‘I was tortured in a Chinese detention camp for Uyghurs. Starmer’s approval of a new embassy is a betrayal’
A woman who was tortured in one of China’s notorious Uyghur detention camps has launched a blistering attack on Sir Keir Starmer, accusing him of “disrespecting human rights” by approving plans for a Chinese mega-embassy in London.
Sayragul Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh who says she witnessed serious abuses when she was forced to work in one of China’s Xinjiang internment camps, accused the British prime minister of prioritising economic and political gain over international law.
“The recent activities of the current UK government have left us in deep anguish and fear,” she said, adding that Britain has “no right to speak about freedom and democracy” given its efforts to strengthen its relationship with President Xi Jinping’s government.
The activist, who is based in Sweden, now serves as the vice president of East Turkestan’s government-in-exile. In 2020, she led a complaint in the International Criminal Court (ICC) accusing Chinese officials of genocide and crimes against humanity, after fleeing China in 2018.
She was honoured six years ago as one of the ‘Women of Courage 2020’, receiving an award in Washington, DC from first lady Melania Trump and then-secretary of state Mike Pompeo, who recognised her “bravery” and role in inspiring other former detainees to tell their harrowing stories.
Speaking to The Independent, she detailed grave abuses in Chinese internment camps and recalled the horrors of the so-called “black room” in which detainees were tortured.
In the middle of the night in January 2017, Ms Sauytbay was detained for the first time by authorities in Xinjiang, an autonomous territory known as East Turkestan by several Turkic ethnic minority groups, including Uyghurs and Kazakhs.
She says she was interrogated on the basis that she had family in Kazakhstan, after her husband and two children had emigrated and gained Kazakh citizenship a year earlier.
Ms Sauytbay had been released for several months, when, in November 2017, she says she was blindfolded and taken to a detention camp in the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture, a camp of around 2,500 people, where she was ordered to work as a Chinese language instructor.
Established in the 2010s, the camps have seen more than a million ethnic Turkic people detained in what Beijing describes as “vocational training centres” designed to combat terrorism and religious extremism.
Many are detained for spurious reasons, including practising religion, travelling abroad, or openly displaying a distinct cultural identity. Rights groups have condemn these detentions, noting that they take place without trials.
At the camp, Ms Sauytbay says she witnessed horrific abuse of detainees.
“They engage in all forms of torture against the detainees, including both psychological and physical torture,” she said. “They routinely rape women. I’ve witnessed gang rapes as well with my own eyes.”
She says that a “black room” existed in the camp: a dark cell without any cameras where detention guards carried out torture against the detainees away from view.
