Why Do These Uighur Witnesses’ Stories Constantly Change?

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Moon of Alabama
WITH SPECIAL COMMENTS THREAD

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Two months ago we documented astonishing changes over time in the testimony of a Uyhgur woman who had claimed to have been incarcerated in China:

Over the years [Sayragul] Sautbay has given several interviews. The details of her story continued to change in anti-Chinese directions.

• In early interviews Sautbay claimed to have been an instructor working in a re-education camp. In later interviews she claims to have been a detainee.
• In more recent interviews she claims that she had seen torture and violence in the camps. In earlier interviews she had refuted such claims.
• In one story she claims to have observed mass rape. In older interviews she insisted that she had observed no violence at all.
• While she now claims that detainees in the camp were forced to eat pork she had earlier claimed that no meat was served in the camps.

The changes in her story came after Sautbay had fallen into the hands of a propaganda group:

After she had gained asylum in Sweden Sautbay joint up with a U.S. financed Uighur organization. Her story then changed dramatically. The party member and language teacher had became a detainee. There was suddenly extensive violence in the camp and people who earlier never got meat were suddenly made to eat pork.
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The Swedish Uyghur association is part of the Munich-based World Uyghur Congress, a CIA affiliated organization that has in recent years gained prominence as part of the U.S. driven anti-China campaign.

A similar change can be observed in the testimony of another Uyghur woman who currently makes the rounds through the media. Tursunay Ziawudun, a Uyghur woman who last year moved to the United States, now claims to have observed mass rape in Chinese detention camps.

The BBC headlined yesterday: 'Their goal is to destroy everyone': Uighur camp detainees allege systematic rape

First-hand accounts from inside the internment camps are rare, but several former detainees and a guard have told the BBC they experienced or saw evidence of an organised system of mass rape, sexual abuse and torture.

Tursunay Ziawudun, who fled Xinjiang after her release and is now in the US, said women were removed from the cells "every night" and raped by one or more masked Chinese men. She said she was tortured and later gang-raped on three occasions, each time by two or three men.

Ziawudun was first interviewed (video) at the office of the Atajurt Kazakh Human Rightsorganization in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on October 15, 2019. An English summary of the interview is here. There are no allegations of rape or overly harsh treatment. The biggest problem seem to have been 'urinary disorders' which some people developed because the camp buildings were new and the concrete had not yet completely dried out.

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BELOW: The BBC proves they have nothing to envy their disinformaiton counterparts across the Atlantic. 
What you see in this video is a complete cynical fabrication. Yet it fools millions. 

The organization which did the first interview with Ziawudun acted as a broker between such persons and 'western' media:

The Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights Organization has provided enormous amount of information about the Chinese concentration camps and the dystopian regime in Xinjiang. We have hosted journalists from all around the world including Hong Kong, Japan, Russia, the United States, Canada, Britain, France, and Germany, among others.
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Leading media outlets including CNN, the BBC and the New York Times had all visited Atajurt’s office in Almaty; journalists and human rights activists were aware of how valuable a source of information Atajurt was.

Atajurt had also propagandized the case of Sayragul Sautbay who later continued to change her testimony:

I knew about the trial through the efforts of a group called Atajurt, cofounded by Serikzhan Bilash, a Chinese-born ethnic Kazakh, one of more than 200,000 oralmandar, or ‘returnees’, now living in Kazakhstan. Atajurt was set up in 2017 with the purpose of defending the human rights of ethnic Kazakhs in Xinjiang. Sauytbay’s husband, an oralman who, like Bilash, was now a Kazakh citizen, had at first been reluctant to publicise her case, but Bilash persuaded him that foreign attention was her best hope. ‘We’ve never had a trial like this, open to the public, to foreign journalists,’ he told me on the steps outside the court. ‘This will show the world what is happening in Xinjiang.’

There is no information on who has financed the quite sizeable Atajurt. Kazakhstan has since shut the organization down and Serikzhan Bilash, its founder, has fled to Turkey. Tursunay Ziawudun also moved from Kazakhstan to Turkey before coming to the U.S.

Two weeks after her interview with Atajurt Tursunay Ziawudun was interviewed by the U.S. government controlled Radio Free Asia:

Authorities took Ziyawudun to an internment camp on April 11, 2017 without offering her or her family a reason, amid a rollout of a new policy of mass incarceration in the region, she said, although “the situation was not so severe, as it was only when they had just started arresting people” and she was released after one month, in part due to poor health.

Ziawudun was again detained in the following year:

However, Ziyawudun was unable to obtain a passport and could not join her husband in Kazakhstan, and on March 10, 2018 was again detained without reason.

This time, she said, the situation at the facility had become much worse, and many of the dozen women she shared quarters with endured poor treatment, including forced sterilization.

There is however no direct claim that she has been raped or observed raping. There is talk of rape in the interview but the claims are indirect, ambiguous and were prompted by the interviewer:

When asked about recent reports by former detainees of rape and other abuse in the XUAR camp system, Ziyawudun broke down.

“We were all helpless and unable to defend ourselves,” she said.

“We all went through all kinds of mistreatment, but even when we saw such abuse we were powerless to do anything about it.”

Camp officials would come in the middle of the night and take women away, she said.

“They would shout, ‘Get up and come with us,’ and after that, we would never see them again,” she said.

Well, could it be that those women were released?

A second interview with Tursunay Ziawudun was published by BuzzFeed News on February 15 2020:

Ziyawudun, 41, is one of just a handful of Uighur Muslims who have made it out of one of China’s now-notorious camps for Muslim minorities and gone abroad — to neighboring Kazakhstan.

After nearly 10 months locked up without ever being charged with a crime, Ziyawudun was released in December 2018. In Kazakhstan, Ziyawudun thought she was finally safe after months of nightmares, interrogations, and ritual humiliations at the hands of camp officials. Her long hair was lopped off, she was forced to watch endless hours of state propaganda on television, and every second of her life was filmed by security cameras. Each night, she had struggled to sleep, terrified she might be raped.

Her husband is a citizen of Kazakhstan, and she was initially granted a visa to stay. Things were looking up. But last year, she was given some terrible news — she must return to China to apply for a new type of Kazakh visa if she wanted to stay.

The Kazakh government says this is a procedural matter, but Ziyawudun knows that returning to China will likely mean she will be sent back to captivity.

Ziyawudun was detained twice. The first time was in April 2017:

[T]he police drove them to a place that they called a “vocational training school.” At the time, Ziyawudun was terrified — but in the context of the many worse things that followed, the facility now seems tame to her.

“To be honest, it wasn’t that bad,” she said. “We had our phones. We had meals in the canteens. Other than being forced to stay there, everything else was fine.”

In the evenings, the instructors taught the detainees to do traditional Chinese dances in the yard of the building, she said. Sometimes there were lectures — an imam working for the state might come in and talk about how important it was to avoid “extreme” practices like wearing headscarves.

Ziyawudun was released a few weeks later.

In March 2018 she was again detained in a reeducation facility. The conditions, she says, were harsher but not unbearable:

Nobody discussed rape in the camp. All conversations were monitored by guards or surveillance cameras. But it was on Ziyawudun’s mind all the time. If she were raped, she knew, there would be no one to tell about it, no place to report the crime. After all, she had landed in the camp because authorities felt she was “unreliable.” If one of the women were raped, who would believe them? She had never felt more vulnerable in her life.
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The real torture, she discovered, took place in silence, in the inmates’ minds.

“I wasn’t beaten or abused,” she said. “The hardest part was mental. It’s something I can’t explain — you suffer mentally. Being kept someplace and forced to stay there for no reason. You have no freedom. You suffer.”

Ziyawudun was released in December 2018 and had since then lived in Kazakhstan. She eventually moved to Turkey.

In September 2020 the U.S. based Uyghur Human Rights Project had picked her up to use her for their agitation against China:

Tursunay Ziyawudun, one of only a handful of Uyghur concentration camp survivors known to have reached the outside world, has arrived safely in the United States.
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"We are tremendously relieved that Tursunay is now safe in the United States,” said UHRP Executive Director Omer Kanat. “UHRP warmly thanks governments who have rescued at-risk Uyghurs. Every rescue is a godsend.”

As one of the few people able to provide eyewitness testimony about what happens in the camps, Ms. Tursunay is a critical witness. She spent nine months in detention, where she suffered malnutrition, dehydration, forcible ingestion and injection of unknown drugs, and physical and mental torture. Her testimony will be vitally important for future atrocity-crimes determination processes and tribunals.

The Uyghur Human Rights Project will be assisting with Ms. Tursunay’s resettlement and is mounting an appeal to ensure that she receives immediate treatment for a serious health condition. Donations to help cover her living costs and medical treatment may be earmarked by sending a brief note.

Neither in her interview with Atajurt nor in her interviews with RFA or BuzzFeedNews does Tursunay Ziawudun claim she was raped. The Uyghur Human Rights Project report of her arrival In the U.S. says she had suffered from several forms of mistreatment but rape is not mentioned as one of them.

Like in the case of Sayragul Sautbay it is only months after she has received the appropriate coaching that Tursunay Ziawudun makes the outrageous rape claims. The BBC knows that these claims are likely bogus as it carefully notes:

It is impossible to verify Ziawudun's account completely (sic) because of the severe restrictions China places on reporters in the country, but travel documents and immigration records she provided to the BBC corroborate the timeline of her story.

The facts indeed corroborate the timeline, but they corroborate not one of the other claims Ziawudun makes.

There are many more details in Tursunay Ziawudun BBC story that differ from her previous accounts. Her "earrings were yanked out" where previously "Police told the women to take off their necklaces and earrings." In the BuzzFeed interview she said: “I wasn’t beaten or abused.” In her later BBC account she is beaten heavily:

"Police boots are very hard and heavy, so at first I thought he was beating me with something," she said. "Then I realised that he was trampling on my belly. I almost passed out - I felt a hot flush go through me."

Small details also differ. Where there previously was a bucket to pee in during the night there is now a hole in the ground.

Parts of what she tells the BBC seems to be from a bad porn script:

"They don't only rape but also bite all over your body, you don't know if they are human or animal," she said, pressing a tissue to her eyes to stop her tears and pausing for a long time to collect herself.

"They didn't spare any part of the body, they bit everywhere leaving horrible marks. It was disgusting to look at.

"I've experienced that three times. And it is not just one person who torments you, not just one predator. Each time they were two or three men."

The accounts of both women, Sayragul Sautbay and Tursunay Ziawudun, have 'evolved' after they have been handled through a chain of organizations set up to propagandize against China's anti-terror and development program in Xinjiang.

Like the Swedish organization which handled Sautbay, the U.S. based Uyghur Human Rights Project which handles Ziawudun is part of the infamous World Uyghur Congress:

As this investigation establishes, the WUC is not a grassroots movement, but a US government-backed umbrella for several Washington-based outfits that also rely heavily on US funding and direction. Today, it is the main face and voice of a separatist operation dedicated to destabilizing the Xinjiang region of China and ultimately toppling the Chinese government.

While seeking to orchestrate a color revolution with the aim of regime change in Beijing, the WUC and its offshoots have forged ties with the Grey Wolves, a far-right Turkish organization that has been actively engaged in sectarian violence from Syria to East Asia.

None of these links seem to have troubled the WUC’s sponsors in Washington. If anything, they have added to the network’s appeal, consolidating it as one of the most potent political weapons the US wields in its new Cold War against China.

The claims by the women of rape in the re-education camps in Xinjiang are as believable as the ones Nyirah al-Sabah made about babies allegedly thrown out of Kuwaiti incubators:

Her story was initially corroborated by Amnesty International, a British NGO, which published several independent reports about the killings and testimony from evacuees. Following the liberation of Kuwait, reporters were given access to the country. An ABC report found that "patients, including premature babies, did die, when many of Kuwait's nurses and doctors ... fled" but Iraqi troops "almost certainly had not stolen hospital incubators and left hundreds of Kuwaiti babies to die." Amnesty International reacted by issuing a correction, with executive director John Healey subsequently accusing the Bush administration of "opportunistic manipulation of the international human rights movement".

Posted by b on February 4, 2021 at 16:24 UTC | Permalink

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The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post

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