Mick Hartley

Gulbahar Haitiwaji's book How I Survived a Chinese ‘Reeducation’ Camp is the latest account of the sytematic genocide of the Uighur people:

“In the camps, the re-education process is systematic in that it applies the same remorseless method to destroying all its victims. It starts out by stripping them of their individuality. It takes away your name, your clothes, your hair. There is nothing now to distinguish you from anyone else. Then the process takes over your body by subjecting it to a hellish routine: being forced by teachers to unendingly recite the glories of the Communist Party for eleven hours a day in a windowless classroom. Falter, and you are punished. So you keep on saying them same things over and over again until you can’t feel, can’t think anymore. You lose all sense of time: first the hours, then the days.”

It's reviewed in the Sunday Times by John Phipps:

[T]he Uighurs are Turkic Muslims who live in the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang; in the past 50 years this region has been transformed from their homeland to one that hosts equal numbers of Han Chinese and Uighur; Uighurs have become second-class citizens; this state of affairs led to dissent, violent protest and may have motivated a handful of terrorist attacks; and the Chinese Communist Party’s response to these attacks was to initiate an enormous state project to destroy the Uighur way of life.

The CCP’s zeal for control has not been limited to China. In 2016 Gulbahar Haitiwaji, a Uighur woman and the author of this bracing new memoir, was living peacefully in Boulogne when she received a phone call from her former employer, a Xinjiang-based oil company. There was a problem with her pension. She would have to come back to sign some papers.

It was the beginning of a life-shattering ordeal. She was arrested, interrogated and left to rot for six months, whereupon she was sent to a new facility, a school.

In fact she would be entering Xinjiang’s gulag archipelago, a vast network of purpose-built camps that at its peak housed roughly a tenth of the adult Uighur population. These facilities, which ostensibly rehabilitate “extremist” Uighurs, are designed to force prisoners into complete submission.

There are two weapons employed to effect this. The first is total control, exerted with unprecedented granularity and scope. As Darren Byler makes clear in another new book on this mass incarceration, In the Camps, this is enabled by cutting-edge surveillance and facial recognition technology. Prisoners swiftly learn that any resistance is impossible. “We were,” Gulbahar writes, “eternal victims bowed under the weight of threats.”

The second weapon is time. Internees are forced to stand motionless for hours, sit on plastic stools day in, day out until their intestines prolapse, and demean themselves by singing patriotic songs and giving thanks to Xi Jinping. Their total obedience to this “programme of study” is underwritten by the threat of unaccountable violence — the screams that echo beyond their locked cell doors.

Gulbahar’s memoir is an indispensable account, which makes vivid the stench of fearful sweat in the cells, the newly built prison’s permanent reek of white paint. It closely corresponds with other witness statements, giving every indication of being very reliable. Most impressive is her psychological honesty. Her initially derisive attitude to the rudimentary propaganda that makes up her “re-education” is replaced by a hollow fog of submission. Re-education works. When she is finally told she can leave, after 18 months, she lies motionless on her bed.

Her memoir attests to a series of mandatory injections for female internees, after which women stopped getting their periods. This detail, reported consistently by survivors, tallies with the immense, state-backed sterilisation programme that is under way. As a result Uighur birth rates have plummeted, by as much as 80 per cent in some places, which validates the charge of genocide — an attempt to destroy, in whole or part, an entire people.

There’s no doubt that this is a crime on a world-historical scale. As to why no one seems to care, I have several theories. The Uighurs live far away. Their culture is unfamiliar, their name difficult to pronounce. It’s possible that books such as these will change that, but I’m doubtful. The brutal truth is that the Uighur cause is unfashionable. Our attention gravitates towards controversy, marginal cases of right and wrong that spark debate. In the case of the Uighurs there is no argument to be had, only the conspicuous, continuing disaster, from which the world turns away.

Never again? Ha! We're busy watching the Beijing Winter Olympics now, pushing aside any unwelcome thoughts of what's happening in Xinjiang. The 1936 parallels are clear, says Ben Felsenburg:

Uighur campaigners have called for a boycott of the Games. Their cry has been answered with a “diplomatic boycott”. That means Britain — along with the US, Australia, Lithuania and a few other countries — will not be sending government officials, in a play that comes straight out of the dictionary of utterly meaningless gestures.

Meanwhile, the pomp and ceremony and bread and circuses will go on and the corporate sponsors’ brightly coloured logos will be festooned at every venue and press call. On the BBC, the chirpily upbeat Clare Balding and her squad of slick presenters will provide faultlessly professional commentary for hour after hour each day for more than two weeks.

As viewers gorge themselves, the regime can burnish its image and puff out its chest: the international community has fully embraced China even now, amid the worsening crimes of recent years, which it seems we have collectively decided do not warrant meaningful censure. China has hardly been cowed ever since President Xi Jinping took power; but after this the authorities will be emboldened to still greater cruelty and can act in the certain knowledge that the world does not care, or at least not enough to pass up on the entertainment and opportunity for commerce, which is to say: not at all.

These Games are a horror show that taint everything they touch, and the deafening sound we can all hear are the echoes of 1936 rising to the pitch of a klaxon. Six months before the world gathered in the Third Reich’s Berlin for the Olympics and the British team raised their arms in a Hitler salute just to be polite, the Winter Games in Bavaria had already proven that the international order could tolerate Nazism’s evil, so long as a discreet veil was draped over its worst excesses for the duration of the event…