The activist Sayragul Sauytbal He spent five months in one of the so-called “Vocational Education and Training Centers” (VETC, in its acronym in English) that China built in the middle of the last decade to repress the Uyghur population and others muslim ethnic minorities in the province of Xinjiangin the western end of the country. As a teacher, she was forced to reeducate detainees and participate in the campaign orchestrated by Beijing to force the cultural assimilation of the inhabitants of this region with the Han, the majority ethnic group in the Asian giant, based on arbitrary arrests, imprisonment and physical and psychological torture.
Eight years after her flight from the country, Sauytbal serves as vice president of the Government in exile of East Turkistan —the term with which these minorities refer to Xinjiang— from Sweden, where she received asylum with her husband and children. In an interview with EL PERIÓDICO, the activist, of Kazakh ethnicity, warns that China is about to achieve its goal to end the legacy of the Uighurs, Kazakhs and other minority Muslim groups and launches a message to the international community to once again put the focus on a situation that has been relegated to the background in recent years.
“China claims to have closed the fields, but they are still in operation“, he denounces by video call. “The only thing that has changed is that the surveillance towers have been removed, but they continue to function and enormous buildings have been built. industrial facilities around them, which is why the Chinese Government now claims that these are vocational training centers in which job training inmates and they are provided with jobs,” he adds.
In a 2022 report, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) indicated that more than a million people They could have passed through these fields, although official figures are unknown. The inmates, from teenagers until seniorsthey spent months and even years in these facilities for reasons as arbitrary as have “too many children”wear a veil or beard or have applied for a foreign passport.
Abuse and torture
In Sauytbal’s case, the police forcibly took her to one of these camps after her husband and children escaped to Kazakhstan fleeing repression. He has since reported the abuses he witnessed while there, including rapes of women, torture y indoctrination sessions with propaganda Chinese Communist Party (CCP). “I also suffered physical and psychological abuse. I have developed many health problemsand before they sent me to the concentration camp I had none. At this moment I am still in the hospital; I suffer from one heart condition that appears and disappears,” he laments.
China has always maintained that the VETC were created to voluntarily educate the population and to eradicate the spread of terrorism and religious extremism after several attacks in 2014, which left dozens dead. Although the authorities assure that these centers were closed in 2019Sauytbal denounces that they are still being carried out arbitrary arrests and crimes against humanity today, claims supported by the UN in an assessment published earlier this year.
“Ethnic unity” law
“The Chinese Government has managed to achieve the 90% of your goals. The remaining 10% intends to complete it by completely destroying our people and legalizing and normalizing their genocidal policy. If nothing changes, they will get it within one or two decades“says the activist, who gives as an example the recent approval of a new “ethnic unity” law in the National People’s Congress of China. This standard establishes that the Mandarin be the teaching language in schools and in official communication; requires parents to “educate and guide” children so that amen al PPCh; and criminalizes opposition to mixed marriages for ethnic or religious reasons, among other measures.
For Sayragul, this is one more step in what he considers a “genocide” of Muslim minorities. “China continues to transfer Chinese settlers to East Turkistanwhile more than a million children of sido separated from their families and sent to orphanages and boarding schools with the aim of brainwashing them and eradicating their identity and culture, putting the future of our people at risk,” he says.
The only possibility to stop the forced assimilation of these groups is for the international community put the focus on this region in the world, says the activist. Something that appears very complicated in which the attention is focused on other conflict scenarios. “The international community is doing ignoring the crisis from East Turkistan. If this continues, China will manage to wipe out our people and will then be able to expand further west, towards Central Asia, and position itself as the sole global power dominant. That is why it is important for the international community to take meaningful measures against China and support East Turkistan not only for humanitarian reasons, but also to guarantee their own freedom, sovereignty and security,” he says.
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