Saturday, December 7, 2024

Right to Life

Home Personal Liberty Right to Life

INTERVIEW: Wincing First-Hand Account of Uyghur Concentration Camp Torture

This isn’t easy to read.

Omar Bekali visited Adelaide recently to deliver a series of keynote speeches.

At first glance, a man on a speaking tour seems ordinary enough. However, Omar’s story is anything but ordinary.

A survivor of the Chinese Communist Party’s Xinjiang Camp, Omar Bekali, 46, presents as a courageous but scarred man with first-hand experience of the Chinese Government’s network of concentration camps. He not only saw people being subjected to unspeakable brutality and torture. He was one of them!

The following interview is compelling and especially wincing, coming with a reader warning. Yet his message is of global importance. The dark truth of China’s concentration camps and human rights violations is uncovered in all their gore.

The scene is Chinese occupied East Turkistan, Xinjiang.

The interview begins …


Liberty Itch: How did you end up in a concentration camp in XinJiang?

OB: My family and I lived in Kazakhstan. I went to Urumqi for a Trade Expo on 22 March 2017 for my work. Then on 25 March 2017, I went to Turpan, a City in Xinjiang, to visit my parents, where I was arrested and detained.

That morning, I was at my parents’ house with my brothers and sisters. Suddenly two police cars pulled up outside our house.  Five armed police officers got out from their cars, came into our home, and arrested me. They never presented me with a warrant; they told me that they had one on their computer. I was brought to Dighar Village Police Station where I was made to wait for two hours. Every chance I got, I’d ask to call my parents, a lawyer, the Kazakh Embassy, or my wife, because no one knew where I was and I couldn’t call for help.

LI: On what grounds were you arrested by the Chinese Police?

Share Liberty Itch

OB: It is because I am a Turkic Kazakh. Beijing wants to erase all Turkic people in East Turkistan, a country invaded by the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. The land is now commonly known as ‘XinJiang, China’. I was suddenly accused of ‘terrorism’ and ‘smuggling people out of China’. I was targeted and discriminated against for being a Turkic Kazakh.

LI: When and how long did you stay in the camp?

OB: I stayed in the camp from 26 March 2017 to 24 November 2017.

LI: Where was your family at that time?

OB: My family was in Kazakhstan. I have a beautiful family with my wife and 3 children.

LI: How was your family impacted?

OB: The CCP destroyed my beautiful family. My family members including my children are all mentally impacted. My youngest son, who was one year and three month old when I was captured, could not call me dad for nearly a year after I returned. He complains even now that I abandoned him.

The purpose of these concentration camps is to indoctrinate Uyghurs into obeying the Chinese government. They use sophisticated mechanisms to brainwash us. I was told by the guards I had been poisoned by extreme ideologies during my life outside of China and needed to have a proper ‘Chinese Education’.

LI: What activities did they require of you in the camp?

OB: We are forced to study the Chinese language, Marxism, ‘Xi Jinping Thoughts’, renounce our religion and younger inmates worked in factories.

We were denied food for not agreeing to sing anthems that praised the Chinese government, otherwise known as Red Songs. We were told to denounce our Uyghur identity and Muslim faith. I was made to read a list of 60 types of common crimes associated with my ethnic and religious identity, praying to Allah, having a beard, attending a Muslim marriage, and communicating with people outside China.

My personal belief is that they never actually planned on indoctrinating us. The plan was always to exterminate the Uyghur population and harvest our organs.

LI: Did you comply with all the tasks? What would happen if you didn’t do them?

OB: I tried to resist. I denied the Chinese government’s accusations and asked them to show me the evidence. But that led to severe torture as punishment. The police realised they needed to escalate the pressure to get me to say what they wanted me to say.

From the police station I was brought somewhere I didn’t recognise. The police made me take off my clothes and examined my body, making notes about my condition. That’s when the torture started. They transferred me to the police station, in Kelamayi, Xinjiang.

My hands were strapped onto the arms on the chair
and my feet were constrained at the bottom
while needles were gradually slid into my fingers.
That would last four to eight hours every day.

From April 3 to April 7, 2017, they would put me in the ‘Tiger Chair’ to try and extract information from me and compel me to admit to crimes I wasn’t guilty of.

They said I organised terrorist activities, propagated terrorism, or covered-up for terrorists. The police showed me photos of Uyghur and Kazakh people in Kazakhstan and asked me for their information.

I was given a letter accounting for all of my ‘crimes’ and told to sign it as a confession.

My job was used against me. The police claimed I was using my tourism career as a way to smuggle people out of China and into neighbouring countries.

Needles and nails were inserted into my body every time I told them “no” or “I’m innocent”.

An iron wire was shoved into my penis.

Rope was tied to the ceiling and around my wrists so tight that my feet couldn’t touch the ground. The rope ripped through the skin on my wrists while my body weight pulled me down. 

Other days I was put in a “flying plane” position, where both my wrists and feet were tied to the ceiling, pulling my arms and legs out of their sockets while I was left dangling.

The guards would laugh as my body pulled itself apart.

There were five other types of punishment for those who didn’t follow the guards’ orders.

  1. First, they’d make me face a wall for 24 hours without food or drink while they beat me with rubber rods.
  2. Second, we were put in the Tiger Chair where needles were shoved into our fingers and feet.
  3. Third, we’d be left in solitary confinement with no light for 24 hours.
  4. Fourth, they’d put us into scorching hot rooms in the summer or freezing cold rooms in the winter.
  5. Finally, a punishment I thankfully never experienced was called water prison. I heard of many detainees who were put in the water prison, but I don’t know what it is.

Share

LI: How did you manage to escape? 

OB: To my great surprise on November 24, 2017, I was informed of my release and expulsion to Kazakhstan. I had been detained for eight months. I later learned that my wife sent a number of letters to the UN Human Rights Commission and the Kazakhstan Foreign Minister attesting to my innocence.

The considerable press coverage of my illegal detainment was a major factor in my release.

LI: Where do you live now?

OB: I migrated to the Netherlands with a valid visa. I moved there to provide eyewitness evidence about what is happening in the concentration camps in XinJiang.

LI: How many Uyghur people are in concentration camps in XiaJiang?

OB: It’s always hard to tell, of course. However, while I was in the camp in 2017, my best estimate is that more than a million Uyghurs were in the camps.


Omar’s is a cautionary tale about brutality inflicted by our largest trading partner. He endured trauma and unspeakable pain that no-one should be required to bear.

However, I prefer to see Omar through the lens of unfaltering courage, resilience and the strength to survive. There’s a bravery in telling his painful story again and again on a global stage, a story shared by millions of Uyghurs and other minority groups who are still in the XinJiang camps.

Today, he is bringing his testimony before international human rights bodies.


What can everyday Australians do to help the Uyghur people?

This year the United States used it’s Magnitsky legislation to ban the import of certain Xinjiang products, including cotton, over concerns about forced-labor in the XinJiang region.

Australia has similar Magnitsky legislation but has not used it to sanction companies exploiting Uyghur slave-labour.

Whilst we at Liberty Itch wholeheartedly support free-trade and are against wholesale nationwide sanctions, products manufactured with slave-labour is anathema to free-trade principles and cannot be supported.

While you wait for your Commonwealth Government to take a stand on this, you can take action as an individual and purchase alternatives to brands made with Uyghur slave-labour.

Small acts of defiance in support of human rights go a long way.

BREAKING: Man Who Chanted “CCP, Step Down”, Arrested and Disappeared!

Brave Chinese citizens have yet again risked imprisonment challenging their country’s regime.

They took to the streets to fight the Chinese Communist Party’s prolonged and inhumane lockdown, a policy which caused residents trapped in their high-rise apartment building in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, to be burned-alive.

In scenes from the security state rarely accessible to the world, Chinese people gathered in the Shanghai streets and chanted ‘CCP, step down. Xijiping, step down!’ The chanting showed the citizens’ barely concealed contempt and dissatisfaction with their government, seemingly well beyond just its strict COVID measures.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/NG-91ngQn4E?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

The whereabouts of the protest leader you see in this video is unknown.

His family were eye-witnesses to him being handcuffed and unceremoniously bundled into a van. There is no official paperwork of his arrest. His family reported that three days after the arrest, there is still no trace of the young man.   

He was simply ‘made to disappear.’  

China is the world’s most heavily surveilled country. Intrusive facial recognition software, a tool used to thwart human rights and civil liberties, is now being routinely exploited by the Chinese Police State. Facial recognition systems log nearly every single citizen in the country, with 372.8 cameras per 1,000 people.  

Chinese authorities have reportedly begun tracking-down people who took part in the demonstrations. Students are always the weakest and easiest to pick off. Others who attended the protests are being rounded-up without scrutiny from international media.

This wasn’t sufficient intimidation for the despotic regime. The Chinese Government immediately made its military presence felt more publicly as it rolled-out armoured tanks on the street.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/vG6nB_YXPUQ?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0


Unlike the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, the Government now has the technology to corral freedom-activists more secretly to avoid the world’s condemnation. The Chinese Communist Party, with all the apparatus of a surveillance state and growing superpower, seemingly acts in fear of its own defenceless citizens.

These actions are a continuation of well-documented brutality evident in the 2019 Hong Kong protests. (Warning: the next video depicts graphic violence on an unarmed civilian. Viewer discretion recommended.)

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/WSCi38shWxg?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

Freedom is worth the fight.

Pray for the Chinese people. 

INTERVIEW: The CCP imprisoned him. She got him out!

If you listen to rare public forays by senior members of the security establishment, the spies and their agencies, we in the West are under threat from several fronts. Looming front and centre, they say, is an expansionary Chinese Communist Party.

To be clear, Liberty Itch has no quarrel with the Chinese people.

However, Liberty Itch is sceptical of government of all stripes, whether in the West or the Chinese Communist Party. Government has a nasty habit of suppressing its people, sometimes stripping freedoms one imperceptible step at a time, its citizens in a saucepan of the slow boil kind. Sometimes government makes swift and savage moves against its people. History is replete with examples of both.

So well may we ask: Is the Chinese Communist Party friend or foe, our ally or adversary? We in the West welcome and educate their students. We trade with their corporations. Australia, the United States and indeed the entire OECD are beneficiaries of China’s emergence. Our shared prosperity is enormous as China brings a billion citizens out of agrarian life into a century-delayed Industrial Revolution and today’s Information Age simultaneously. The project is breathtaking.

Share Liberty Itch

But as Liberty Itch discovered, geopolitical relationships are complex. Material wealth is soulless if not accompanied by human rights. We cannot be so naïve or selectively blind as to ignore civil liberties in our estimation. The Dragon we feed and enable today should be ready to take its place on the world stage as a force for good.

With an open mind, Liberty Itch therefore embarked on an investigation, a series of tell-all interviews with people with particular direct experience with the Chinese Communist Party. The stories are real. The events described happened and cannot be ignored. What each does is illuminate, directly and personally, how the Chinese Communist Party acts from a civil liberties perspective.

Our first guest in this series is Fiona Hui.

You can see the former flight attendant in Fiona instantly. Urbane, impeccably-dressed and possessed of a welcoming smile, she possesses a charm hard not to like. She has navigated many of life’s milestones and responsibilities already while retaining her youthful energy.

First impressions rarely tell the whole story. As you peel-away the onion layers of her life, normality gives way to heartache, the collapse of her homeland, the incarceration of a loved one and a fight for survival with lessons for all freedom-lovers who value their civil liberties.

So her story is yours. There are some timely warnings for all of us.

Here’s Liberty Itch’s short interview with Fiona Hui.


LI:          When did you become an Australian citizen?

FH:        Although I have been living in Australia for nearly 20 years, I only became an Australian citizen very recently, in 2021.  I applied for my citizenship in light of the loss of freedom and democracy in Hong Kong in 2019. At that point, I realised that Australia is my only home, so I submitted my citizenship application.

LI:          Prior to this, you were a citizen of which country?

FH:        Prior to 2021, I was a citizen of Hong Kong. I was born and raised under the British rule in Hong Kong. 

LI:          You lived in Hong Kong during which years?

FH:        I lived in Hong Kong since I was born in 1980, until 2004, when I left Hong Kong and came to Australia to pursue a liberal arts education.

LI:          What was life like in Hong Kong in those early years?

FH:        As a successful former British Colony from 1841–1997, Hong Kong is a unique place blending East and West. I always felt free, safe, and connected to the West when I was a child and a young teenager. I enjoyed living in a ‘very Chinese city’ essentially, but also appreciated the opportunities to be exposed to Western literature, music, philosophies and ideologies. It was dynamic, stimulating and exciting.

LI:          Why did you leave Hong Kong?

FH:        I left Hong Kong for a Western higher education. I did not imagine Hong Kong could become what it is today when I left. Like most people. I have taken democracy for granted and couldn’t imagine otherwise.

LI:          From the handover by Britain in 1997 to your departure, what changes did you notice in Hong Kong?

FH:        Since the handover in 1997, there has been a steady and gradual erosion of Hong Kong freedoms. Since the structure of democracy was already in place, Hong Kong people had been asking for ‘universal suffrage’, all adult citizens should be able to vote for their government representatives, as highlighted by the Occupy Central and Umbrella Movement in 2014.

In 2019, 70-80% of the Hong Kong population participated in the largest and longest Hong Kong protests in history, in demonstration of the City’s strong will to safeguard Hong Kong’s declining civil liberties and freedoms. 

Then in 2020, the National Security Law was introduced by the Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong. Under this law, any pro-democracy movement was suddenly classified as ‘secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion’. 

2020 was the year when Hong Kong lost its press freedom, the rights to peaceful protests, and the complete collapse of the rule of law.

LI:          I believe this is the time we saw footage of Chinese Communist Party agents breaking into the The Epoch Times and smashing the printing presses with sledge-hammers …

Share

FH:        Yes. They actually set fire to the bureau. The building was aflame.

LI:          How did these changes impact your family initially?

FH:        My family was fine for many years after the handover. The whole world thought China was opening-up and we could work together for a more prosperous world.

LI:          Your brother was a Hong Kong democratically-elected parliamentarian. How did his status slowly change?

FH:        It was not until 2019 with the breakout of large-scale protests in Hong Kong that it started to seriously impact my family. My brother, Ted Hui, being a vocal pro-democracy legislator, was frequently arrested due to his involvement in mediating the protests, wanting to protect young people and ordinary citizens from being abused and arrested. Like the majority of the population, Ted was pepper sprayed, tear-gassed, abused and arrested many times. In the end, his parliamentarian status was completely disregarded by the Hong Kong Police and the Chinese Communist Party. They just treated him like a ‘criminal’. Democracy had suddenly become a serious crime.

LI:          How did your brother and other democratically-elected parliamentarians reconcile the freedoms bequeathed by British rule and a growing autocratic influence from the Chinese Communist Party?

FH:        They have never reconciled the loss of freedoms. Some of his MP friends are still in prison. Many like Ted, went in ‘exile’ and continued with the movement overseas, lobbying governments of the Five Eyes, warning them of the dangers of the Chinese Communist Party regime. I guess they are now all ‘colluding with foreign forces’, as the Chinese Communist Party would describe it.

LI:          How did things come to a flashpoint?

FH:        The prolonged protests in 2019, combined with the noble and pure intention of democracy-loving Hongkongers, and the Chinese Communist Party led by a psychopathic Chinese President Xi Jinping have all contributed to this flashpoint.

LI:          What role did you play in responding to the loss of civil liberties?

FH:        I was not interested in politics at all prior to 2019, I had a great life in Adelaide. Who cared? However, the 2019 Hong Kong Crisis made me awake. The images and live-streaming of abuse in Hong Kong stunned me. I was in disbelief that freedom could be lost like this overnight. I couldn’t believe that people could be thrown in prison for protesting and speaking. It was all just unimaginable.

So I became a ‘democracy activist’.

Then I discovered CCP activism in my adopted country of Australia. So I exposed the CCP’s interference in Australia and politicians who were working with the CCP for their own self-serving interests.

I joined the Liberal Democrats for a period because I saw that they had good policy in support of libertarianism and humanitarianism principles. I also connected with organisations and communities who cared about our civil liberties.

LI:          How did your brother escape?

Share Liberty Itch

FH:        My brother got ‘invited’ by some young, democracy-loving Danish politicians and libertarians to attend a ‘Climate Conference’. It was staged so that Ted had an excuse to get out of Hong Kong. At that time, his passport was detained by the Hong Kong Court, but the judge decided to release his passport so that Ted could attend this ‘conference’. The judge made a fine decision but, to this day, I don’t know whether he was subsequently imprisoned by the Chinese Communist Party!

Ted escaped also because many people around that world have played a part in helping him and praying for him. This includes the Australian Government and many nameless men and women within and outside our government. We have some good people in this country, who have empathy, intelligence, capability and goodwill. God bless Australia.

LI:          What did you leave behind?

FH:        My family and I won’t be able to go back to Hong Kong for a long time. Under the current circumstances, I’ve convinced myself there is not much worth going back for anyway. I miss the mountains. I miss the views. Any love I had of shopping there is tainted by the lack of a free press, no free speech, no rule of law. Home is where the family is. Australia is my only home. Look forward rather than backwards!

LI:          Why choose Australia to live?

FH:        I chose Australia due to its beauty, its reputation in higher education and its proximity to Asia.

LI:          What worrying early-signs in sliding from democracy to tyranny do you see in Australia?

FH:        The early-signs were shown during the last two years: how our governments managed COVID, especially in Melbourne, the prolonged lockdowns, and the mandatory vaccinations in various industries.

Modern technological advancement means that people are more easily monitored. I’m worry about the introduction of My Gov Accounts, facial recognition cameras in our City here in Adelaide, digital IDs and yet more business-crushing IDs for company directors.

We have to be careful how people in positions of power use these mechanisms. They could be used to make us a more effective country, or they could be used as a means of monitoring and control. It all depends on how you view the government and the people holding those powerful positions.

We need to be awake and alert.

LI:          How quickly can that slide happen, in your experience?

FH:        The loss of freedom could happen so quickly that people will be in disbelief. Just look at Hong Kong. A clean, proper judicial system could end so fast. Unimaginable.  

LI:        What can your fellow Australians do to counteract this?

FH:        Stay aware and united with fellow Australians. Unity and helping others in need. Play a part to end the divide and polarisation in society. Be the change you want to see in the world.

LI:          What do you think the outlook is for Australia?

FH:        Australia is a lucky country. I believe that we will continue to be blessed. Be careful of the ‘doom and gloom’ presented in the media. I feel hopeful and positive about our country.

***