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I was made to believe that my loved ones, my husband and my daughter, were terrorists. At first, I couldn’t make sense of what he was calling about. By turns, beneath the wary eye of the camp leaders, we would recite the communist stew we’d been served up. At the time, Kerim was a frequent attender. Some names have been changed. And the camp just kept filling up. Had she herself been re-educated before doing this work? It was even more politicised and biased than the teaching at Chinese universities. When a hand viciously pushed clippers across my skull, and other hands snatched away the tufts of hair that fell on my shoulders, I shut my eyes, blurred with tears, thinking my end was near, that I was being readied for the scaffold, the electric chair, drowning. Gulbahar Jalilova, a citizen of Kazakhstan, spent fifteen months in one of China’s concentration camps for ethnic Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities. Two hundred lives locked up until further notice. It enabled us to absorb and regurgitate volumes of history and declarations of loyal citizenship, so we could avoid the public humiliation dished out by the teacher. Uighur community members in Turkey hold banners as they join a protest against China in Istanbul on Feb 26. I wish good health to President Xi Jinping. If you play at submission, if you feign losing your psychological power struggle against the police, then at least, despite it all, you hang on to the shard of lucidity that reminds you who you are. In reality, it was tantamount to military training. She tells the story of life in Chinese detention and the women she met there. “Fine. So instead, I’d applied for a residence permit that was renewable every 10 years. No mattress. There was static on the line; I had a hard time hearing him. Our exhausted bodies moved through the space in unison, back and forth, side to side, corner to corner. “All I want is for those camps to close and to help make sure that happens. How could I ever say goodbye to my roots, to the loved ones I’d left behind – my parents, my brothers and sisters, their children? Why should I come back for some paperwork? What my husband was experiencing was all too familiar. At night, I collapsed on my bunk in a stupor. The wardens claimed our food was halal. On the cover of the manual we were given was inscribed “re-education programme”. The occasion was one of the demonstrations organised by the French branch of the World Uighur Congress, which represents Uighurs in exile and speaks out against Chinese repression in Xinjiang. I never did anything to harm China, and yet they locked me up and tortured me," Gulbahar Haitiwaji says. Xinjiang is a strategic corridor and far too valuable for China’s ruling Communist party to risk losing control of it. It was my daughter Gulhumar. A few days after I landed in China, on the morning of 30 November 2016, I went to the oil company office in Karamay to sign the vaunted documents related to my upcoming retirement. “A friend of mine in Karamay takes care of my administrative affairs. The women who shared my cell said it would be like a normal school, with Han teachers. I wondered what she thought of all this. When the nurses grabbed my arm to “vaccinate” me, I thought they were poisoning me. Now free and back home in France, Haitiwaji has written a book with the French journalist Rozenn Morgat about her experiences entitled "Rescapée du Goulag Chinois" (Survivor of the Chinese Gulag), an English translation of which is to be published in the U.S. by the end of this year. ow even to begin the story of what I went through in Xinjiang? They managed to convince me that the sooner I owned up to my crimes, the sooner I’d be able to leave. But as the days went by, fatigue set in like an old enemy. Glued to our chairs, we repeated our lessons like parrots. To insult our own people. Swagata Banerjee. After all, it was only a matter of a few documents. This was no school. Diary of a Uyghur Survivor: Gulbahar, prisoner for two years in a Chinese camp | by Maria Serena Natale - Thursday 01st April 2021 09:41 AM William and Kate are looking for a new personal assistant - Thursday 01st April 2021 09:39 AM Every day, I saw new faces, zombie-like, with bags under the eyes. Quickly deprived of her passport on arrival, she went through a series of traumatising experiences, including prison, a re-education camp, interrogations, indoctrinations lasting 11 hours per day, and punishment from unforgiving guards for any “mistake” made. After initially denying the existence of the Xinjiang camps, China later defended them as vocational training centres aimed at reducing the appeal of Islamic extremism. His voice was unfamiliar to me. But the ferocity with which Beijing has lashed out at the 54-year-old author exceeded her worst expectations. Giving up my Chinese nationality meant giving up on her, too. Chen Quanguo, who had made his reputation imposing draconian surveillance measures in Tibet, was named head of Xinjiang province. ‘Right! The guards terrified me. “In the camps, life and death do not mean the same thing as they do elsewhere. This is an edited extract from Rescapée du Goulag Chinois (Survivor of the Chinese Gulag) by Gulbahar Haitiwaji, co-authored with Rozenn Morgat and published by Editions des Equateurs Posted in Culture , Diaspora , Politics Bookmark the permalink . Gulbahar Haitiwaji knew that China would not be happy about her book describing nearly three years of imprisonment, brainwashing and harassment at the hands of the authorities simply because she is Uyghur. Was it a ploy so the police could interrogate me? It was a waking nightmare. That was it. Even a moment’s privacy was impossible. I simply did my best to be a good actor. During that time, everyone around me – the police officers who came to interrogate prisoners, plus the guards, teachers and tutors – tried to make me believe the massive lie without which China could not have justified its re-education project: that Uighurs are terrorists, and thus that I, Gulbahar, as a Uighur who had been living in exile in France for 10 years, was a terrorist. To Uighurs, that flag symbolises the region’s independence movement. It rolled right over our aching bodies. But at the same time, it weakened our critical abilities. These camps are to China what the Gulag was to the USSR. I’d never been in one before. While I tried to overlook the evidence of discrimination that followed us everywhere, with Kerim, it became an obsession. I was exhausted, and my firm resolve to resist was on permanent hold. Death lurked in every corner. The Uyghurs are a Turkish-speaking Muslim ethnic group who inhabit Xinjiang. I tried not to give in, but school went steamrolling on. She wrote a book Survivor of the Chinese Gulag to detail her experience. “I just wanted to get out of there and anybody else would have done the same.”. They had sentenced me to seven years of re-education. A Woman’s Life Inside China’s Digital Gulag. We were worked until we were nothing more than dumb animals. Bits of my soul shattered and broke off. The teacher gave her a brutal slap. Members of the Uighur community and supporters demonstrate near the Eiffel Tower in Paris in 2020. ... ["Survivor of a Chinese Gulag"] Gulbahar … It was November 2016, and I had been on unpaid leave from the company since I left China and moved to France 10 years earlier. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Blogger 0 (0) Gulbhar Haitiwaji knew that China would not be happy about her book describing I was assigned Bunk No 9. After graduation, we were offered jobs as engineers at the oil company in Karamay. He ordered us to remain still. But why, said Haitiwaji, would China need to “train” a university graduate living in France? Kerim had always known he would leave Xinjiang. Rescapée du Goulag Chinois (Survivor of the Chinese Gulag), a book by Gulbahar Haitiwaji, an Uyghur detained by communist authorities as an alleged terrorist, details her 32-month ordeal of cold-iron shackles, interrogation and brainwashing sessions in one of China’s notorious internment camps in Xinjiang. Gulbahar Haitiwaji, an Uyghur refugee recounted the 'interrogations, torture, & forced sterilizations' she experienced in the Chinese 're-education camps' ... ("Survivor of the Chinese Gulag"), co-authored by Le Figaro journalist Rozenn Morgat and published in … And now, after reviewing my case, a judge had decided that no, in actual fact, I was innocent. We were panting like cattle. Uyghur author recalls imprisonment, torture in Chinese camps. Gulbahar Haitiwaji knew that China would not be happy about her book describing nearly… Gulbahar Haitiwaji knew that China would not be happy about her book describing nearly three years of imprisonment, brainwashing and harassment at the hands of the authorities simply because she is Uighur. She obeyed, ashen-faced, then sat down again. Gulbahar Haitiwaji’s book “Survivor of the Chinese Gulag” has angered authorities in China. A big metal shutter, perforated with tiny holes that let the light in, hid the outside world from us. “I’ve had enough,” he said. Chained by the ankles, she suffered from hunger and fear, and was forced to sit through a mock trial at which she was sentenced to seven years of “re-education”. I didn’t know how I was going to hold out. One thing was for sure: everything here was new. By Ibtissem Guenfoud and Guy Davies. You can get used to anything, even horror. They had tortured my body and brought my mind to the edge of madness. (PARIS) — Gulbahar Haitiwaji says when she was summoned back to China to sign documents relating to her retirement as an oil company engineer in November 2016, she could not have possibly known the fate that awaited her. All she’d done was shut her eyes. We had met as students in Urumqi, the largest city in Xinjiang province, and, as new graduates, had begun looking for work. I was thinking about all the times I had asserted my innocence, all those nights I had tossed and turned on my bunk, enraged that no one would believe me. The Artux City Vocational Skills Education Training Service Center north of Kashgar, Xinjiang, believed to be a re-education facility. Detainees were sent there to be brainwashed – and worse. She treated us like wayward citizens that the party had to re-educate. One night in 2000, Kerim came home and announced that he had quit. This could last half an hour, or just as often a whole hour, or even more. The teacher was always watching us, and slapped us every chance she got. ‘Survivor of the Chinese Gulag’ describes Gulbahar Haitiwaji’s ordeal during a trip to Xinjiang from her home in France. As if that weren’t enough, we had to do an hour of extra study after dinner in the evening before going to bed. I was tired, so tired. No toilet paper. The quiet hum of the heater, the poorly cleaned whiteboard, the pallid lighting: these set the scene. Xinjiang is essential to President Xi Jinping’s great plan – that is, a peaceful Xinjiang, open for business, cleansed of its separatist tendencies and its ethnic tensions. After a few days, I understood what people meant by “brainwashing”. The summer of 2016 saw the entrance of a significant new player in the long struggle between our ethnic group and the Communist party.
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