ÜRÜMQI – “I begged them to kill me each time I was electrocuted. My whole body would shake violently and I would feel the pain in all my veins.” That’s how the Muslim Uyghur young lady, Mihrigul Tursun, described the torture she has survived at a Chinese detention camp, The Independent reported on November 30.

The 29-year-old woman was humiliated and abused at an internment camp where the Chinese occupation authorities is detaining hundreds of thousands of the native Uyghur Muslims who are the indigenous people of the Muslim republic of Uyghurstan.

During her press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, USA, Tursun informed that she was interrogated for four days in a row without sleep, had her hair shaved, was electrocuted and was subjected to an intrusive medical examination following her second arrest in China in 2017. After she was arrested a third time, the treatment grew worse.

The United Nations has reports that the Chinese occupation authorities have incarcerated as many as two million Uyghurs in “reeducation camps” to promote what the occupation government calls “ethnic unity”.

Ongoing reports since 2017 have noted malnourishment, numerous deaths – particularly among the elderly and infirm Muslims – and in some cases the forced administration of psychiatric drugs.

Tursun is a university student who was raised in Uyghurstan and moved to Egypt to study English at a university and soon met her husband with whom she had triplets.

Nonstop Chasing

In 2015, after returning to Uyghurstan to spend time with her family, she was immediately arrested by the Chinese forces and separated from her infant children. When she was released three months later, one of the triplets had died and the other two had developed health problems.

Several months later, she was detained a third time and spent three months in a cramped prison cell with 60 other women, having to sleep in turns, use the toilet in front of security cameras and sing songs praising China’s Communist Party.

“Me and my inmates in the camp were forced to take unknown medication, including pills that made them faint, and a white liquid that caused bleeding in some women and loss of menstruation in others. Nine women from my cell died during the three months there,” Tursun said.

After her release, the Muslim lady took her remaining two children to Egypt, but the Chinese authorities ordered her to return to Uyghurstan. Once in Cairo, Tursun contacted US authorities and, in September, went to America and settled in Virginia.

The Chinese government replied to the UN that the detained Uyghur Muslims at the camps are “grateful to be detained in mass internment camps because it makes their lives more colourful”.

The occupation authorities depicted the reeducation camps as “an attempt to bring the native Muslim Uyghurs into the modern, civilized world.”

Uyghurstan is a Central Asian Muslim republic with a total area of 1.665 million km². According to 2010 estimates, about 21.8 million people ,mostly Uyghurs, live in this Muslim country which is occupied by China since 1949.