(London, United Kingdom) Gulzira Auelkhan, a 41-year-old Kazakh woman, gave her testimony of her time in four separate Chinese Communist Party (CCP) camps over the course of 16 months. Her testimony was livestreamed to the Uyghur Tribunal in London from ChinaAid. Tribunal officials asked several questions about her eyewitness accounts, which include torture, persecution, and sexual assault on her and Uyghur captives.
Born in Xinjiang, Ms. Gulzira moved to Kazakhstan in 2014. She lived there until July 2017 and returned to her home town in China. Gulzira was arbitrarily arrested for having “improper thoughts” and sent to a “reeducation” camp. She did not return to her family in Kazakhstan until January 2019, spending over a year in four CCP prison camps. “I heard the cries of Uyghur women,” Gulzira wrote in her official statement. She went on to describe that she was detained and interrogated 19 times. In the first camp, she was bound in shackles for six months and placed in a “tiger chair,” a Chinese torture device, for over 24 hours. She and the other female captives were forced to take “flu shots” and other mysterious medications. Since her imprisonment, she has not been able to bear children.
Gulzira testified her experience within these prison camps to the Uyghur Tribunal. The Tribunal’s objective is to gather evidence for China’s crimes against humanity, and possibly genocide, mounting several serious international accusations. Although the Tribunal is a quasi-judicial body and cannot offer legal verdicts, eyewitness accounts from Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Turkic Muslims can be collected and organized for future international legal proceedings.
To find out more information about the Tribunal, or to read Gulzira’s testimony, visit the Uyghur Tribunal’s official website