Omir Bekali holds up a mobile phone showing a photo of his parents whom he believes have been detained in China. — AP
On March 25 last year, Bekali visited his parents in Xinjiang. The next day, police took him away. They strapped him into a “tiger chair” that clamped down his wrists and ankles. They hung him by his wrists against a barred wall. They interrogated him about his work inviting Chinese to apply for Kazakh tourist visas.
“I haven't committed any crimes!” Bekali yelled.
Seven months later, Bekali was taken out of his cell and handed a release paper. But he was not free.
Bekali was driven to a fenced compound in Karamay, where three buildings held more than 1,000 internees.
They would wake up together before dawn, sing the Chinese national anthem, and raise the Chinese flag at 7.30am. They sang songs praising the party and studied Chinese language and history. They were told that the indigenous sheep-herding Central Asian people of Xinjiang were backward before they were “liberated” by the Communist Party in the 1950s.
When they ate meals of vegetable soup and buns, they first had to chant: “Thank the Party! Thank the Motherland! Thank President Xi!”
Bekali was kept in a locked room almost around the clock with eight other internees, who shared beds and a wretched toilet. Cameras were installed in toilets and outhouses. Baths were rare, as was washing of hands and feet, equated with Islamic ablution.
In four-hour sessions, instructors lectured about the dangers of Islam and drilled internees with quizzes that they had to answer correctly or be sent to stand near a wall for hours on end.
“Do you obey Chinese law or Sharia?” instructors asked. “Do you understand why religion is dangerous?”
The detainees had to criticise and be criticised by their peers. One by one, they would also stand up before 60 classmates to present self-criticisms of their religious history.
“I was taught the Holy Quran by my father and I learned it because I didn't know better,” Bekali heard one say.
“I travelled outside China without knowing that I could be exposed to extremist thoughts abroad,” another said. “Now I know.”
After a week, Bekali went to his first stint in solitary confinement. He yelled out to a visiting official.
“Take me in the back and kill me, or send me back to prison,” he shouted. “I can't be here anymore.”
He was again hauled off to solitary confinement. It lasted 24 hours, ending late afternoon on Nov 24, when Bekali was suddenly released.
At first, Bekali did not want the AP to publish his account for fear his sister and mother in China would be detained.
But on March 10, the police took his sister, Adila Bekali. A week later, they took his mother, Amina Sadik. And on April 24, his father, Ebrayem.
Bekali changed his mind and said he wanted to tell his story.