Last Thursday, Amnesty International published a document titled China’s Mass Internment, Torture and Persecution of Muslims in Xinjiang.
It is a deeply disturbing document. The index itself, divided into chapters, gives a flavour of the reading ahead: Violence and repression; Erasure of ethnic identity; Arbitrary Detention; Interrogations; Types of Torture and other ill-treatment.
The report is a litany of spine-chilling crimes orchestrated by China’s ruler, Xi Jinping.
Since early 2017, massive numbers of men and women from predominantly Muslim ethnic groups have been detained in the Xinjiang province in Northwest China in what can only adequately be described as concentration camps. Some are held there on account of practising their Muslim faith. Many are interned for their relationships - real, perceived or alleged - with family, friends, or community members abroad. Others still have no idea what heinous crime they have committed. One person was detained for many months for the offense of downloading WhatsApp onto her mobile phone.
In these internment camps, detainees are subjected to the most gruesome physical and psychological abuse. They have no privacy; are monitored at all times, and their every move subject to restriction, including when they eat, sleep, and use the toilet. They are forbidden to speak their native language or talk freely with other detainees and are severely punished for the most innocuous misdemeanours. According to the report, they are kept in deplorable conditions where there is insufficient food, water, exercise, healthcare, sanitary and hygienic conditions, fresh air, or exposure to natural light.
The report draws on first-hand testimonies that Amnesty International gathered from former detainees of the internment camps, as well as from an analysis of satellite imagery and data. Needless to say, but I'll say it, China does not make it easy to come by these testimonies.
The accounts are stomach churning.Former detainees describe the “tiger chair” – a steel chair with affixed leg irons and handcuffs that restrain the body, often in painful positions, to an extent that it is essentially renders the person immobile. One inmate recalled how, as punishment, a man was made to sit in a tiger chair in the middle of their cell for three days. His cellmates were made to watch him sit there and were expressly forbidden to help him. The man later died.
In some of these detention centres, detainees are made to sit on stools for 16 hours a day with their hands on their knees. One inmate had his feet shackled together for the first year he was in the camp.
Forced confessions, beating, torture, humiliations, interrogations and incessant propaganda lauding the Chinese Communist Party are the staple diet meted out against those China has declared an all-out war.
One former detainee described being forced to stand in a small, crowded cell with 50 other inmates all day. We slept side by side touching each other. “We don’t even put cows in that terrible condition…”
After breakfast we had to sit on our beds with our hands on our knees and a straight back. If we moved, they spoke to us through a loudspeaker [in the room] and said, ‘Don’t move.’ Then, around 11:30 or 12 they brought lunch. Then from 12:30 to 2 we could lie down [on our beds]. Then at 2pm they told us to maintain the seated position. We sat like that until dinner, but they sometimes said through the loudspeaker that we had five minutes to move, lie down, or urinate…
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| A man was made to sit in a tiger chair in the middle of their cell for three days. |
On a decidedly personal level, as a grandchild of German Jews who fled Nazi Germany, I found most upsetting the description of what happened to detainees as they arrived at the camp:
Upon arrival at the camps, detainees were searched, their personal effects were confiscated, and they were made to remove certain items of clothing, including shoelaces, belts, buttons, and anything else that could be used as a weapon or as an implement with which to take their own life, just as is often done in prisons. Some women detainees had their hair cut off after arriving, and some men had their heads and beards shaved.
It is said that comparisons are odious. I say, they are necessary.
You do not have to be an expert on Sino-relations to realise that a terrible crime is being committed on a massive scale against a defenceless population who have no recourse to any legal assistance or protection. It is an appalling act of state-sanctioned terrorism that should revolt any decent human being. These acts also meet the definition of crimes against humanity under international law. And this is happening in 2021, in full glare of the world’s eyes.
And what are we, here in Australia, doing about it? In short, very little. As a member of the Jewish community, I contacted, back in November 2019, the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies. It is the representative roof-body of the NSW Jewish community. My question was simple. What is the official stand of the JBD on China’s mass arrests and construction of concentration camps, I asked. I received the following reply: It’s a federal matter and we are not buying in at this stage. That was the reply, word-for-word. [Since the author of this reply has now left the organisation, I shall grant him the privilege of anonymity.]
This attitude raises some very serious questions – not least ethical ones. What lessons have we learnt from our own history of persecution?
In the summer of 1938, as anti-Semitism was running riot across Germany and Jews were fleeing for their life, delegates from thirty-two countries gathered at the French resort of Evian to discuss how to help the refugees. It was a noble gesture, except that soon into the piece, the entire conference descended into a farce as delegates rose to the podium, one after the other, to offer reasons why their country was unable to help the Jewish refugees. Australia’s chief delegate at the conference, one Colonel White, declared: “as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one by encouraging any scheme of large-scale foreign migration”. The rest is history. Kristallnacht followed in November of that year.
It is incumbent upon all civilised nations to act; and not to be bystanders witnessing these appalling acts of barbarity perpetrated by China. We must call out China for its excessive human rights abuses and come to the aid of the Uighur minority in Xinjiang. To achieve this, our leaders, whether communal, state or federal, must commit to use all bilateral, multilateral, and regional platforms at their disposal to bring an end to these reprehensible crimes.
Upon arrival at the camps, detainees were searched, their personal effects were confiscated, and they were made to remove certain items of clothing, including shoelaces, belts, buttons, and anything else that could be used as a weapon or as an implement with which to take their own life, just as is often done in prisons. Some women detainees had their hair cut off after arriving, and some men had their heads and beards shaved.
It is said that comparisons are odious. I say, they are necessary.
You do not have to be an expert on Sino-relations to realise that a terrible crime is being committed on a massive scale against a defenceless population who have no recourse to any legal assistance or protection. It is an appalling act of state-sanctioned terrorism that should revolt any decent human being. These acts also meet the definition of crimes against humanity under international law. And this is happening in 2021, in full glare of the world’s eyes.
And what are we, here in Australia, doing about it? In short, very little. As a member of the Jewish community, I contacted, back in November 2019, the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies. It is the representative roof-body of the NSW Jewish community. My question was simple. What is the official stand of the JBD on China’s mass arrests and construction of concentration camps, I asked. I received the following reply: It’s a federal matter and we are not buying in at this stage. That was the reply, word-for-word. [Since the author of this reply has now left the organisation, I shall grant him the privilege of anonymity.]
This attitude raises some very serious questions – not least ethical ones. What lessons have we learnt from our own history of persecution?
In the summer of 1938, as anti-Semitism was running riot across Germany and Jews were fleeing for their life, delegates from thirty-two countries gathered at the French resort of Evian to discuss how to help the refugees. It was a noble gesture, except that soon into the piece, the entire conference descended into a farce as delegates rose to the podium, one after the other, to offer reasons why their country was unable to help the Jewish refugees. Australia’s chief delegate at the conference, one Colonel White, declared: “as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one by encouraging any scheme of large-scale foreign migration”. The rest is history. Kristallnacht followed in November of that year.
It is incumbent upon all civilised nations to act; and not to be bystanders witnessing these appalling acts of barbarity perpetrated by China. We must call out China for its excessive human rights abuses and come to the aid of the Uighur minority in Xinjiang. To achieve this, our leaders, whether communal, state or federal, must commit to use all bilateral, multilateral, and regional platforms at their disposal to bring an end to these reprehensible crimes.
