Chinese guards 'gang rape' and 'electrocute' women detainees in Uyghur concentration camps

Accounts from survivors of Uyghur concentration camps, where China's Uyghur minority has been subjected to genocide at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party, have detailed the institutionalized rape and torture of female soldiers, BBC reports.

Among these women is Tursunay Ziawudun, who has since fled her homeland of East Turkestan for the United States. According to Ziawudun, female inmates were subjected to rape, often by multiple men at once, on a nightly basis by masked guards. Ziawudun herself was raped on three separate occasions while serving her nine-month sentence, each time by more than one man.

Another inmate named Gulzira Auelkhan, who is ethnically Kazakh, says that prisoners, including herself, were often forced to facilitate the rape of prisoners in the camps.

"My job was to remove their clothes above the waist and handcuff them so they cannot move," said Auelkhan. "Then I would leave the women in the room and a man would enter - some Chinese man from outside or policeman. I sat silently next to the door, and when the man left the room I took the woman for a shower."

Chinese authorities "would pay money to have their pick of the prettiest young inmates," according to her, corroborating other accounts of child rape which have reportedly taken place within the camps.

Auelkhan noted that some of the women who were taken these rooms were never returned to their cells, leaving only speculation about what type of sadistic horror may have been inflicted upon them by Communist Party henchmen. Those who did return, however, were threatened to not tell anyone what had happened.

"You can't tell anyone what happened, you can only lie down quietly," Auelkhan told the BBC. "It is designed to destroy everyone's spirit."

One Uzbek woman, Qelbinur Sedik, was brought to the camp to teach inmates Mandarin. After seeing signs of rape and sexual abuse among female prisoners, Sedik spoke to a female guard about the matter in secrecy.

"I asked her, 'I have been hearing some terrible stories about rape, do you know about it?' She said we should talk in the courtyard during lunch."

"Yes, the rape has become a culture," the guard told Sedik in a courtyard with relatively less surveillance. "It is gang rape and the Chinese police not only rape them but also electrocute them. They are subject to horrific torture."

Sedik explained that there were four forms of electrocution torture the authorities would use, "the chair, the glove, the helmet, and anal rape with a stick."

"The screams echoed throughout the building," she recounted. "I could hear them during lunch and sometimes when I was in class."

Sayragul Sauytbay, who was also brought to the camps as a teacher, said that she witnessed the public gang rape of a woman as young as 20 after coercing her into providing the authorities with a forced confession.

"While carrying out this test, they watched people closely and picked out anyone who resisted, clenched their fists, closed their eyes, or looked away, and took them for punishment," Sauytbay noted.

Sexually abused prisoners would also be given mandatory sterilization treatments to prevent pregnancies.

Various other mass atrocities have been committed in these camps aside from rape. According to testimonies from dozens of concentration camp survivors, prisoners are often crammed into crowded cells, access to food is strictly limited, and inmates spend most of their days repeating Chinese propaganda, including praising China's President Xi Jinping.

Prisoners are also known to be forced into slave labour, often for the benefit of western companies. Dozens of international corporations have supply chains linked to Uyghur slave labour including Nike, Apple, and Google.

The ultimate goal of the Chinese state is to bring about the destruction of Uyghur culture, replacing it with Han Chinese identity.