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Over four trips to Central Asia, I have amassed ~ 70 hours of interviews with 30-40 people from Xinjiang, including a dozen or so ex-detainees of "reeducation" camps and dozens more who have lost loved ones to camps and prisons.
This hardly makes me an expert on the region. But I have met enough people in different places and from different backgrounds to realize their stories are tragic, believable, and overwhelmingly consistent.
Combined with troves of documents and other evidence, my interviews make clear that Chinese authorities have erected a totalitarian police state in Xinjiang where thousands are arbitrarily imprisoned for their cultural background and religious beliefs. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/16/world/asia/china-xinjiang-documents.html
In 2019, I published an oral history of China's mass internment drive. https://believermag.com/weather-reports-voices-from-xinjiang/
The Believer gave permission for Russian/Kazakh translations of some of these interviews to be published by the US Embassy in Kazakhstan's Facebook page. I gave my assent, on the condition there would be no payment and they would be freely disseminated without editorializing.
Moreover, I have released any personal copyright I might hold on these histories and encouraged them to be re-used, republished, and disseminated, for example by @shahitbiz and at various conferences. They are of course also available free online forever via @believermag.
I received no payment from the US State Department and have had no dealings with them. But I'm happy there are Russian/Kazakh translations for citizens of Kazakhstan to read.
Kazakhstan, a corrupt autocracy, has no free press. Criticism of China there is swiftly suppressed.
Kazakhstan, a corrupt autocracy, has no free press. Criticism of China there is swiftly suppressed.
At the same time, many Kazakhs are aware of the brutal treatment of ethnic Kazakhs across the border, thanks to a whisper network and the arrival of escapees from Xinjiang, together with a few high-profile asylum cases.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/29/magazine/china-globalization-kazakhstan.html https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n18/ben-mauk/diary
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/29/magazine/china-globalization-kazakhstan.html https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n18/ben-mauk/diary
For the record, I am (highly) skeptical of the agenda of the US State Department, in Kazakhstan and everywhere else. The US has a history of using human rights issues as fungible tokens in geopolitical conflicts as part of the struggle to maintain their waning hegemony.
A robust asylum program for Kazakhs and Uyghurs would go a long way toward convincing me that the US is invested in the oppression of Turkic and Muslim people.
I know from firsthand interviews of many displaced people from Xinjiang who would avail themselves of such a program.
I know from firsthand interviews of many displaced people from Xinjiang who would avail themselves of such a program.
But no such program exists. That the US terrorizes Muslim communities across the globe makes their stated interest in religious freedom in Xinjiang hard to swallow.
But none of that disproves what is happening in Xinjiang. Indeed, the evidence is overwhelming.
https://docs.uhrp.org/pdf/Detained-and-Disappeared-Intellectuals-Under-Assault-in-the-Uyghur-Homeland.pdf
https://docs.uhrp.org/pdf/Detained-and-Disappeared-Intellectuals-Under-Assault-in-the-Uyghur-Homeland.pdf
Yesterday, one of my interviews attracted the attention of Global Times, a nationalistic mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party: https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1192690.shtml
This hastily assembled screed focuses on comments from the Chinese ambassador to Kazakhstan, who does not seem to realize that the interviews are translations of an independent publication, and that they were written by a journalist, edited, and fact-checked.
Somewhat confusingly, the Global Times simultaneously accuses my interviewees as being "amateur actors" while also arguing that their missing loved ones really were detained, but for legitimate reasons. Which is it?
The Times focuses on one of around 24 interviews that appeared in my oral history: Bikamal Kaken, whose husband, Adelhaze Muhay, was detained in Xinjiang in 2017. Here is Bikamal with her two children (and photo of Adelhaze) during our interview.
The Global Times states that Adelhaze Muhay was convicted in December 2019 "for encouraging acts of extremist terrorism and disturbing the region's social order," and that he was never in a camp.
These are obviously difficult claims to fact-check! But my interview with Bikamal took place in May 2019, when he had already been vanished for two years with no news. Where was he from May 2017 through December 2019?
I met Bikamal again last December; she'd still heard nothing about her husband. Their relatives in Xinjiang were still clueless as to his whereabouts, except for what she'd already told me: he was in a camp somewhere, and she, too, was wanted for interrogation back in Xinjiang.
"Adelhaze was found acquiring, storing, and spreading a large number of video and audio files which encouraged terrorism and religious extremism." I have no idea if this is true. It was not true in May 2019, when I conducted the interview, since no trial had yet taken place.
However, I do know that "religious extremism" in Xinjiang is an umbrella term than includes praying, attending mosque, having a beard, wearing a head scarf, and other normal cultural practices.
https://www.jpolrisk.com/brainwashing-police-guards-and-coercive-internment-evidence-from-chinese-government-documents-about-the-nature-and-extent-of-xinjiangs-vocational-training-internment-camps/
https://www.jpolrisk.com/brainwashing-police-guards-and-coercive-internment-evidence-from-chinese-government-documents-about-the-nature-and-extent-of-xinjiangs-vocational-training-internment-camps/
My oral history includes an account of a show trial where several women were given long prison sentences for observing Ramadan. https://believermag.com/weather-reports-voices-from-xinjiang/
I also know that imprisoned people in Xinjiang are being transferred from camps to prisons, given sentences as long as 20 years for crimes like “using superstition to undermine law enforcement” and “assembling a crowd to disturb social order” https://livingotherwise.com/2019/10/05/from-camps-to-prisons-xinjiangs-next-great-human-rights-catastrophe-by-gene-a-bunin/
I know of another person, Zhiger Toqai, who received a 10-year prison sentence for having a poem on his phone discouraging intermarriage between Han men and Kazakh woman. His sentence is known to several people, some of whom were briefly detained with him: https://shahit.biz/eng/viewentry.php?entryno=2208
Some of these prison sentences and court decisions are even available in the original:
https://shahit.biz/supp/verori_1.pdf
https://shahit.biz/supp/verori_9.pdf
https://shahit.biz/supp/verori_1.pdf
https://shahit.biz/supp/verori_9.pdf
So I remain (again, highly) skeptical that any kind of fair trial has taken place concerning Adelhaze Muhay, and I wonder why Bikamal has been unable to communicate with him or get any information about her children's father for nearly 3 years.
That said, most of the people I have profiled in my work on Xinjiang are desperate for ANY information about their loved ones. They simply cannot find out anything through normal channels. Kazakhstan is of no help. That's what leads them to make videos and speak to journalists.
So I hope the Global Times will look into, and publish, the whereabouts of some of the dozens of detained people I have written about here, and I promise to be thoroughly and publicly humiliated by the exposure of my "amateur actors" if they do! https://believermag.com/weather-reports-voices-from-xinjiang/
Thanks to Gene at the Xinjiang Victims Database for making me aware of this little gem. It brightened my day. https://twitter.com/shahitbiz/status/1276754075900694529
And thanks to The Believer for supporting this project and making it, by some apparently insane and ever-widening margin, the most-read story in their magazine's history. I hope people continue to read, share, translate, discuss, and republish it, including my peers at GT :)
