The ordeal of Erbaqyt Otarbai, one of the hundreds of thousands of victims of China’s brutal secret “re-education centers”

Erbaqyt Otarbai was born in a rural area in the north Xinjiang, close to the borders that China shares with Kazakhstan, Russia and Mongolia. His family roots were Kazakh, and although he grew up speaking both Kazakh and Chinese, he always felt closer, due to his language and customs, to Central Asia than to Beijing or Shanghai. The Kazakhs are one of the 56 officially recognized ethnic groups in China and the third largest ethnic group in Xinjiang. Uyghurs, the region’s largest ethnic group, like the Kazakhs, speak a Turkish language and are predominantly Muslim.

As an adult, Otarbai was drawn to Kazakhstan, where members of the Kazakh diaspora in China had increasingly migrated, especially after the country declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. After s’ Being married, he moved to his wife’s hometown, Tacheng City. seven miles from the Kazakh border, and changed his address to match his own. Then, in 2011, he moved to Kazakhstan to build a house for his family. He found work managing pipeline segments across the border for a Chinese oil company, so he continued to travel to see relatives and enjoy China’s best healthcare.

However, From 2015, the border crossing became tense. Otarbai and his wife traveled to China for the birth of their second child. When the family tried to return to Kazakhstan, border guards arrested him. There were issues with his documentation, an issue that took three days to resolve, as his family waited in a hotel in Kazakhstan. He suspected that the change of address identified him as a suspect, so he decided to apply for Kazakh citizenship.

In 2017, when he returned to China to work in the mining company, his application for citizenship in Kazakhstan was still pending. Border officials confiscated his Chinese passport. They told him that the government had issued new instructions for cases like his. Local authorities would keep his passport at the Tacheng Police Station, where his house was still registered, until he was ready to return to Kazakhstan. But before he can get his passport back, the police arrested him on August 17, put him in a patrol car and turned on the siren, account in a special report The New Yorker.

They took him to Tacheng Pre-trial Detention Center. There he spent the dramatic three months sharing overcrowded cells with twenty-two other inmates. Otarbai was not resigned, he was fighting for his freedom, which led to severe beatings. During one meeting, a guard told him he would rot in prison, then hit his head with a metal baton, causing him to bleed.

“No one questioned me,” he said. “Nobody told me what was going on.” He assumed his arrest was a mistake that would soon be corrected. But three months after his arrest, instead of releasing him, he was transferred to a “political learning center”. Handcuffed, shackled and hooded, he set out for his next cruel destination.

He arrived in a former retirement home turned into a detention center, with high walls and watchtowers: Tacheng Regional Vocational Education and Training Center. During a medical examination, he learned that he had lost nearly 28 kilos during his three months in police custody.

By November, when Otarbai arrived, the field was almost empty, but the following month the adjacent rooms started to fill up. Daily classes have started. The inmates spent ten hours in a classroom: four hours in the morning and afternoon and two hours at night.

The students were divided into different classes. For high school and college graduates, like Otarbai, the classes focused on political indoctrination and, to an obsessive degree, they said, on the dangers of Islam. “Religion is like an opium,” they tell us, “he remembers.” They talk about jihadists. They say that if someone doesn’t smoke or drink alcohol, they can have extremist thoughts. “

Although it is forbidden to talk to classmates, Otarbai recognized prominent local figures in their class, such as imams, intellectuals and former mayors. “There were a lot of influential people,” he said. As in the pretrial detention center, Otarbai was a brooding prisoner, demanding his release and better treatment for himself and his cellmates. As punishment, he often spent time in solitary confinement, in a squalid cell too small to lie down. During the interrogation, the guards forced him to undress, sprayed him with water, and beat him. On another occasion, they gave him an electric shock. Inmates from other camps have described similar experiences.

Otarbai’s ordeal was not an isolated case, In 2018, new detention camps were opened in Xinjiang. According to satellite photo analyzes from the Australian Institute for Strategic Policy, the square meters of suspect fields in Xinjiang have more than doubled from the previous year. Former inmates described striking similarities in the design of the fields. Door locking systems, furniture, color-coded uniforms, and classroom layouts were often virtually identical from field to field. It was a systematic plan.

In December 2018, Otarbai was abruptly released. The motive remains a mystery, but his former cellmates, from the relative security of Kazakhstan, had made statements calling for his release. Six months later, after more than two years away from his family, Otarbai entered Kazakhstan. His wife and two children, aged nine and four, were waiting for him in the house he had built for them, in a small town on the outskirts of Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan. His youngest son, Nurtal, did not recognize him when he returned home. “Who is this guy coming to our house?” The boy asked his mother.

“Currently, Otarbai suffers from chronic pain and memory loss, which he attributes to his long detention and the torture he suffered. However, he is the funniest and most carefree ex-convict I have met ”, describes Ben Mauk, the reporter who produced the New Yorker report.

While incarcerated, he decided that, if he were ever released, he would raise his children in an environment of total freedom. “Now almost all the furniture doors are broken,” he told me. “But I never scold them, because I really understand what prison is. I want them to be free from everything ”.

A brutal systematic plan

Since 2017, arrests of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Hui and other minorities have started to escalate. The first wave targeted Uyghur imams and religious worshipers. Prominent academics, novelists and filmmakers were also quickly arrested. Police and security guards used many excuses to justify the arrests, such as traveling overseas, having a beard, and owning a prayer rug.

Expert estimates of the scale of the Xinjiang internment campaign – called a transformation through education program by Communist Party officials – are around one million people detained extrajudicially.

At thousands of checkpoints and gas stations in Xinjiang, police collected DNA samples, voice recordings, fingerprints, and face and iris scans from residents. Across the region, citizens’ homes are marked with QR codes linked to information about each resident. Mandatory smartphone apps monitor citizens’ private messages and movements. Chinese tech companies, like US-sanctioned Huawei, tested facial recognition software that could identify Uyghurs in a crowd.

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