Nathan Ruser Profile picture
Picking quarrels and provoking trouble (寻衅滋事) 🎵I'm working late, cause I'm a mapper 🎵 Analyst at @ASPI_org, PhD @UNSW

Sep 28, 2020, 16 tweets

One facility out of a total of 380 detention camps is a school in Nilqa. Bad-faith actors/trolls have desperately tried to disprove this site. I'm going to tell the story of Dina Nurdybai to highlight the cruelness that denying the trauma of victims has. She was detained here.

Dina was a business woman and a business owner, she owned a clothing company in Nilqa, and in 2017 was summoned for 'a chat' with police. This chat ended up with her being detained without rhyme or reason for almost a year.

She was taken directly to this facility, the Wuzan Middle School, where she was ordered to strip, undergo a full cavity search and then crammed into a room with 30 detainees and three beds.

When she met with a party cadre asking why she was detained, she was told that it was Uyghurs who were to blame for her detention, not the party, because they were terrorists. Which is shockingly similar to the psychopathic justification of this shocking regime I've seen on here.

At least every two weeks she was made to write “thought reports” (思想汇报), “statements of repentance” (悔过书), and “speak out and brandish one’s sword” (发声亮剑) declarations. Some of these often needed to be more than 3 pages long.

Dina says that it took her a while to learn that this place was a “education and training center” (教培中心). She says that when she looked up at the sign saying that, she was hit with an electric-shock baton by a guard.

She was also once made to sit next to a torture (tiger) chair for 24 hours, she needed to 'repent' by looking at it, or else they would strap her in and torture her with electric shocks.

They were allowed to call home twice per month. Following her release she was told she was required to pay interest on loan totally $250/day, when she was detained this loan had no interest. As a result all the machines and materials for her company were confiscated.

Her full testimony is available in Kazakh here:

and documented by @shahitbiz here: shahit.biz/eng/viewentry.…

She told the AP that anyone with children were forced to have an IUD implanted while detained at the camp.

Dina's story, compared to many other detained individuals, is quite light, she was released relatively quickly, she wasnt tortured, she wasn't grossly mistreated in the camp. Even so, when she left she was sick, her "fingers were swollen and my nails were almost falling off."

That's because this is an exceptionally low security facility, compared to many of the other ones in Xinjiang. But it's still deeply traumatic. For the online reactionary left to search high and low for any smidgen of mistake, like sharks in the water is speaking over victims.

What matters more than these stories, to the derranged portion of the podcast-tankie-left, is an incorrect ideological belief that these people have no agency and have no experience unless they completely agree. Anyone who doesn't is a US imperialist pawn.

Pretty much every Uyghur I know has friends and family who, to this day, remain detained. A lot of them have far more horrific stories than Dina, one of the lucky people who was able to get out.

To dismiss all of that in favour of amature and incorrect assumptions (this facility is marked as a school on an online map therefore it can't be a camp) shows that to them the suffering of Uyghurs and others means nothing, anything counter to their belief is false.

It's distinctly cruel, and it's distinctly typical of a toxic part of the online Left that has been denying the agency, the experiences and the trauma of oppressed people of colour for decades.

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