The wounds once deeply etched across the body of Dr Sayragul Sauytbay by the Chinese state may have healed, but the emotional scars of her year-long detention will haunt her until her dying breath.
The former teacher witnessed unimaginable horrors after she was dragged away by Communist guards and forced to work as a language instructor within the brutal confines of an internment camp in Xinjiang.
Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh-Chinese national now in her late 40s, repeatedly broke down in tears as she recounted the brutality she was subjected to during her eight-month ordeal.
She described a hell-on-Earth existence where inmates resembled zombies from the ‘Living Dead’, women were mercilessly gang-raped, and ‘raw cries like a dying animal’ rang out from a torture chamber dubbed the Black Room.
In this room, tools were laid out ready to inflict agonising pain. Inmates had finger nails pulled out and were forced to sit on chairs with nails sticking out of the seat.
The mother-of-two did not escape punishment herself. She was shocked in an electric chair and beaten unconscious for the ‘crime‘ of showing sympathy to a terrified elderly inmate.
Sauytbay said the camp was located in Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture north west China, and operated as part of China’s network of so-called ‘re-education’ or ‘vocational training’ centres.
Dr Sayragul Sauytbay spent eight months in an internment camp in Xinjiang, China, where she witnessed unimaginable horrors. Pictured: Chinese guards at a detention centre in Xinjiang take part in an anti-escape drill in 2018
Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh-Chinese national now in her late 40s, repeatedly broke down in tears as she recounted the brutality she was subjected to during her eight-month ordeal: Pictured: Watchtowers on a high-security re-education camp where mostly Muslim ethnic minorities are detained, on the outskirts of Hotan, in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region
Detainees are pictured listening to speeches in a camp in Lop County, Xinjiang, China, in April 2017
Its primary purpose, she believes, was political indoctrination and forced assimilation of ethnic minorities – mainly Kazakhs and Uyghurs – through compulsory Mandarin instruction, Communist Party ideology classes, and strict discipline aimed at suppressing religious and cultural practices, rather than genuine vocational education.
In the run-up to her detention, she recalls ‘profound’ fear coursing through her body after seeing her friends and neighbours being taken by Chinese state agents. Soon after, she began receiving visits herself.
‘In January of 2017, they [began] detaining me in the middle of the night for interrogation. This happened several times, so I would have a hard time sleeping,’ she said.
By that time, her husband and two children had already fled to Kazakhstan, leaving her to fend for herself. She found work as the headteacher of several kindergartens.
Following several months of this, she was finally taken to a camp in November 2017. After being told to report to an address, an order she said she could not refuse, armed officers dragged her into a van and took her away.
She said: ‘A police van filled with an entire squad, all armed with assault rifles, came. They put a black bag over my head, took me into the van and then drove off.
‘We kept driving for a while and stopped several times, [presumably] to go through the checkpoints. [After a while] we entered a facility. Once I was inside, they said: “You’re going to work here as a Chinese language instructor for the detainees.” They forced me to sign an agreement that stated I will never talk about what happened once I got out.’
Though she may not have technically been a prisoner, she was held against her will and treated as if she were one.
She said: ‘Although I was a Chinese language instructor, it was not any different from the detainees. I would eat the same food as them, I would have to obey the same orders as them. The only difference is that while there were dozens of people crammed into one cell, I had a smaller, separate area where I would sleep.
‘The Chinese guards didn’t view any of the detainees as humans. And they also didn’t view me as a human either.’
Established in 2017, the camps in Xinjiang have been used to subjugate an estimated one million people many of whom have been held with no charges against them.
China’s camps are believed to be the largest-scale arbitrary detention of ethnic and religious minorities since WW2, when the Nazi party systematically detained Jews and other groups in concentration camps.
Understandings of why the Chinese government has engaged in this long-term suppression of ethnic minorities vary.
China claims that its motivation is to stamp out terrorism in the country. So well-held is this claim that the camps are key to the country’s anti-terror crackdown that the government euphemistically calls them ‘counter extremism training centres’ and ‘education and transformation training centres’.
But Sauytbay told the Daily Mail she believes the reason is far more calculated.
The former teacher (pictured during a court hearing in 2018) described a hell-on-Earth existence where inmates resembled zombies from the ‘Living Dead’, women were mercilessly gang-raped and ‘raw cries like a dying animal’ rang out from a torture chamber dubbed the Black Room
She said the region is ‘strategically vital to China because it has a lot of natural and mineral resources’.
She added: ‘It’s a very large piece of territory. Since China occupied East Turkestan, they’ve sought to remove the native populations and to gradually make it dominated only by the Chinese.’
Sauytbay said she remembered seeing zombified inmates – the ‘Living Dead’, as she put it – shuffling through the bleak prison in her first days there.
But it was only until she had been there for a few days that she began hearing screeches of terror and pain ring through the halls of the ‘concrete coffin’ she lived in.
The escapee wrote in her 2021 book The Chief Witness: Escape from China’s Modern-Day Concentration Camps: ‘I’d never heard anything like it in all my life. Screams like that aren’t something you forget. The second you hear them, you know what kind of agony that person is experiencing.
‘They sounded like the raw cries of a dying animal.’
Later, she would learn that these screams came from so-called ‘Black Rooms’, chambers filled with torture equipment that had no cameras inside.
It was here that prisoners were dragged by guards for any number of indiscretions committed against the Chinese state or the prison itself.
Sauytbay said that many of those who emerge from the Black Room come back covered in their own blood. Others were simply never seen again.
She herself was tortured in a Black Room for daring to show sympathy to an elderly detainee who had been brought into the camp for no discernible reason, she told the Daily Mail.
‘One night, a large group of new detainees [arrived]. Among them was an elderly, Kazakh lady from a shepherd family,’ she recounted.
‘[The guards] didn’t even give her the time to put on her shoes or clothes properly, [even though] it was the winter.
‘She was very scared. She saw me and she came running to me, hugging me and crying, telling me: “I have done nothing wrong. I’m innocent. I don’t know why they brought me here. Please help me.”
‘And because of that, they took me into the Black Room.’
‘After they took me, the first thing I noticed was a lot of different tools that I had never seen before.
‘They shocked me in an electric chair. Then they began to beat me to the point that I fainted. While I was being tortured, I thought I was going to die because of them. The only thing I could think of was my two children.
‘When I woke up, I was in the room where I usually sleep. Even after receiving that torture, I was forced to go back to teaching [the other detainees].’
‘I was a very healthy person before I went into the camp. After I came out of the camp, I felt as if I had aged over ten years. My health quickly deteriorated.’
She saw others taken into Black Rooms for little to no reason as well. She said: ‘The camps are run like military regiments. If [detainees] lay down, they can only sleep on their right side so they face the security cameras that are monitoring them constantly.
‘If they move or try to talk to one another, they’re immediately punished for breaking the rules.’
She said: ‘For anything, whether it was not laying on the right side or if they talked to one another or if they didn’t obey instructions, they were immediately taken to the Black Room.
‘There, they would be subject to various types of torture. [Guards would] shock them, they would pull out their fingernails, force them to sit down on chairs that have nails sticking up or just beat them.’
It wasn’t just here that abuse of prisoners would happen. Sauytbay told the Daily Mail that she and around 100 other prisoners were made to watch a young woman being gang-raped by prison guards.
The woman, who she said was 20 or 21 years old, was made to confess to texting a friend on a religious holiday. She was thrown to the ground and abused by three guards.
As she begged for help, other officers watched the assembled prisoners for any dissent.
Those who protested were immediately taken away. Sauytbay said she believes the incident was a test designed to see how compliant the prison’s population was.
The former prisoner said that she somehow managed to stop herself from reacting to what she saw, but that she would never come to terms with it: ‘I’ve never witnessed anything more vile or inhumane in my life. Some people were crying, some tried to look away, some clenched their fists to show their anger. All of them were taken by the guards.
‘I couldn’t do anything but feel helpless. As a woman, as a mother, I was horrified that I was being forced to watch this, but I couldn’t express anything there because I knew I would be tortured as well. I’ve never forgotten this incident.
‘It caused me a lot of health problems. I can’t sleep properly at night. Even my heart problems are connected to this. This is why I’m still in the hospital right now.’
‘This is not just the issue of the honour of one woman being abused, but this is an issue of our entire nation’s honour.’
Other survivors have spoken out about the horrific sexual abuse at the camps.
Ruqiye Perhat, who was held in various prisons in Xinjiang over the course of four years, told the Washington Post in 2019 that she was repeatedly raped by Chinese guards.
As a result, she twice fell pregnant. Chinese guards then forced her to have abortions in both cases.
She told the newspaper: ‘Any woman or man under age 35 was raped and sexually abused.’
Several other women said they were forced to shower and use toilets in rooms with cameras in them.
One woman said female guards used chewing gum to pull on her pubic hair.
Others said that they were forced to smear ground chilli paste on their genitals before they showered, with one woman recalling: ‘It burned like fire.’
Sauytbay said these reports were consistent with what she witnessed at the camps.
She said: ‘The Chinese guards received unfettered freedom to do whatever they wanted to the detainees in the camps from Beijing directly. That’s why they didn’t view the detainees as human.
‘They would do whatever they felt like doing without any fear that they would ever be held accountable because that was what was guaranteed to them from their higher ups. There’s no restriction on what they want to do. They’re totally free to do that.’
The problem of sexual abuse was so systemic that in 2019, a former guard at a Xinjiang camp wrote an open letter that backed the claims of countless women who blew the whistle on their experiences.
The man, named only as ‘Berik’, said Chinese officers at the camps would select their victims before taking them to a room.
He wrote, apparently referring to sexual abuse: ‘There are two tables in the kitchen, one for snacks and liquor, and the other for “doing things”.’
Sauytbay said: ‘I constantly think back to those people in the camps. I constantly remember the things that happened there. The most painful part was the fact that the rape of women became a routine thing inside the camp.’
Following her detention, she was eventually allowed to leave in 2018. But she was quickly threatened with permanent imprisonment by Chinese authorities, even though she had committed no crime.
This was when she decided to flee to Kazakhstan under false documents. After spending a year there, she was then granted political asylum in Sweden, where she now lives with her family.
Sauytbay now works as the vice-president for the East Turkistan Government-in-Exile, an organisation that aims to get the Xinjiang province to secede from China and to hold the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) accountable for their unimaginable crimes.
She said that she was shocked at the difference in how people are treated in the West: ‘After I came to the West, I began to see how people treated not only one another, but animals.
‘I realised that we did not see even an ounce of the compassion and humanity that dogs and cats get in the West.’