‘The Only Crime of Most of Us Was That We Were Uyghur Muslims'

Concentration camp survivor Tursunay Ziyawudun on her imprisonment and torture in China

- By Noor Greene, Photography by Billy Childress

BEFORE SHE FLED, Tursunay Ziyawudun was one of about 1.5 million Uyghurs and other Muslims imprisoned in western China in what the government insists are “re-education” centers. She describes them as “worse than prison”—modern concentration camps.

Ziyawudun was born in what the Chinese government calls the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, though she calls it East Turkestan. About a decade ago, she married a Kazakh man and moved to Kazakhstan. When they returned to her home village at the end of 2016, she says, the situation had “completely changed.”

Xinjiang, a region the size of Alaska, is home to 23 million people, 45 percent of whom are Uyghurs. The remainder are mostly Han Chinese, the majority ethnic group of mainland China. Today, Xinjiang is a police state where the government subjects the population to round-the-clock surveillance. Expressions of traditional Uyghur culture have been criminalized, and the threat of the concentration camp looms over every interaction.

In April 2017, Chinese police arrested Ziyawudun and held her for a month. They released her only because she was ill. Since the police had seized her passport, she couldn’t return to Kazakhstan, though her husband eventually did. In March 2018, she was arrested again and imprisoned for nine months, during which time she was sexually tortured and witnessed unspeakable horrors.