Indoctrination Camps Evoke Cultural Revolution

Detainees in far western China's new indoctrination camps are being made to disavow their Islamic beliefs, criticise themselves and their loved ones and give thanks to the ruling Communist Party.

When one of them, Omir Bekali, a Kazakh Muslim, refused to follow orders each day, he was forced to stand at a wall for five hours at a time. A week later, he was sent to solitary confinement, where he was deprived of food for 24 hours. After 20 days in the heavily guarded camp, he wanted to kill himself.

"The psychological pressure is enormous, when you have to criticise yourself, denounce your thinking - your own ethnic group," said Bekali, who broke down in tears as he described the camp. "I still think about it every night, until the sun rises. I can't sleep. The thoughts are with me all the time."

Since last spring, mainland authorities in the heavily Muslim region of Xinjiang have ensnared tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Muslim Chinese - and even foreign citizens - in mass internment camps. This detention campaign has swept across Xinjiang, a territory half the area of India, leading to what a US commission on China last month said is "the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today."

Chinese officials have largely avoided comment on the camps, but some are quoted in state media as saying that ideological changes are needed to fight separatism and Islamic extremism. Radical Muslim Uighurs have killed hundreds in recent years, and China considers the region a threat to peace in a country where the majority is Han Chinese.

The internment programme aims to rewire the political thinking of detainees, erase their Islamic beliefs and reshape their very identities. The camps have expanded rapidly over the past year, with almost no judicial process or legal paperwork. Detainees who most vigorously criticise the people and things they love are rewarded, and those who refuse to do so are punished with solitary confinement, beatings and food deprivation.

The recollections of Bekali, a heavyset and quiet 42-year-old, offer what appears to be the most detailed account yet of life inside so-called re-education camps.

The Associated Press also conducted rare interviews with three other former internees and a former instructor in other centers who corroborated Bekali's depiction. Most spoke on condition of anonymity to protect their families in China.

Bekali's case stands out because he was a foreign citizen, of Kazakhstan, who was seized by China's security agencies and detained for eight months last year without recourse. Although some details are impossible to verify, two Kazakh diplomats confirmed he was held for seven months and then sent to re-education.

The detention programme is a hallmark of China's emboldened state security apparatus under the deeply nationalistic, hard-line rule of President Xi Jinping. It is partly rooted in the ancient Chinese belief in transformation through education - taken once before to terrifying extremes during the mass thought reform campaigns of Mao Zedong.

"Cultural cleansing is Beijing's attempt to find a final solution to the Xinjiang problem," said James Millward, a China historian at Georgetown University.

Rian Thum, a professor at Loyola University in New Orleans, said China's re-education system echoes some of the worst human rights violations in history.

"The closest analogue is maybe the Cultural Revolution in that this will leave long-term, psychological effects," Thum said. "This will create a multi-generational trauma from which many people will never recover."

Asked to comment on the camps, China's Foreign Ministry said it "had not heard" of the situation. When asked why non-Chinese had been detained, it said the Chinese government protects the rights of foreigners in China and they should also be law-abiding. Chinese officials in Xinjiang did not respond to requests for comment.

However, bits and pieces from state media and journals show the confidence Xinjiang officials hold in methods that they say work well to curb religious extremism.

China's top prosecutor, Zhang Jun, urged Xinjiang's authorities this month to extensively expand what the government calls the "transformation through education" drive in an "all-out effort" to fight separatism and extremism. (AP)