All posts tagged: Torture

“99 bad things”: A man’s 2-year journey through Xinjiang’s complex detention network

Editor’s preface: Three years after the start of the mass incarcerations in China’s northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, there are now dozens of eyewitness accounts testifying to the coercive, violent, and often cruel nature of Xinjiang’s “re-education initiative”. Among these, however, few are as informative, comprehensive, and detailed as Erbaqyt Otarbai’s, a Kazakh truck driver who – following a trip to Xinjiang in May 2017 – found himself caught up in the system for two full years, with the majority of the time spent in detention centers, “re-education” camps, a hospital, an improvised factory, and house arrest. His account – independently corroborated various times over by former cellmates, satellite images, and testimonies for victims that he met along the way – offers a rare and invaluable view of not only the system’s many facets but also of their evolution, from the initial beginnings of the incarcerations, to their intensification, and finally to the authorities’ very visible response to outside pressure, with the facilities being transformed and many inmates being released, yet others being given long …

The stories of Kazakhstan citizens arrested in China

Translated by Gene Bunin on August 23, 2018; Republished with Permission The following is an English translation of an article published by Нұртай Лахан for Azattyq in the January of 2018. Though old, I found it quite insightful and as such have decided to translate it. It covers the stories of Omirbek Ali, Orynbek Koksebek, and Asqar Azatbek – all Kazakhstan citizens who had been arrested in China and sent to camps / detention centers at some point over the past two years. Omirbek had already been released when this article aired. Orynbek has been released since, in the March of this year. Asqar, taken in the special economic zone at Korgas, is still missing. News of a crackdown on ethnic Kazakhs in China have been coming in starting from April 2017. Among those detained are also those who had moved to their historical homeland from China and had already managed to obtain Kazakhstan citizenship. Omirbek Bekaly was born in China in 1970, in Turpan’s Pichan (Shanshan) County. In 2006, he moved from China to …