A woman who was tortured in one ofChina’s notorious Uyghur detention campshas launched a blistering attack onSir Keir Starmer,accusing him of “disrespecting human rights” by approving plans for aChinese mega-embassyin London.
Sayragul Sauytbay,an ethnic Kazakhwho says she witnessed serious abuses when she was forced to work in one ofChina’s Xinjiang internment camps,accused the British prime minister of prioritising economic and political gain over international law.
“The recent activities of the current UK government have left us in deep anguish and fear,” she said, adding that Britain has “no right to speak about freedom and democracy” given its efforts to strengthen its relationship with President Xi Jinping’s government.
The activist, who is based in Sweden, now serves as the vice president of East Turkestan’s government-in-exile. In 2020, she led a complaint in the International Criminal Court (ICC) accusing Chinese officials of genocide and crimes against humanity, after fleeing China in 2018.
She was honoured six years ago as one of the ‘Women of Courage 2020’, receiving an award in Washington, DC from first lady Melania Trump and then-secretary of state Mike Pompeo, who recognised her “bravery” and role in inspiring other former detainees to tell their harrowing stories.
Speaking toThe Independent, she detailed grave abuses in Chinese internment camps and recalled the horrors of the so-called “black room” in which detainees were tortured.
In the middle of the night in January 2017, Ms Sauytbay was detained for the first time by authorities in Xinjiang, an autonomous territory known as East Turkestan by several Turkic ethnic minority groups, including Uyghurs and Kazakhs.
She says she was interrogated on the basis that she had family in Kazakhstan, after her husband and two children had emigrated and gained Kazakh citizenship a year earlier.
Ms Sauytbay had been released for several months, when, in November 2017, she says she was blindfolded and taken to a detention camp in the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture, a camp of around 2,500 people, where she was ordered to work as a Chinese language instructor.
Established in the 2010s, the camps have seen more than a million ethnic Turkic people detained in what Beijing describes as “vocational training centres” designed to combat terrorism and religious extremism.
Many are detained for spurious reasons, including practising religion, travelling abroad, or openly displaying a distinct cultural identity. Rights groups have condemned these detentions, noting that they take place without trials.
At the camp, Ms Sauytbay says she witnessed horrific abuse of detainees.
“They engage in all forms of torture against the detainees, including both psychological and physical torture,” she said. “They routinely rape women. I’ve witnessed gang rapes as well with my own eyes.”
She says that a “black room” existed in the camp: a dark cell without any cameras where detention guards carried out torture against the detainees away from view.
Despite her role as a teacher, Ms Sauytbay was subjected to the same inhumane treatment.
“You can’t talk, you can’t cry, you can’t smile – even as an instructor, you can’t speak with the detainees unless it’s about teaching them,” she recalled.
When one batch of new detainees arrived, an elderly Kazakh woman ran to Ms Sauytbay crying. She hugged her, and told her she had committed no crimes. She was tortured as a result of the exchange.
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“For several hours, they made me sit in the electric chair. They beat me. I thought I was going to die. Then, after they beat me up, I fainted. I woke up at 6am to the signal of the wake-up alarm of the camp, and pinched myself to see if I was just dreaming or if I was alive.”
Rape, she added, was a “very common occurrence” in the camp, with prison guards taking “whichever woman that they like”.
‘The UK is hypocritical’
Kazakhs and Uyghurs, Ms Sauytbay said, once looked to the United Kingdom for “hope and help”.
But in recent months, Downing Street has sought to repair the tense relationship between UK and China – despite Beijing’s human rights record and its alliances with Russia and Iran.
The prime minister advocated for a “more sophisticated” relationship with the Chinese government as he paid a landmark visit to Beijing in January, stressing the financial benefits of an improved relationship with the world’s second-largest economy.
Days before the visit, the UK had approved a controversial plan for a Chinese mega-embassy in London, criticised by many as a risk to national security.
Ms Sauytbay’s assessment of Sir Keir’s government was scathing.
“Starmer is disrespecting human rights. He’s disrespecting international law and obligations, because human rights needs to be prioritised over all things, over economic and political gains,” she said.
“Every country has legal obligations that they signed on to before international law, that they will prioritise and respect human rights.
“If they are not respecting that, then they have no right to speak about freedom and democracy in other parts of the world. So I want to highlight this hypocrisy by the UK government when it comes to our people.”
‘I still don’t feel safe’
Following a near-six-month stint in one of the detention camps, Ms Sauytbay was officially dismissed from her role at the kindergartens.
It was only a matter of days before the Chinese authorities returned to her door. Again, she was detained and interrogated in the middle of the night and told she would return to the camps for three years to be “re-educated”.
“I knew that if I went back to the camps as a detainee, I was not going to survive. I was going to die. I’ve seen many people dying there. So I decided to take a risk, to run off into Kazakhstan, to at least try to see my children,” she recalls.
In Kazakhstan, she was arrested and convicted for illegally crossing the border, and issued a six-month suspended sentence.
After Kazakhstan denied her asylum request, Ms Sauytbay fled for Sweden, where she now resides after being granted asylum. She is 4,500km from home - but does not feel she has truly broken free from the threat posed by the Chinese government.
“I don’t feel that I’m 100 per cent safe,” she said. “The CCP has a long reach. It has agents in all these countries. It’s able to use its influence and soft power to get its way and intimidate and silence people.
“The CCP’s increasing influence in democratic nations is not only a threat to the security of those nations, but it’s a threat to democracy, and it’s a very serious issue that needs to be confronted.”
The Independenthas contacted the UK Foreign Office and China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs for comment.
A woman who was tortured in one ofChina’s notorious Uyghur detention campshas launched a blistering attack onSir Keir Starmer,accusing ...
