“The survivor of the Chinese version of Gulak”▶ Click here for a larger view
Gulbahar Haitiwaji, 54, who fled to France with her husband in 2006, received a phone call from a company he had worked with in November 2016.
A native of the Uighurs, he was an engineer working for an oil company in Xinjiang Weiwuer Autonomous Region, China.
He also had two daughters between a husband who works for an oil company, and he lived a life that was not economically scarce, but he left China because he hated the discrimination he had to endure as a minority ethnic group.
When my life in China was fading in my mind, a call from my previous job was a request to return to Korea because a document must be signed in order to complete the retirement process.
At first, he refused, but after a week-long phone call, he finally decided to visit China for a while. Upon arrival, Mr. Haitiwaji took his passport from the police station where he was invited to have a cup of tea.
He had to eat and sleep in a room with 30 women, and he was forced to “confess” as he was investigated every day, and when he said he didn’t know what he had done wrong, authorities arrested his younger brother.
In the end, Mr. Haitiwaji gave the answer the authorities wanted that he had sympathized with the separatist terrorism. In a nine-minute trial held in November 2018, he was sentenced to “retraining” for seven years.
Haitiwaji’s eldest daughter sent letters from France on the other side of the globe to President Emmanuel Macron and Foreign Minister Jean Yves Ledrien, appealing for the release of her mother.
Without much change, the daughter filed an online petition by the Chinese authorities in the summer of 2018 asking the Chinese authorities to rescue her mother who was captured.
Thanks to that, Haitiwaji, who should have spent seven years in the camp, was able to return to his family in France in March 2019.
On the 3rd (local time), the French weekly magazine Robs shed light on the life of Haitiwaji, who had to be confined in a camp with shackles on his feet just because he was a Uyghur tribe.
Haitiwaji published a’Chinese version of Gulag’s Survivor’ in January with reporter Le Figaro in France to expose life in concentration camps. Gulag is a concentration camp run by the Stalin government of the former Soviet Union.
International human rights organizations such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch estimate that more than 1 million Uyghurs and other minorities are confined in camps operated by Chinese authorities in Xinjiang.
Chinese authorities strongly deny these allegations, refuting the facility as a “vocational training center” aimed at “retraining”.
In an interview with AFP, Haitiwaji said his testimony was based solely on facts and “I expected China to deny everything.”
“If I could get out of that place, other people would have done like me,” he said.
At the same time, he criticized that the Chinese government’s explanation was not correct, saying that he did not know whether he needed to bring someone living in France to China to “train” again after graduation.
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