WASHINGTON - At the Sog County “reform through re-education center” in Nagchu Prefecture of the Tibetan Autonomous Region, “Those who the officials didn’t like would be captured and tortured with electronic devices. When they become unconscious, [the torturers] would splash water on their faces until their victims regained their consciousness. After doing that for a long time, they would use a black rubber tube as well as electronic baton to torture people. The bruised bodies of the prisoners turned blue and black, and people become half-dead. For some [strange] reason, their bones were not broken.
This description of daily life comes from a two-part journal written by a former inmate of one of the camps that was obtained by the Tibetan Service of the Voice of America, and some organizations of exiled Tibetans. The author, believed to be a Tibetan monk, was put in the re-education camp in July 2017 after studying at an unnamed Tibetan Buddhist institute in Qinghai Province, on the Tibetan Plateau in northwest China.
Cultural anthropologist, historian and University of Colorado professor, Carole McGranahan, the author of “Arrested History: Tibet, the CIA and Memories of a Forgotten War,” reviewed the journal and found it an “authentic recounting of what it is like to be a prisoner in a re-education camp in Tibet.”
“The details given correspond to our understanding of what such re-education centers look like, and these re-education camps, detention camps, internment camps are found not only in Tibet but right now, [in] 2019, there are also many in which Uighurs — Uighur Muslims — are prisoners in Xinjiang as well. So we are seeing this in both Tibet and Xinjiang,” she told VOA.
The Tibetan journal recounts brutal practices that continued into 2017, but by that time, Chen Quanguo the camp’s top administrator, had moved on, appointed by Beijing as party secretary of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region in 2016.
Since then, under his administration, hundreds of thousands of Uighur Muslims have been imprisoned in similar re-education centers as security and surveillance in the region has been tightened using methods Chen employed in Tibet, such as setting up security stations in every intersection in the cities and passport confiscation, .
“Tibet is the precursor to what is happening,” McGranahan said. “The Chinese architect of the Uighur ‘re-education’ or concentration camps is Chen Quanguo. Where was he before Xinjiang? In Tibet from 2011-2016, in charge of surveilling, policing and oppressing Tibetans.
“Global Islamophobia is enabling current Chinese Communist abuse in Xinjiang, but we need to connect what is happening in Xinjiang with what has happened in Tibet since the 1950s,” McGranahan continued. “The logics, structures, and tactics of oppression are similar, and similarly devastating.”
Human rights activists have called for the imposition of international sanctions on Chen, .
Calls to the Chinese Embassy in Washington asking for comment went directly to a voicemail system that hung up before messages could be left.
Pema Gyal, a Tibet researcher at Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy, says the journal makes it possible to compare treatment at the re-education camps for Tibetans with what is known of the Xinjiang camps for Uighurs.
“This diary shows there are many similarities between the re-education centers in Tibet and Xinjiang,” Pema Gyal says. “This shows the way political re-education campaigns about minorities carried are exactly the same [in those two regions]. Like in Xinjiang where young women are reportedly raped, the monk’s journal [entries show] many nuns were raped in the Tibetan re-education centers.”
The journal’s saga begins with the author being accused of breaking the law by studying in Qinghai [Province] and forced to leave the Tibetan Buddhist study center on July 1, 2017. “My parents and siblings were warned that if I did not return voluntarily, they would face imprisonment, their children would be barred from attending schools, and the family would not be allowed to collect , or caterpillar fungus. Under such circumstance, I had no choice but to come back.”
According to traditional Chinese medicine, the fungus enhances male virility and is the primary income for Tibetan families in many parts of Tibet. The from Sog is prized.
“Before I was taken in, a Tibetan man from the National Security Office told me, ‘You are going to a school, not to a prison,’” the journal writer recorded.
He was allowed only his clothes and toiletries.