By Anne Kader
What is it with the rubber gloves? They are grossly used to humiliate and patronize the elderly Uyghur detainees. It is not some disease control, and Uyghurs are not spreading some ideological virus. Why would elderly Uyghur female detainees need a Han Chinese carer somehow adjust their position for a mugshot? How humiliating! Why would one need one’s hair tidied up for a jail mugshot?
These images so clearly show the oppressive subjugation of the Uyghur people. A much younger Han Chinese guard ‘seems’ to know better how elderly Uyghurs should conduct themselves!
As a Westerner, my immediate reaction would be: “Get your hands off me!” However, Uyghurs cannot enjoy those protective boundaries anymore that we in the West take for granted. The elderly ladies cannot carry pepper spray in their handbags and defend themselves. The Chinese communist regime has trespassed the Uyghur’s privacy to the point that even their bodies and their homes are not under their own control.
I challenge the western women’s rights groups to speak up against this mental and physical abuse of Uyghur women of all ages.
The portraits are from the leaked Xinjiang Police Files containing an encrypted archive with images of several thousand persons taken in the first half of 2018 at police stations and detention centers in Konasheher county, Kashgar prefecture – a region in southern Chinese occupied East Turkistan predominantly inhabited by Uyghurs.