far western region, dragging people from their homes, handcuffing and hooded them, and threatening to shoot them if they resisted, a former detective from Chinese police.
"We captured them all by force during the night," he said.
"If there were hundreds of people in a county in this area, then you would have to arrest those hundreds of people."
The former detective-turned-whistleblower asked to be identified only as Jiang, to protect his family members who remain in China.
In a three-hour interview with CNN in Europe, where he is now in exile, Jiang revealed unusual details about what he described as a systematic campaign of torture against ethnic Uighurs in the region's detention camp system, claims that China has denied for years.
"Kick them, beat them (until they are) bruised and swollen," Jiang said, recalling how he and his colleagues used to interrogate detainees in police detention centers.
"Until they kneel on the ground crying."
advertising
China responds to CNN investigation into separated Uighur families
During his stay in Xinjiang, Jiang said that every new detainee was beaten during the interrogation process, including men, women and children as young as 14 years old.
The methods included chaining people to a metal or wooden "tiger chair" - chairs designed to immobilize suspects - hanging people from the ceiling, sexual violence, electrocutions and simulated drowning.
Inmates were often forced to stay awake for days and denied food and water, he said.
"They all use different methods. Some even use a wrecking bar or iron chains with padlocks," Jiang said.
"The police would step on the suspect's face and tell him to confess."
The suspects were charged with terrorism offenses, Jiang said, but he believes that "none" of the hundreds of prisoners who were involved in the arrests had committed a crime.
"They are ordinary people," he said.
Jiang said he was sent to Xinjiang "three or four" times from his usual post at a police station in China.
Short-term deployments came with an additional payment.
Torture in police detention centers only stopped when suspects confessed, Jiang said.
They were then usually transferred to another facility, such as a prison or an internment camp staffed by prison guards.
To help verify his testimony, Jiang showed CNN his police uniform, official documents, photographs, videos and identification from his time in China, most of which cannot be released to protect his identity.
CNN has sent detailed questions to the Chinese government about their allegations, so far unanswered.
CNN cannot independently confirm Jiang's claims, but multiple details from his recollections echo the experiences of two Uighur victims that CNN interviewed for this report.
More than 50 former inmates of the camp system also gave testimony to Amnesty International for a 160-page report published in June, "'As if we were enemies in a war': Mass imprisonment, torture and persecution of Muslims in Xinjiang in China."
US, Allies Announce Sanctions Against Chinese Officials For "Serious Human Rights Abuses" Against Uyghurs
The US State Department estimates that up to 2 million Uighurs and other ethnic minorities have been detained in internment camps in Xinjiang since 2017. China says the camps are vocational, intended to combat terrorism and separatism, and has repeatedly denied allegations of human rights abuses in the region.
"I want to reiterate that the so-called genocide in Xinjiang is nothing more than a rumor backed by ulterior motives and a blatant lie," said Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, during a press conference in June.
On Wednesday, Xinjiang government officials even introduced a man at a press conference who they said was a former detainee, who denied torture was taking place in the camps and called those accusations "outright lies."
It was unclear if he was speaking under duress.
'Everyone must hit the mark'
The first time Jiang was sent to Xinjiang, he said he was eager to travel there to help defeat a terrorist threat that he was told could threaten his country.
After more than 10 years in the police force, he was also eager for a promotion.
He said his boss had asked him to take office, telling him that "the separatist forces want to divide the country. We must kill them all."
Jiang said he was dispatched "three or four" times from his usual post in mainland China to work in various areas of Xinjiang during the height of China's "Hard Hand" counter-terrorism campaign.
A guard patrols the No. 3 Detention Center in Dabancheng, western China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
Launched in 2014, the "Mano Dura" ("Strike Hard") campaign promoted a mass detention program for ethnic minorities in the region, who could be sent to a prison or a camp simply for "wearing a veil ", grow" a long beard "or have too many children.
Jiang showed CNN a document with an official directive issued by Beijing in 2015, calling on other provinces of China to join the fight against terrorism in the country "to convey the spirit of the important instructions of Secretary General Xi Jinping upon hearing the report on counterterrorism work ".
Jiang was told that 150,000 police assistants from provinces around mainland China were recruited under a scheme called "Help Xinjiang," a program that encouraged mainland provinces to provide aid to areas of Xinjiang, including public security resources.
The temporary positions were financially rewarding: Jiang said he received double his normal salary and other benefits during his deployment.
But Jiang quickly became disillusioned with his new job and the purpose of the crackdown.
"I was surprised when I went for the first time," Jiang said.
"There were security checks everywhere. Many restaurants and places are closed. The society was very intense."
The persecution of Uyghurs does not stop at the Chinese border
During routine night operations, Jiang said they would be given lists of names of people to pursue, as part of orders to comply with official quotas on the number of Uighurs to be detained.
"Everything is planned and has a system," Jiang said.
"Everyone must hit the target."
If someone resisted arrest, the police officers "held the gun to their head and told them not to move. If you move, they kill you."
He said police teams would also search people's homes and download data from their computers and phones.
Another tactic was to use the area's neighborhood committee to convene the local population to a meeting with the village chief, before a mass arrest.
Describing the time as a "combat period," Jiang said officials treated Xinjiang as a war zone, and police officers were told that the Uighurs were enemies of the state.
He said it was common knowledge among police officers that 900,000 Uighurs and other ethnic minorities were detained in the region in a single year.
Jiang said that if he had resisted the process, they would have arrested him as well.
ANALYSIS |
China says it restricts abortions to promote gender equality.
Experts are skeptical
'Some are just psychopaths'
Inside police detention centers, the main objective was to obtain a confession from detainees, with sexual torture being one of the tactics, Jiang said.
"If you want people to confess, use the electric baton with two sharp points on top," Jiang said.
"We tie two electrical cables at the ends and place the cables on their genitals while the person is tied."
He admitted that he often had to play "bad cop" during interrogations, but said he avoided the worst of violence, unlike some of his colleagues.
"Some people see this as a job, others are just psychopaths," he said.
A "very common measure" of torture and dehumanization was for guards to order inmates to rape and abuse new male prisoners, Jiang said.
Abduweli Ayup, a 48-year-old Uyghur academic from Xinjiang, said he was arrested on August 19, 2013, when police officers with rifles surrounded a kindergarten he had opened to teach young children their native language.
On his first night in a police detention center in Kashgar city, Ayup says he was gang-raped by more than a dozen Chinese inmates, who had been instructed by "three or four" prison guards who also witnessed the attack. assault.
"The prison guards, they asked me to take off my underwear" before telling him to bend over, he said.
"Don't do this, I cried. Please don't do this."
Abduweli Ayup said he was gang-raped by more than a dozen Chinese prisoners acting under the orders of the guards.
He said he passed out during the attack and woke up surrounded by his own vomit and urine.
"I saw the flies, as if they were flying around me," Ayup said.
"I found out that flies are better than me. Because no one can torture them and no one can rape them."
"I saw those guys (were) laughing at me and (saying) it's so weak," he said.
"I heard those words."
He says the humiliation continued the next day, when the prison guards asked him, "Did you have a good time?"
Uyghur women rape survivors recount horrors suffered in detention camp in Xinjiang, China
He said he was transferred from the police detention center to an internment camp, and was finally released on November 20, 2014, after being forced to confess to a crime of "illegal fundraising".
His detention time came before the broader crackdown in the region, but it reflects some of the alleged tactics used to crack down on the ethnic minority population that the Uighurs had complained about for years.
CNN is awaiting a response from the Chinese government on Ayup's testimony.
Now living in Norway, Ayup still teaches and also writes Uighur-language books for children, to try to keep their culture alive.
But he says the trauma of his torture will stay with him forever.
"It's the scar on my heart," he said.
"I will never forget her."
'They hung us up and beat us'
Omir Bekali, who now lives in the Netherlands, is also struggling with the long-term legacy of his experiences within the camp system.
"The agony and suffering we had (in the camp) will never go away, it will never leave our minds," Bekali, 45, told CNN.
Omir Bekali holds up his official form stating that he was released on bail in November 2018, pending trial.
Bekali was born in Xinjiang to a Uyghur mother and a Kazakh father, and moved to Kazakhstan, where he obtained citizenship in 2006. During a business trip to Xinjiang, he said he was detained on March 26, 2017, and a week later he was interrogated and tortured for four days and four nights in the basement of a police station in the city of Karamay.
"They put me in a tiger chair," Bekali said.
"They hung us up and beat us in the groin, on the hips with wooden torches, with iron whips."
He said the police tried to force him to confess that he supported terrorism, and he spent the next eight months in a series of internment camps.
"When the chains were put on my legs for the first time, I immediately understood that I was coming to hell," Bekali said.
He said the prisoners' hands and feet wore heavy chains, forcing them to remain hunched, even when they slept.
He said he lost about half his body weight during the time he was there, and said he "looked like a skeleton" when he came out.
"I survived this psychological torture because I am a religious person," Bekali said.
"I would never have survived this without my faith. My faith for life, my passion for freedom kept me alive."
This is the agony of Uighur parents abroad with children trapped in China: CNN traveled to Xinjiang to search for them
During his time in the camps, Bekali said that two people he knew died there.
He also says that his mother, sister and brother were interned in the camps, and he was told that his father Bakri Ibrayim died while in detention in Xinjiang on September 18, 2018.
Xinjiang government officials responded to CNN's questions about Bekali during Wednesday's press conference when they confirmed that he had been detained for eight months for alleged terrorist offenses.
But officials said his allegations of torture and the arrest of his family were "total hearsay and slander."
His father died of liver cancer, they said, and his family "now leads a normal life."
Omir Bekali was told that his father died while in detention in Xinjiang on September 18, 2018. Chinese officials said he died of liver cancer.
'I'm guilty'
From his new home in Europe, former detective Jiang struggles to sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time.
The enduring suffering of those who went through the camp system runs through his mind;
you feel you are close to collapse.
"Now I'm numb," Jiang said.
"He used to arrest so many people."
Former inmate Ayup also has a hard time sleeping at night as he suffers from nightmares of his time in detention and cannot escape the constant feeling that he is being watched.
But he said he still forgives the prison guards who tortured him.
"I don't hate them," Ayup said.
"Because all of them are victims of that system."
"There they sentence themselves," he added.
"They are criminals, they are part of this criminal system."
Abduweli Ayup looks at one of the children's books written in Uighur that he uses to keep the language alive.
Jiang said that even before his stay in Xinjiang, he had been "disappointed" with the Chinese Communist Party due to increasing levels of corruption.
"They pretended to serve the people, but they were a group of people who wanted to achieve a dictatorship," he said.
Fleeing China and sharing his experience there, he said he wanted to "side with the people."
Now, Jiang knows that he will never be able to return to China, "they will beat me almost to death," he said.
"They would arrest me. There would be a lot of problems. Defection, treason, leakage of government secrets, subversion. (I would have) them all," he said.
"The fact that I speak on behalf of the Uyghurs (means that) they could accuse me of participating in a terrorist group. They could accuse me of anything imaginable."
For the first time, Pope Francis refers to China's Uighurs as "persecuted" (2020)
When asked what he would do if he came face to face with one of his former victims, he said that he would be "scared" and would "leave immediately".
"I am guilty and I hope a situation like this does not happen to them again," Jiang said.
"I hope your forgiveness, but it would be too difficult for people who suffered torture like that."
"How do I face these people?"
"Even if you are just a soldier, you are responsible for what happened. You need to carry out orders, but many people did this together. We are responsible for this."
Uyghurs