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China Forcibly Sterilising Uighur Muslim Women In Detention Camps, Claim Former Detainees: Report

Swarajya StaffAug 14, 2019, 07:03 PM | Updated 07:03 PM IST
Uighur women clashing with Chinese police during a protest (Representative Image) (@ShimonLevit/Twitter)

Uighur women clashing with Chinese police during a protest (Representative Image) (@ShimonLevit/Twitter)


Chinese authorities are sterilising Uighur Muslim women at internment camps for ethnic and religious minorities, former detainees have claimed, reports Independent.

Gulbahar Jalilova, who was held for over a year in government “re-education centres” in the Xinjiang province of China, claimed that the Chinese authorities injected them with a substance from time to time.

“We had to stick our arms out through a small opening in the door. We soon realised that after our injections that we didn’t get our periods any more,” Jalilova told France24.

She and up to 50 other people were packed into a tiny cell “like we were just piece of a meat,” the 54-year-old woman said.

Another woman Mehrigul Tursun, who is 30-year-old, gave a similar account while speaking to Amnesty International event in Tokyo. She too claimed of being sterilised unknowingly in a detention camp in 2017.

According to Tursun, who now lives in exile in the United States, she felt “ tired for about a week, lost my memories and felt depressed”. She was released four months later after being diagnosed as mentally ill. The doctors in US told her that she had been sterilised, she said.

As per the report, an estimated one million Uighurs, Kazakhs and other minorities have been arbitrarily detained in prison camps across the country by the Chinese authorities.

The camps, according to the researchers, are being run like “wartime concentration camps” as part of “systematic campaign of social re-engineering and cultural genocide”.

However, the Chinese government has described the camps as “boarding schools” offering vocational training and rejected allegations of torture and other abuses as “fake news”.

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