Ms. Mamut with her sons Mamutjan Turkel, left, and Nury Turkel, on Sunday. The sons had not seen their mother in 20 years.Credit...Moriah Ratner for The New York Times
On Thanksgiving eve, U.S. diplomats reunited family members who had not seen each other in years because of China’s harsh policies on the ethnic group.
Edward Wong has reported on the policies of China in its frontier regions as a diplomatic correspondent in Washington and as Beijing bureau chief for The Times and in a new book on China.
The police officers came for Ayshem Mamut a week ago at her home in northwest China.
They told her to pack her bags. She could have been taken to a prison, a detention center or an internment camp, just like many other ethnic Uyghur Muslims who have vanished, sometimes for years.
But four days later, the 73-year-old Chinese citizen was in Virginia having a Thanksgiving meal with two sons she had not seen in 20 years and four grandchildren she had never met.
She sometimes talked, sometimes cried, as they ate traditional Uyghur dishes of noodle soup, lamb stew, broiled chicken, salad and rice with chickpeas.
Last week, U.S. officials said that China had freed three American men, one of them an F.B.I. informant, in exchange for two imprisoned Chinese spies and at least one other Chinese citizen. But as part of that deal, China also quietly agreed to allow Ms. Mamut and two other Uyghurs, one an American citizen, to leave the country for the United States.
The Biden administration has not made public the part of the deal involving the Uyghurs, and it is being reported here for the first time.
“Waking up in America and seeing my family, especially my grandchildren, is nothing short of a dream come true,” Ms. Mamut said.
The story of the Uyghurs’ journey to freedom is one of persistent efforts by anguished family members and American officials in the face of an increasingly authoritarian China. U.S. officials privately raised the cases for years in talks with their Chinese counterparts. President Biden mentioned Ms. Mamut twice in face-to-face meetings with Xi Jinping, China’s leader.
China had barred Ms. Mamut from leaving the country because her oldest son, Nury Turkel, was involved in advocacy for Uyghur rights.
“It’s amazing to me that she was able to keep it together all those years,” Mr. Turkel, 54, a former U.S. official and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, said in an interview. He hugged his mother on the tarmac and wept last Wednesday night after she stepped off a Boeing 767 chartered by the U.S. government at a military base in San Antonio, Texas.
“Her ability to endure, to not lose sight, to manage her disappointment is something that personally I can’t do as a free person.”
After this article was published, the National Security Council said in a statement to The New York Times, “We are pleased Ayshem Mamut is home with her family. The Biden-Harris administration has continuously advocated for cases of humanitarian concern, including Uyghurs.” The council initially declined to comment for this article, as did the State Department.
President Joe Biden twice mentioned Ms. Mamut to President Xi Jinping of China, including last month when the two met in Lima, Peru.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
Mr. Turkel and his family have experienced the hardships of Chinese rule for more than a half-century. Ms. Mamut gave birth to him in a re-education camp in Kashgar in 1970, during China’s Cultural Revolution. He came to the United States as a graduate student in 1995, was granted asylum and then invited his parents to visit him. They came in 2000 and again in 2004, when he graduated from American University’s law school.
Mr. Turkel became a leading advocate for Uyghur human rights, including working on cases of Uyghurs detained by the U.S. military in Guantánamo Bay in Cuba during the post-9/11 wars. In 2009, his parents wanted to visit him in the Washington area. When the police refused to give them their passports, they realized they were barred from traveling because of Mr. Turkel’s advocacy work. Mr. Turkel then began trying to bring pressure on the Chinese government to let his parents leave the country.
Chinese officials allowed Mr. Turkel’s father, Ablikim Mömin, a retired professor, to travel for two weeks in 2015 to meet with his four sons in Turkey, but their mother was forced to stay at home.
Mr. Turkel with his parents, Ms. Mamut and Ablikim Mömin, after his graduation from law school in 2004.Credit...Moriah Ratner for The New York Times
Mr. Turkel spoke with officials in the Obama and Trump administrations about his parents’ situation. When President Donald J. Trump visited Beijing in 2017, he gave Mr. Xi a list of people his administration wanted freed. Mr. Turkel’s parents were on the list, as was Ilham Tohti, a Uyghur professor sentenced to life in prison in 2014 on a conviction of “separatism.”
In May 2020, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, appointed Mr. Turkel to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, where he would serve for four years. Mr. Turkel told Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken about his parents’ plight during an online meeting in the fall of 2021.
In December 2021, China announced sanctions against four U.S. officials on the religious freedom commission, including Mr. Turkel, in retaliation for sanctions that the Biden administration had imposed on Chinese officials for abuses in Xinjiang.
Mr. Turkel testifying in March 2023 before a hearing of a special House committee dedicated to countering the Chinese Communist Party.Credit...Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press
Mr. Turkel spoke with R. Nicholas Burns, the designated U.S. ambassador to China, before he left for Beijing. Mr. Burns later asked U.S. diplomats to check on Mr. Turkel’s parents in the city of Urumqi. “He made a personal commitment,” Mr. Turkel said.
Mr. Turkel’s father died in April 2022, at age 83. Mr. Turkel was on an official trip to Uzbekistan but could not fly to China for the funeral because of the sanctions against him.
“Because of years of enforced family separation, and along with social isolation, he was losing it,” Mr. Turkel said. “He was wanting to go.”
Mr. Burns invited Ms. Mamut, now widowed, to visit him in Beijing, but security officers at the airport in Urumqi kept her from boarding a plane, Mr. Turkel said.
“That was a public slap to all of us,” he said. “It was morally crushing for my mom.”
U.S.-China relations hit a low point in early 2023 after the Pentagon discovered a Chinese spy balloon above the continental United States. Mr. Turkel was losing hope and expressed his frustration in congressional testimony and essays.
But U.S. officials persisted. Mr. Turkel said that Mr. Biden mentioned his mother in a meeting with Mr. Xi in Woodside, Calif., that November, then again last month in Lima, Peru. Still, as recently as early last month, Mr. Turkel did not sound optimistic when we spoke at an event.
Then on Nov. 24, a White House official told Mr. Turkel that his mother would be on a U.S. government plane leaving China later that week. Around the same time, the police officers were visiting Ms. Mamut’s home. Mr. Turkel spoke to her by phone and told her to go along with whatever the officers suggested.
Ms. Mamut holding the hand of her son Nury Turkel at his home in Virginia on Sunday.Credit...Moriah Ratner for The New York Times
Ms. Mamut spent that Monday seeing a dentist, visiting her husband’s grave and packing a bag with traditional Uyghur silk cloth that she could use to make clothes for her grandchildren in America. The next morning, she boarded a charter plane to Beijing with police officers and the other two Uyghurs, a man and his daughter.
The three of them stayed in a government guesthouse in Beijing on Tuesday night. Their planned departure was delayed by six hours, making them nervous. Then on Wednesday night, they were taken to the airport, where the U.S. government charter plane awaited them.
Mr. Burns walked with them up the plane’s stairs and took photos inside with them. The three freed American prisoners — Mark Swidan, Kai Li and John Leung — were on the flight, as was Roger D. Carstens, the U.S. special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, and other American officials. One of the diplomats put Ms. Mamut on the phone with her son.
The Uyghurs on the plane burst into tears after it took off.
Mr. Turkel and a younger brother, Mamutjan, boarded their own flight to go from Northern Virginia to San Antonio.
At a refueling stop in Alaska, the group traveling from China got separate calls from Mr. Biden and Mr. Blinken. I was on Mr. Blinken’s official plane returning from a diplomatic trip to Rome when he made that call. After we landed outside Washington, an aide told me that Mr. Blinken had spoken to the three freed American men but did not mention there were also Uyghurs on the trip.
Ms. Mamut left a message on Mr. Turkel’s voice mail during the Anchorage stop: “We are in America.”
Hours later, near midnight, they were in each other’s arms on the tarmac in Texas.
Edward Wong reports on global affairs, U.S. foreign policy and the State Department. More about Edward Wong
