To Whom It May Concern, What Follows Is Public Testimony Data Exported
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To whom it may concern, What follows is public testimony data exported from the Xinjiang Victims Database (shahit.biz) on Sat, 25 Sep 2021 15:36:20 +0000. A total of 106 victims with the following criteria is considered: List: Eyewitness accounts The vast majority of testimonies presented come with supplementary materials - video, audio, pictures, and documents - the links to which are included here and which also may be consulted by accessing the testimonies via the original interface at www.shahit.biz. In compiling this information, all efforts have been made to faithfully and accurately convey that which has been put forth by the testifier. In many cases, the information was imported from public sources. In others, it was submitted to us directly by the testifier. Despite our best efforts and most professional intentions, it is inevitable that some human error is nevertheless present. Many testimonies were inputted by non-native English speakers and still require proofreading. Finally, the majority of these testimonies have not gone through rigorous corroboration and as such should not be treated as fact. We hereby leave the way in which this data will be used to the reader's discretion. Sincerely, the shahit.biz team 46. Nursaule Qabdolla (努尔沙吾列·喀布都拉) Chinese ID: 654201195609113924 (Chochek) Basic info Age: 63 Gender: F Ethnicity: Kazakh Likely current location: outside China Status: free When problems started: Oct. 2017 - Dec. 2017 Detention reason (suspected|official): ---|--- Health status: has problems Profession: --- Testifying party (* direct submission) Testimony 1: Quanyshbek Tursynbek, born in 1988, is a Kazakhstan citizen as of August 2017. (son) Testimony 2: Quanyshbek Tursynbek, as reported by Gene A. Bunin. (son) Testimony 3*: Gene A. Bunin, independent scholar and curator of shahit.biz. Testimony 4: Nursaule Qabdolla, as reported by Buzzfeed News. (the victim) About the victim Nursaule Qabdolla is a Kazakhstan permanent resident. Address in China: No. 1 Attachment, House No. 34, Terekti Brigade, Oijailau Livestock Farm, Tacheng City, Xinjiang (新疆塔城市窝依加依劳牧场铁列克特队34号附1号). Victim's location In Kazakhstan. When victim was detained She returned to China on October 5, 2017, to be detained on December 9, 2017 and held in a concentration camp. When her husband visited her on March 4, 2018, she was in poor health, unable to see, and unable to eat because of stomachaches. Her hair had also been cut short. Twice during her stay, she would be taken to a local hospital for treatment, before being returned to camp. She was released on December 23, 2018, but did not immediately receive her passport and was kept under house arrest, with her daughter looking after her. At some point in 2019, she returned to Kazakhstan. Likely (or given) reason for detention --- Victim's status Released and back in Kazakhstan. She was extremely skinny upon her release from detention. How did the testifier learn about the victim's status? Unclear how the victim's son learned about the detention. [Possibly through her husband, who was able to visit the facility and talk to her through a screen on March 4, 2018.] Gene A. Bunin learned about her status through people in contact with her in Kazakhstan. Nursaule's account to BuzzFeed is an eyewitness testimony. Additional information Also mentioned in Foreign Policy: https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/01/18/detainees-are-trickling-out-of-xinjiangs-camps/ Eyewitness account [The following account was originally featured in BuzzFeed News. While an attempt to keep the eyewitness pseudo-anonymous was made in the original, with only her first name reported, the relative rarity of the name - together with the other details (age, time of detention and time of release, family situation and husband’s detention status, her city of residence) and the fact that only a few hundred ex-detainee women managed to return to Kazakhstan - essentially strip the account of all anonymity. We have therefore decided to include it, in an adapted and abridged form.] Maybe the police officers call you first. Or maybe they show up at your workplace and ask your boss if they can talk to you. In all likelihood they will come for you at night, after you’ve gone to bed. In Nursaule’s case, they turned up at her home just as she was fixing her husband a lunch of fresh noodles and lamb. Nursaule’s husband was watching TV the day she was detained in late 2017 near Tacheng City, she said. She was in the kitchen when there was a sharp knock at the front door. She opened it to find a woman wearing ordinary clothing flanked by two uniformed male police officers, she said. The woman told her she was to be taken for a medical checkup. At first, Nursaule, a sixtysomething Kazakh woman whose presence is both no-nonsense and grandmotherly, was glad. Her legs had been swollen for a few days, and she had been meaning to go to the doctor to have them looked at. Nursaule’s stomach began to rumble. The woman seemed kind, so Nursaule asked if she could return to pick her up after she’d eaten lunch. The woman agreed. But then she said something strange. “She told me to take off my earrings and necklace before going with them, that I shouldn’t take my jewelry where I was going,” Nursaule said. “It was only then that I started to feel afraid.” After the police left, Nursaule called her grown-up daughter to tell her what happened, hoping she’d have some insight. Her daughter told her not to worry - but something in her tone told Nursaule there was something wrong. She began to cry. She couldn’t eat a bite of her noodles. Many hours later, after the police had interrogated her for hours, she realized that she was starving. But the next meal she would eat would be within the walls of an internment camp. After a series of blood tests, Nursaule was taken to a separate room at the clinic, where she was asked to sign some documents she couldn’t understand and press all 10 of her fingers on a pad of ink to make fingerprints. Police interrogated her about her past, and afterward, she waited for hours. Finally, past midnight, a Chinese police officer told her she would be taken to “get some education.” Nursaule tried to appeal to the Kazakh officer translating for him - she does not speak Chinese - but he assured her she would only be gone 10 days. When Nursaule arrived, the first thing she saw were the heavy iron doors of the compound, flanked by armed police. For several women detainees, a deeply traumatic humiliation was having their long hair cut to chin length. Women were also barred from wearing traditional head coverings, as they are in all of Xinjiang. “I wanted to keep my hair,” said Nursaule. “Keeping long hair, for a Kazakh woman, is very important. I had grown it since I was a little girl, I had never cut it in my life. Hair is the beauty of a woman.” “I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “They wanted to hack it off.” After the haircut, putting her hand to the ends of her hair, she cried. Some former detainees said there were small clinics within the camps. Nursaule remembered being taken by bus to two local hospitals in 2018. The detainees were chained together, she said. People were coming and going all the time from the camp where she stayed, she said. Nursaule was never beaten, but one day, she got into a squabble with an Uyghur woman who was living in the same dorm room. Guards put a sack over her head and took her to the solitary room. There, it was dark, with only a metal chair and a bucket. Her ankles were shackled together. The room was small, about 10 feet by 10 feet, she said, with a cement floor. There was no window. The lights were kept off, so guards used a flashlight to find her, she said. After three days had passed by, she was taken back up to the cell. Nursaule never expected to be released. “It was dinner time and we were lining up at the door,” she said. “They called my name and another Kazakh woman’s name.” It was December 23, 2018. She was terrified - she had heard that some detainees were being given prison sentences, and she wondered if she might be among them. China does not consider internment camps like the ones she was sent to to be part of the criminal justice system - no one who is sent to a camp is formally arrested or charged with a crime. Nursaule had heard that prisons - which disproportionately house Uyghurs and Kazakhs - could be even worse than internment camps. She whispered to the other woman, “Are we getting prison terms?” The two were taken in handcuffs to a larger room and told to sit on plastic stools. Then an officer undid the handcuffs. He asked if Nursaule wanted to go to Kazakhstan. She said yes. He then gave her a set of papers to sign, promising never to tell anyone what she had experienced. She signed it, and they allowed her to leave - to live under house arrest until she left for Kazakhstan for good. The day after, her daughter arrived with her clothes. Nursaule’s daughter, who is in her late twenties, is a nurse who usually works the night shift at a local hospital in Xinjiang, starting at 6 p.m. Nursaule worries all the time about her - about how hard she works, and whether she might be detained someday too.