6 Aug 2020 | News and features
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
A screenshot of Merdan Ghappar from the video he filmed on his phone from a Chinese prison
In a video clip that went viral yesterday, Uighur model Merdan Ghappar doesn’t speak. But he doesn’t need to – the footage says enough. Shot by Ghappar himself from inside a prison cell, he moves the camera with one hand and reveals his other to be handcuffed to a bed. Ghappar is confined to a tiny room with mesh and bars on a window. His clothes are dirty as are the walls, and his face carries an expression of anguish and exhaustion.
Ghappar is incarcerated in one of China’s notorious prisons for Uighurs, the Muslim population who live in the far western province of Xinjiang. The Uighurs, with their Islamic faith, Turkic language and ties to the cultures of central Asia, have long been viewed by the Chinese state with suspicion and have faced discrimination. Following two brutal attacks against pedestrians and commuters in Beijing in 2013 and in Kunming in 2014, which were blamed on Uighur separatists, this suspicion has morphed into systematic oppression.
Estimates suggest more than one million Uighurs are now incarcerated in a network of prisons across the region. China initially denied the existence of the prisons, then acknowledged them but said they were re-education camps established to counter extremism in the province. The state denies Uighurs are being used as forced labour and denies rumours of torture and other abuses. The camps are also winding down, the state has recently said.
It can be hard to probe the official Chinese party line: foreign media is pretty much banned from Xinjiang. Reporters who have been there have found their visas revoked, such as Buzzfeed’s China bureau chief Megha Rajagopalan, who was forced to leave China in 2018. Rajagopalan had reported extensively on the crackdown in Xinjiang. When media is allowed in, as the BBC has been, the visits are highly controlled and staged.
But with each passing week and month evidence that directly contradicts the party line finds its way into the outside world; shipments of human hair products from Xinjiang reach New York; drone footage of rows of people queuing, shackled and blindfolded, for trains appears; testimonies of sterilisation of Uighur women emerge. And now Merdan Ghappar’s video. It might be the most significant piece of evidence yet.
Sure it does not come close to showing the real horror of the camps, but it does something else. It personalises the Uighurs’ plight. We see his face; we look into his eyes. And through his video and the reports that have emerged around it we learn his own, unique story.
We know that Ghappar studied dance at Xinjiang Arts University and worked as a dancer before he became a successful model. We know that in 2009, he moved away from Xinjiang in search of other opportunities in China’s wealthier eastern cities. We know, from his relatives, that he was told to downplay his Uighur identity and refer to his facial features as “half-European” if he wanted to get ahead in his career. And we know that he was also apparently unable to register the apartment he bought with his own money in his own name, instead having to use the name of a Han Chinese friend. We know that throughout this period Ghappar was in regular touch with his uncle, Abdulhakim Ghappar, who fled China after his activism in Xinjiang made him a target (in 2009, for example, he handed out flyers ahead of a large-scale protest in the city of Urumqi), and that while his uncle says Ghappar is not political, his ties to his uncle might explain why he became a target.
We know that in August 2018 he was arrested and sentenced to 16 months in prison for selling cannabis, a charge many believe is false. We know he was released in November 2019, but that soon after police told him he needed to return to Xinjiang to complete a routine registration procedure and that there “he may need to do a few days of education at his local community”.
We know that on 15 January, his friends and family brought clothes and his phone to the airport where he boarded a flight and was escorted by two officers back to his home city of Kucha. And most significantly, we know that he somehow managed to not only keep, but use his phone and from this reveal some details of his own incarceration (initially in a squalid, unsanitary prison jail where he was surrounded by the sounds of other inmates screaming; later in the facility shown in the new video he says his “whole body is covered in lice”).
But we don’t know where he is today. Ghappar’s messages have stopped. No one has heard from him and authorities have not provided notification of his whereabouts.
There is an increasingly loud chorus of calls for what is happening in Xinjiang to be labelled a genocide – and this could definitely change how the international community responds to the situation. But as history has proved even if it is officially termed a genocide will it force us, on an individual level at least, to act differently?
Comparisons to the Holocaust come easily and one line of defence there, which has come up again and again, is that people didn’t act because people “didn’t know”. But that’s historically contested given how ubiquitous the camps were. There was a reason people on arrival at Auschwitz tried to rouge their cheeks to appear healthy – they knew.
What some historians have argued, though, which could partly explain the inaction of many, is that while people might have known, they didn’t understand. The truth was simply too abhorrent to fathom. And without understanding they didn’t truly know.
And that’s why Ghappar’s video and story is so important. As was the case with Anne Frank, and indeed recently with George Floyd, sometimes you need a face, a singular experience, to relate to the suffering of the whole. Stories that are granular touch people in ways that the bigger picture cannot always. News of the ill treatment of Uighurs is not new and yet within hours of Ghappar’s video circulating, crowds began protesting outside the Chinese Embassy in London.
Ghappar has made the Uighur suffering feel much more real and more personal. He could be our brother, our son, our neighbour, our friend. He’s not just a number or a news headline; he’s a face and a name. Let’s learn that name and tell his story. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][/vc_column][/vc_row]
3 Feb 2014 | China, News and features, Religion and Culture
(Photo illustration: Shutterstock)
During China’s Cultural Revolution the Uyghur linguist Ibrahim Mutte’i, who helped compile a comprehensive multilingual dictionary, was tortured in the pursuit of cultural conformity by having large volumes of his edited dictionary dropped on his head.
Although the Cultural Revolution resonates as an extreme moment in China’s modern history, today the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continues to develop expansive legal and political frameworks that repress the cultural and religious freedoms of its Uyghur population in Xinjiang province.
China maintains a stifling grip on the largely Muslim minority Uyghurs of Xinjiang. Aspirations for greater autonomy are repressed through ambiguous and far-reaching criminal laws that equate expressions of independence with separatism and terrorism. Severe restrictions in cultural and religious freedoms are part of considered government policy and Uyghurs are practically the only minority group subject to structural executions for religious offences.
Narratives of “terrorism”, external threats and fanatical separatism have been successfully produced and reproduced by the CCP, to confront ethnic problems in Xinjiang and delegitimise criticisms of government policy. The post 9/11 context has enabled the CCP to widen the scope of “terror” offences in its criminal code, where potential crimes include the dissemination of information and public gatherings that “disturb social order”. Rights to free assembly and expression, alongside peaceful protests are prohibited through punitive legal frameworks.
Expansive definitions of terrorism to include any “non-state” action decontextualise violence in Xinjiang as isolated extremism and privilege national security over individual human rights. By externalising ethnic discord, the CCP denies the existence of legitimate dissent and acts with domestic impunity.
The abuse of national security and anti-terror laws to marginalise and censor free speech are emphasised in the recent arrest of prominent Uyghur intellectual Ilham Tohti.
In a statement released by the Bureau of Public Security in Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang, Tohti is charged with promoting “Xinjiang independence”, the spread of separatism and ethnic discord, sending followers overseas to engage in separatist activities and praising individuals involved in “terrorist” attacks. China’s state-owned newspaper, the People’s Daily, commented that “police authorities have uncovered the concrete evidence behind Ilham Tohti’s separatist activities”.
Tohti has not joined calls for an independent East Turkestan but questioned the impact of economic, social and cultural policies in Xinjiang, and advocated for better treatment of Uyghurs. His arrest and official discourses explaining his crimes point to the criminalisation of dissent and a predictable pattern whereby challenges to state power are not tolerated.
Alongside the political and legal frameworks deployed to proscribe freedom of expression, curtailments of religious and cultural self-determination continue unabated. A recent Project Beauty campaign endorsed by the provincial government in Kashgar, ostensibly to promote “beauty” and “modern culture”, registered veiled women and bearded men at checkpoints in attempts to discourage expressions of Islamic and Uyghur identity.
The Uyghur Human Rights Council documents the indiscriminate targeting of religious practice. Outward expressions of faith at state institutions are forbidden, with public signs ostracising Islamic dress through explanations such as “women and girls, open your veils, don’t disturb modern civilised society”. In addition Uyghur language is being systematically eliminated from tertiary institutions, and classes on Uyghur literature, instructed entirely in Chinese, have been subject to inspection by “language police”.
Local religious leaders must complete compulsory political training through the state-run Islamic Association of China, which provides the Islamic clergy with a collection of state-sanctioned sermons and “approved” copies of the Koran. Private religious education is banned and those found to facilitate the independent tuition of Islam or in possession of non-approved literature, are often charged with “illegal” religious activity.
Furthermore, state employees and anyone under the age of 18 cannot enter a mosque. These measures point to a comprehensive draconian system of censorship, with Uyghurs arrested for offences such as “possession of wrong books” and “teaching the Koran”.
A report from Human Rights Watch, citing the official document A Manual for Urumqi Municipality Ethnic Religious Work, provides further evidence of the flagrant denial of civil and political rights. The manual identifies illegal religious activities to include: “inciting the masses to illegally rally and demonstrate”; “distorting history”; going abroad to study religion or engaging in any kind of religious activity that “span[s] different localities”; and carrying out activities “harmful to the good order of society”. These highly ambiguous injunctions restrict not only freedoms of religious belief, but also deny free expression and freedom of movement under virtually any pretext.
The tragic reality of Xinjiang is that a multidimensional system of surveillance, control and religious suppression has exacerbated an ongoing human rights crisis. Although the number of missing Uyghurs is difficult to verify, most estimates point to the arbitrary detention of thousands every year for “illegal” religious activity.
The signs in 2014, of continued violent “separatist” attacks and aggressive state crackdowns, should alarm the international community as controls seem likely to escalate. Beyond the political disenfranchisement, economic exploitation and cultural erosion of Uyghur identity, CCP assimilationist policies ironically serve only to reinforce a sense of alienation and difference.
This article was posted on 3 Feb 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
3 Jan 2012 | Asia and Pacific, China
The brother of Chinese dissident human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng has told two news agencies that his brother is now in a Xinjiang prison, being the first confirmation of his whereabouts in 20 months.
Gao Zhiyi added that he received a notice last Sunday informing him that his brother was back in prison because a court had revoked his probation, and that he would have to serve a further three years. Chinese state media reported last month that he had violated his probation.
In 2006 Gao Zhisheng was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for “subversion of state power”, having defended the rights of political and religious dissenters such as the Falun Gong, an outlawed spiritual sect in China. Since 2009 he has largely been held incommunicado. In the same year he was taken from a relative’s home in Shaanxi province, northern China, resurfacing briefly in March 2010, when he told the Associated Press he had been tortured. He disappeared again soon after.
Gao’s case is one of the most high-profile abuses of human rights in China, drawing widespread condemnation from the international community and calls for his release.
