A Chinese flag can be seen behind the entrance of a minority camp in Xinjiang, China. AFP=Yonhap News
“I wish a great country to develop and a bright future. I hope that all nations will become one great country. Thank you to President Xi Jinping and wish you good health. Long live President Xi Jinping.”
This is the oath of loyalty that Gulbahar Haitian, a 54-year-old Uyghur native, memorized every morning at a concentration camp in China. Haitiwaji published a book called “The Survivors of the Chinese Version of Gulag” with reporter Le Figaro in France in January, exposing this kind of life in a concentration camp. Gulag is a concentration camp run by the Stalin government of the former Soviet Union.
On the 3rd (local time), French weekly magazine Robs shed light on the life of Haitiwaji, a Uighur woman who had to live in a camp with shackles on her feet.
A former oil company engineer in the Uighur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang, China, he moved to France with her husband and two daughters in 2006. It wasn’t economically scarce, but it was because I hated the discrimination that minorities had to endure.
Gulbahar Haitiwaji (54, female), a Uighur native, published a book, The Survivor of the Chinese version of Gulag with reporter Le Figaro in France in January to expose life in the camp. AFP=Yonhap News
“I got a phone call from my former job, went to China, confined a camp
However, about 10 years ago, in November 2016, when my life in China fades in my mind, I get a phone call from a company I worked with in the past. It was a request to return to Korea as the documents need to be signed in order to complete the retirement process. Because of this phone call, his life collapsed.
He also refused at first. However, he couldn’t overcome the phone calls he received throughout the week, so he decided to visit China for a while. Upon arriving in China, he was invited to the police station, saying, “Let’s have a cup of tea,” where he took his passport.
After that, a hellish investigation followed. In one room, 30 women stayed and eaten together, and they were forced to confess every day. When he said, “I don’t know what I did wrong,” the authorities even grabbed his younger brother.
“30 people stay and eat together…I am forced to confess every day”
In the end, Haitiwaji came to say the’correct answer’ that the authorities wanted, saying, “I sympathized with the separatist terror. Subsequently, at a trial held in November 2018, he was sentenced to seven years in reeducational imprisonment. The trial was 9 minutes long.
While he was held by the Chinese authorities, his eldest daughter sent letters from France on the other side of the globe to President Emmanuel Macron and Foreign Minister Jean Yves Ledrien, asking for help in the release of his mother.
With little progress, eventually his daughter filed an online petition in the summer of 2018 asking “save her mother captured by the Chinese authorities,” and when 440,000 people signed it, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs also began to move. Because of this, Haitiwaji, who was initially sentenced to 7 years in prison, was able to return to his family in France in March 2019, a few months later.
Uighur camp in Xinyuan County, Xinjiang, China. Reuters = Yonhap News
“Like a parrot, brainwashing the glorious history of China”
Last month, the BBC also reported on the case of Tursuwaiziaudun, 42, a Uighur woman who was imprisoned in a detention facility in Xinyuan County, Xinjiang, China. He revealed that sexual assault and sexual torture were committed in the camp. In addition, there were testimonies such as, “If I could not memorize Xi Jinping’s words, I did not give food to him.”
Haitiwa also revealed in his book, “There was coercion during the interrogation process,” and that “the authorities were able to control our bodies and souls at will.” He also said, “Like a parrot, he was brainwashed into China’s glorious history.”
Meanwhile, the New York Times (NYT) reported that the’Uyghur reeducation facility’ in the Uighur Autonomous Region in Xinjiang, in northwestern China, was conducted after the Uighur separatist terrorist attacks in 2014 and ordered “don’t show mercy.”
International human rights groups 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 insist that the detention facility is an’education center’. Reuters = Yonhap News
Chinese “Education Center”… “I came to college, what kind of education do you need?”
However, the Chinese authorities denied that “the facility in Xinjiang is not a camp, but a social education and training center,” and that “China equally protects the rights and interests of all ethnic groups and takes the protection of women’s rights very important.”
Haitiwaji told AFP that “I expected China to deny everything,” and that his testimony was based solely on facts.
He criticized the Chinese government, saying, “I don’t know if there was a need to bring someone living in France after graduating from university to China and train again.”
Reporter Go Seok-hyun [email protected]
