Susan Palmer with the new book she co-authored.
The best way to document the horror of what is happening is to let victims speak for themselves.
by Ruth Ingram
Bitter Winter, 11/27/2024
Many versions of the Uyghur story have shot to prominence over the last six years since news started trickling out of Northwest China (or East Turkestan as the exiled community prefers to call its homeland) of mass roundups, incarcerations, extrajudicial jail terms, compulsory sterilizations, torture, and rape.
With every Western news report of Orwellian surveillance, huge numbers of so-called “re-education camps” scattered around the province, and every-day misery in the “open prison” of Xinjiang, the Chinese government news services retorted, hot on their heels firstly with barefaced denials and then, unable to deny satellite evidence, furious back peddling and justification for its actions in the name of extremism and terrorism control.
With every meticulously compiled academic report by now legends in the field such as Adrian Zenz, Timothy Grose, Nathan Ruser, Laura Murphy, and a host of others whose painstaking research has uncovered systematic abuses, widespread use of forced labour, and cold blooded Chinese central government planning, spearheaded by Xi Jinping himself, the state propaganda machine has hit back, calling the accusations “lies of the century” “cooked up by the West.” The increasingly paranoid attitude, tantamount to hysterical rhetoric, denounces the research as a “malicious” “patchwork of disinformation” and a deliberate ploy to undermine China.
Enter into this maelstrom of facts and expertise a new voice that attempts to earth the news headlines, the reams of statistics, the endless worthy power point presentations and academic treatises in the everyday lived experience of ten Uyghur women growing up under the “systematic racism and discrimination that existed before the contours of genocide became visible.”
Researchers Susan J. Palmer, Dilmurat Mahmut, and Abdulmuqtedir Udun, in their book, “Uyghur Women Activists in the Diaspora: Restorying a Genocide,” have focused on the personal stories of women who grew up in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s experiencing first hand systematic racism, religious persecution and a glass ceiling that even after graduating from top inner China universities left them excluded from the competitive employment market, overlooked in favour of Han Chinese graduates.
Susan Palmer at Capitol Hill, Washington DC during the launch of the book. Credits Susan Palmer.
For each of these women there came a “tipping point” when they realized they could no longer live in their own country. Whilst eight of them left before 2005 to pursue careers in the West and two were more recently survivors of the notorious “re-education” camps, they have all become outspoken critics of the Chinese regime since settling overseas, and the majority would describe themselves as activists of one sort or another.
According to the authors, “none of them could have known that a campaign of genocide was being put into place” or that what they had experienced, in hindsight, “were the early warning signs of a vast, well coordinated ‘social engineering project’ that entailed the suppression of Uyghur language, culture, religion, and personal freedom,” and that what lay ahead was the unimaginable denouement of that plan.
Susan Palmer in Washington DC with Capitol Hill in the background, after the launch of the book. Credits Susan Palmer.
The ten women, Zubayra Shamseden, Rushan Abbas, Rahima Mahmut, Rukiye Turdush, Arzu Gul, Raziya Mahmut, Dilnur Reyhan, Gulcherha Hoja, Zumrat Dawut, and Mihrigul Tursun speak candidly; each providing a “restorying” element to commonly accepted narratives. They talk frankly, some of them revealing stories for the first time in public.
Zubayra, Rukiye, and Arzu thought naively that as students they could publicly refute the idea that “Xinjiang has always been part of China.” They quickly discovered they were wrong. The state’s official mantra was the only “truth” that mattered. They were punished.
Rushan Abbas pointed out that persecution of Uyghurs did did not start in 2017. They have always been persecuted, she said; in the 1950s as “nationalists,” in the 1960s as “counter revolutionaries,” in the 1980s and 90s as “separatists.” After 9/11, they were labelled as terrorists, she said.
The stories told by the women weave a tapestry of life growing up in the shadow of capricious atheism where Uyghurs were often the butt of prejudice and censure, where devout relatives would disappear for months and sometimes years, and then reappear, and where conversations were hushed and secrets withheld from children for their own safety.
Some were witnesses to the horrors of the Ghulja massacre in 1997 where hundreds were mown down in the streets and hundreds more were sentenced to death or simply vanished.
Rushan’s efforts at organising student protests against injustices, inspired by Uyghur intellectuals who used to come to her home and regale the young 10-year-old with tales of life in jail, culminated in her leaving the country at the urging of her activist father who felt she was in danger. After arriving in the USA as the Tiananmen protests were underway, witnessing the killings on TV after her arrival propelled her into further activism on behalf of her people, which she has maintained to this day.
Rahima Mahmut, a singer, translator, and long-term human rights activist left her country in 2000 to study in the U.K. She remembers the family praying in secret during the Cultural Revolution but also a period of openness when her father became an imam in a local mosque.
Tiananmen Square, she said, shaped her ideology and her understanding of the ruthless regime, in its willingness to mow down the “best and the brightest” of its own people. Having been at the protests for two weeks, she escaped the brutality by two days after warnings of what was about to happen.
Unable to find a good job after graduating with the same grades as her Chinese friends, followed by witnessing the terrors of the Ghulja incident convinced her that she should leave. Her aim in leaving, she said, was to spend her life speaking up for her people.
Rahima Mahmut, campaigning in London against plans for a giant Chinese Embassy near Tower Bridge. Photo by Ruth Ingram.
Raziya Mahmut too felt the discrimination against Uyghurs as she was growing up during the Cultural Revolution when her sisters spoke Mandarin at home while she could only speak her own tongue. The language barrier at home created an emotional distance and frequent misunderstandings and conflict. She left for Belgium in 2002 after Ghulja but had to wait four years before her husband and daughter were allowed to join her. They were finally reunited and emigrated to Canada, but the enduring memory of government orchestrated separation during her childhood has stayed with her to this day; parents from children, children from grandparents, and husbands from wives.
The same is true today of the hundreds of thousands of children removed from families while their parents endure “re-education,” long jail terms or forced labour far from home. These issues have “pushed her to her last limit” and fueled a life of passionate advocacy.
Gulcherha Hoja trained as a journalist. After witnessing a steep rise in the Han population in Xinjiang and a creeping forced assimilation of her people under the guise of giving children a chance to study in inner China, she became angry and indignant. “They brainwashed them, they assimilated them, they changed them. Those kids were so confused. They missed their parents and were forbidden to speak Uyghur,” she said. Working as a TV journalist at the time the conflict she felt was intense as she had to promote the scheme on her show.
Access to uncensored news during a trip to Austria in 2001 opened her eyes to the reality of Chinese government policies in her homeland and she determined to stay and work for Radio Free Asia as a journalist.
This decision has cost her dearly. Her family in Xinjiang has been continually harassed because of her work, and following an interview with a camp survivor in 2018, 25 members of her family were detained. “I felt frozen, angry. I was helpless, I didn’t know what to do. This was the most difficult time in my whole life. But I chose not to be silent.”
Zumrat Dawut and Mihrigul Tursun’s horrifying ordeals in the camps have been well documented and they have both given testimonies at the people’s Uyghur Tribunal in London from 2020–2021, which helped contribute to the determination that genocide was being carried out against the Uyghur people in Xinjiang.
“I was one of the first survivors to come out of the concentration camps,” said Mihrigul. She saw many women die during her captivity. “While I was in prison, I promised myself that I would tell the world what happened to us if I ever got out alive.”
“I am here now in this free country, I can speak—but my people they cannot speak. Many people have died because they had no voice, and there are millions of people still suffering. If I keep silent, then they will die too. I need the whole world to know how horrible China is.”
In many respects the women chosen for the book have transcended Uyghur female stereotypical norms, as mothers and managers of the home and risen to excellence in their chosen careers.
Zumretay Arkin, newly elected Vice President of the World Uyghur Congress, speaks of the “incredible resilience and strength” of Uyghur women. “Despite enduring the most egregious crimes such as sexual violence, they are still the ones voicing their concerns with the international community.”
Speaking in a webinar to launch the book, Susan Palmer expressed her hope that the women’s stories would make people listen. “This is a story that makes you listen to what’s happening—a genocide.”
“It’s fascinating and terrifying but you are hearing it from a lower level of the human experience and an individual story. You have ten women all telling their story from a different angle. I think this will convince everyone about what is going on,” she said.
