As repression against the Uighur minority intensifies in China, a survivor of the internment camps who has taken refuge in France gives a shocking testimony. This first direct testimony plunges us into the cruelty of what observers call genocide.
With “Rescapée du goulag chinois”, Gulbahar Haitiwaji plunges us into the hell that Xinjiang has become for millions of Uighur Muslims. This Uighur mother has nevertheless been living in France since the mid-2000s. She left Xinjiang with her two daughters to join her exiled husband who found refuge there.
In 2016, her former employer convinced her to come to China for administrative procedures. In view of her retirement, she had to sign papers. It was impossible to do it by proxy, the accountant of the oil company that had employed her for 20 years assured her over the phone. Despite her apprehension, Gulbahar Haitiwaji decided to make the trip.
She was arrested shortly after arriving in China and then disappeared. During her interrogation, the police showed her a photo of Uighur protesters in Paris, she says. Among the crowd was her daughter, Gulhumar, waving the flag of East Turkestan, a symbol of Uighur independence. For the Chinese authorities, her daughter was therefore “a terrorist”. Gulbahar Haitiwaji managed to inform her family of her arrest, but from 29 January 2017, nothing more. For six months, her family did not know what had happened to her.
She will spend five months in the cells of the Karamay police, between interrogations and arbitrary cruelties. Then she is transferred to a school “built by the government to correct the Uighurs, they said”. It is in reality the Baijiantan camp, a camp in the middle of the desert.
During this absence, she is unaware that her daughter is trying to mobilize opinion in France. She publishes a petition signed by nearly 500 000 people and called for her mother’s release on television sets. A first trial sentenced Gulbahar Haitiwaji to 7 years of re-education. But after two years, during a summary trial in August 2019, a judge in Karamay declared her innocent.
Meticulous ethnic cleansing of Uighurs
From her experience, she wrote a book with the journalist Rozenn Morgat and published on January 13. It is the first testimony of a Uighur survivor. The former prisoner recounts in detail the dehumanizing course of her days. The goal, according to her, is to slowly make a Muslim ethnic group disappear “in general indifference.”
Numbered boards as a bed, a bucket to relieve herself, a window that is always closed and two panoramic cameras. This is the only furniture in the dormitories where she will spend her “rehabilitation” time.
Brainwashing 11 hours a day, forced self-criticism, extracted confessions, repeated oaths of allegiance morning and evening, physical and psychological pressures are the daily lot of the detainees. For women, forced sterilizations under the guise of vaccination are added. All with military supervision and rules. Beware of those who yawn, refuse food or even close their eyes in class under penalty of being accused of praying or clinging to their religion with the consequences of physical punishment and humiliation.
Excerpts
“In these camps, life and death do not have the same meaning as elsewhere,” writes Gulbahar Haitiwaji. “A hundred times, I thought, when the guards’ footsteps woke us in the night, that our time had come. When a hand violently shaved my scalp, while another tore out the locks of hair that had fallen on my shoulders, I closed my eyes, thinking that my end was near, that I was preparing myself for the scaffold, the electric chair, and drowning. Death was omnipresent.”
“When the nurses grabbed my arm to ‘vaccinate’ me, I thought they were poisoning me. In reality, they were sterilizing us. That’s when I understood the method of the camps, the strategy that was being implemented: not to kill us in cold blood, but to make us disappear slowly. So slowly that no one would notice.”
“Did they think they would break us with a few pages of propaganda? And then as the days went by, fatigue set in, exhaustion lurked. I was tired, so tired. I couldn’t even think anymore. Whole days and evenings repeating the same empty sentences that, day after day, stupefy, erase memories, erase the faces of the past. Nobody told us how long this would last.”
“We are shadows, our souls are dead. I was made to believe that my loved ones, my husband and daughter, were terrorists. I was so far away, so alone, so exhausted and alienated, that I almost ended up believing it. My husband, Kerim, my daughters Gulhumar and Gulnigar – I denounced your “crimes”.”
Little international opposition
For several years, China has been conducting a merciless repression in Xinjiang, particularly against its Uighur Muslim minority. According to human rights organizations, more than a million Muslims are being detained in political re-education camps.
Just like in Hong Kong, the suppression of Chinese dissident voices is even said to have intensified in 2020, thanks to the global paralysis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Beijing denies this figure and refers to “vocational training centres” intended to combat Islamist radicalisation.
This policy has been criticized, mainly by Western countries. The United Kingdom, for example, declined on January 12 measures to prevent goods linked to forced labor in the province of Xinjiang from reaching British consumers. London is following in the footsteps of Ottawa and Washington, which have recently taken similar measures.
