More allegations about Chinese detention centres

Every day we are reading and hearing about genocide and sexual abuse in Chinese detention centres. And every day the Chinese authorities deny the allegations.

Why not allow national and international journalists visit these centres and see for themselves what is happening?

Allegations of shackled students and gang rape inside China's detention camps

By Ivan Watson and Rebecca Wright, CNN

Hong Kong (CNN)On the first day of her new teaching job at a Chinese government-run detention center in Xinjiang, Qelbinur Sidik said she saw two soldiers carry a young Uyghur woman out of the building on a stretcher.

"There was no spark of life in her face. Her cheeks were drained of color, she was not breathing," said Sidik, a former elementary school teacher who says she was forced to spend several months teaching at two detention centers in Xinjiang in 2017.

A policewoman who worked at the camp later told her the woman had died from heavy bleeding, though she didn't say what caused it. It was the first of many stories the policewoman would tell Sidik during the teacher's three-month assignment at the heavily-fortified building that housed female detainees. 

According to Sidik, the policewoman claimed to have been assigned to investigate reports of rape at the center by her superiors, though CNN has no evidence of that claim. However, Sidik said what she heard and saw herself was so disturbing that it made her ill.

Sidik's allegations are similar to those of former detainees who have spoken of rape and systematic sexual assault within China's vast detention network.

Her testimony is a rare account of a worker's direct experience of life inside the detention centers, where the US government alleges China is committing genocide against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities through a repressive campaign of mass detention, torture, forced birth control and abortions. 

The Chinese government has rejected allegations of genocide, and in a statement to CNN said "there is no so-called 'systematic sexual assault and abuse against women' in Xinjiang."

However, Sidik said the female police officer described how her male colleagues used to boast about it. "When (male guards) were drinking at night, the policemen would tell each other how they raped and tortured girls," Sidik told CNN from her new home in the Netherlands.