https://www.theatlantic.com/the-uyghur-chronicles/
Introduction by Joshua L. Freeman
If you took an Uber in Washington, D.C., a couple of years ago, there was a chance your driver was one of the greatest living Uyghur poets. Tahir Hamut Izgil arrived with his family in the United States in 2017, fleeing the Chinese government’s merciless persecution of his people. Tahir’s escape not only spared him near-certain internment in the camps that have swallowed more than 1 million Uyghurs; it also allowed him to share with the world his experience of the calamity engulfing his homeland. The following articles are Tahir’s firsthand account of one of the world’s most urgent humanitarian crises, and of one family’s survival.
Before I met Tahir, I knew his poems. I encountered them soon after I began working as a translator in Xinjiang, the Uyghur region in western China. A close friend there kept telling me that if I really wanted to understand Uyghur culture, I had to read the poetry. Like many Americans, I rarely felt drawn to poetry, but one day, another friend put a sheaf of Tahir’s verses in my hand. Poetry had never affected me so deeply.
On a Saturday morning in May 2017, my wife, my daughters, and I piled into the car and headed to Turpan, a nearby city, to relax for the weekend. The winter cold still hadn’t left Urumqi, and we were hoping a couple of days enjoying the warm spring weather in Turpan would be good for us.
On long car trips, we usually passed the time with conversation. But it was hard to talk about anything besides what was happening.
The Chinese government’s mass internment of Uyghurs was in full swing. This campaign had begun in Kashgar, Khotan, and other predominantly Uyghur parts of southern Xinjiang. Now it had reached Urumqi, the regional capital, where our acquaintances were regularly disappearing. Every day, hundreds of Uyghurs who had moved here over the decades—finding work, starting families, buying houses, coming to consider themselves locals—had been shipped out to concentration camps known as “study centers.” Nearly everyone I knew from the labor camp where I’d been imprisoned two decades earlier had already been rearrested. My turn would clearly come soon.
Human-rights groups, academics, and multiple governments contend that China has interned more than 1 million Uyghurs, along with thousands of individuals from other Muslim minority groups, and undertaken a campaign of forced sterilization against Uyghur women. The U.S., Canada, and the Netherlands have officially recognized the crisis as a genocide. Beijing rejects these charges, insisting that Uyghurs are voluntarily undergoing “reeducation” at the camps.
Surveillance technology, already ubiquitous in our city, had become even more sophisticated and invasive. Police were everywhere. I had spent hours cleaning my phone of pictures, videos, audio recordings, and even instant-message records—anything that authorities might seize on as “evidence.”
I wanted to leave the country, but my wife, Merhaba, was reluctant. In 16 years of marriage, we had confronted all manner of difficulties. We had bought an apartment, raised two kids, and started our own film-production company, small though it was. It hadn’t been all that long since we’d established ourselves, but we were finally doing well. Merhaba cherished our way of life and had no desire to leave her relatives and friends. “Things can’t get that bad,” she would say. “God help us. We haven’t done anything they could arrest us for.”
It is not an easy thing to leave your homeland in your 40s and start life anew. Although we had never spoken openly about it, we both knew that if we left, we might never be able to return.
Our two girls, who had long since tired of these endless discussions, had fallen asleep in the back seat. To our right, below the Heavenly Mountains, Salt Lake shone like a giant mirror tossed into the desert.
My cellphone rang through the car speakers. It was an unknown number. Everyone now feared unknown numbers.
She was calling because the police station was collecting fingerprints from anyone who had been abroad, and that meant they wanted ours. I offered to come by on Monday morning.
“I’m sure it will be crowded in the morning. Why don’t you come at two in the afternoon?”
Our weekend in Turpan passed under a cloud of anxiety. As hard as Merhaba and I tried to enjoy ourselves, we couldn’t put our appointment out of our minds.
“They don’t want anything else besides our fingerprints, right?” she asked. By “anything else,” she meant whether we would be sent to “study.”