New testimonies were given by a group of Muslim Uyghurs fleeing China regarding the persecution and torture of the Muslim minority at the hands of the Chinese authorities in the Xinjiang region, according to what The Independent reported on Thursday, June 3, 2021.
Three Muslim Uighurs, who fled from China to Turkey, are to present evidence before an arbitration panel in London investigating whether Beijing’s actions against ethnic Uighurs bends to the crime of committing a massacre.
What did the shocking testimonies from Uyghur Muslims intend for?
One woman among the three escapees said she was forced to have an abortion while she was 6 and a half months pregnant, while a man claimed he was “tortured day and night” by Chinese soldiers in prison.
The independent arbitral tribunal, which does not admire the support of the British government, is expected to attract dozens of witnesses during its four-day hearings. Organizers hope that the evidence that will be released will compel the international community to act against abuses in Xinjiang.
One Uighur Muslim witness, 55-year-old Pomeriam Rosie, who’s a mother of 4, told that authorities brought her together with other pregnant women to force her to abort her fifth child in 2007. She said she complied for fear that the authorities would confiscate her house and endanger her family’s life into so many risks.
Pomerium added: “The policemen came, one Uighur and two Chinese. They took me and 8 other pregnant women to a car and took us to the hospital.”
She also said, “First they gave me a pill to take. So I did, and I didn’t know what it was. Half an hour later, they put a needle in my stomach. After that, I lost my child.
How did the unstoppable torture and constant revenge look like?
Semsenor Gafur, a former obstetrician and gynecologist who worked at Xinjiang Hospital in the 1990s, said she and other female doctors used to go from house to house with a portable ultrasound machine to check if any women were pregnant.
Simsenor added, “If a family has more births than they are allowed, they demolish their home. They flatten it, they destroy it.”
The third exile, Mahmud Tevkul, also said that he was imprisoned and tortured in 2010 by Chinese authorities who interrogated him to obtain information about one of his brothers. He added that part of the reasons the Chinese authorities are seeking to arrest his brother is because he published a religious book in Arabic.
Tevicol described being beaten and punched in the face during interrogation. “They put us on a tiled floor, handcuffed our hands and feet, and tied us to a pipe like a gas pipe,” he said. Six soldiers were guarding us, and they interrogated us until morning.”
One million detainees in “re-education” camps
According to researchers, an estimated one million or more Uighur Muslims have been detained in “re-education” camps in Xinjiang in recent years.
While Beijing denies these allegations. Administrators said that the camps used to teach Chinese, business skills, and law, but they are now closed.
China also said that it will not back down from the security measures imposed on the region of East Turkestan (Xinjiang), where international human rights organizations have documented the persecution and torture of hundreds of thousands of members of the Muslim Uyghur minority there. Observers believe that the Chinese authorities are torturing everyone from this minority who joined Islam on the pretext that they are terrorist projects, and this affliction is only due to the spread of Wahhabi thought among Muslims, so that they spawn at one time Al-Qaeda and sometimes ISIS.
This came in an interview that the Deputy Director-General of the Public Relations Department of the Communist Party of China, Xu Juexiang, gave earlier to the Associated Press in the capital, Beijing.
The Chinese official said that the security activities carried out by Beijing over the past 4 years were within the scope of “freedom from terrorism”, which “cannot be ignored at present because threats still exist,” he said.
As for the sanctions imposed by America on officials in Beijing, as well as the ban on importing goods from “Xinjiang” due to news of forced labor imposed on the residents of the region, the Chinese official downplayed their importance, saying: “Do not think that companies in Xinjiang cannot operate without the American market or some American companies.
The Chinese official also claimed that 117,000 Muslim Uyghur Turks are working in various Chinese regions thanks to their education within the training programs launched in 2014.
