By the time Chinese guards began torturing Kayrat Samarkand inside a re-education camp last spring, he says his life had prepared him for this.…
By the time Chinese guards began torturing Kayrat Samarkand inside a re-education camp last spring, he says his life had prepared him for this.
The ethnic Kazakh grew up in the mountains of rural Xinjiang, just miles away from China’s border with Kazakhstan. When he was 11 years old, his parents died. A man from his village lured the young orphan to a nearby city with the promise of work, and then sold him to a criminal gang of ethnic Uighurs, the predominant ethnic minority in Xinjiang, who managed a network of child thieves throughout China.
« There were a lot of other children who had been kidnapped, » Samarkand recalls. « Most of the others were trained to be pickpockets. They wanted me to be a beggar, so they injected me with medication that made my legs go numb. They held me down and broke both of my legs. »
Samarkand says they took him, newly crippled, to the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou to beg on the streets. By the time he turned 16, Samarkand says gang leaders had trained him to sell crystal methamphetamine. That’s when police caught him selling drugs, broke up the syndicate and sent him and 40 other kidnapped orphans to a rehabilitation center in the northeastern Chinese city of Tianjin. The police paid for multiple surgeries to help heal Samarkand’s legs before sending the boy to a boarding school in Xinjiang.
Now 30, Samarkand walks with a limp and still bears the scars of his youth up and down his legs. He says those Chinese police in Guangzhou were the only people who had helped him after his parents died.
That’s why, nearly two decades later, when the police from his home village invited him for a meeting, he went straight to the station to see how he could help. It was Oct. 19,2017.
« They sat me down in a tiny room with cameras aimed at me, » Samarkand remembers. « They cuffed me and interrogated me for 72 hours. »
Samarkand had spent eight years working in construction in Kazakhstan, and had recently returned to China to see friends. He says the police kept asking him what he did in Kazakhstan, whom he met with and how religious he was. He says they were never satisfied with his answers. Finally, they let him sleep inside the cell, but he says speakers installed in the ceiling kept waking him up.
« They woke me up playing the call to prayer, » says Samarkand. « I think they were testing me to see if I’m religious. Later on, they woke me up with a recording of a child speaking Kazakh. The child said, ‘Daddy, Mommy, please help me! You’ve seen what the Chinese are doing. They’re awful.’ Again, I think they were testing my response. »
Samarkand says he was transferred to a re-education camp, where people were separated into three groups: those who were religious, those who were suspected of being criminals, and those, like him, who had traveled abroad.
