On trial for being Uyghur

Gulbahar Haitiwaji was living in France in November 2016 when she received a phone call telling her she had to return to Karamay, an oil city in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region where she was born. There were important documents to sign, she was told, and she had to come in person. Haitiwaji was anxious about going to Karamay. She knew that the Chinese Communist Party was growing more repressive in its treatment of ethnic and religious minorities in the region. She could not know that around a million Turkic and Muslim people in Xinjiang, many of them Uyghurs, would soon be detained in internment camps.

The trip to Karamay started out peacefully. But as Haitiwaji was signing documents, an officer confronted her with a picture of her daughter at a rally. He accused her daughter of being a terrorist. Soon, Haitiwaji was arrested. She was eventually sent to a facility -- the authorities called it a "school" -- in a remote region of Xinjiang called Baijiantan. As she describes in her book Rescapée du goulag chinois (Escaped from a Chinese Gulag), written with Rozenn Morgat, for two years Haitiwaji and her fellow inmates spent 11 hours a day learning about the greatness of Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party. In 2019, Haitiwaji was released from detention and managed to return to France. In the following excerpt, she describes a show trial where she learned the nature of her crime.

"The accused: Gulbahar Haitiwaji, 52, was born on December 24, 1966 in Ghulja. She left Xinjiang for France in 2006. She has been married to Kerim Haitiwaji since June 11, 1990. Kerim Haitiwaji is a political refugee in France and is involved in the activities of the Uyghur Association of France, a separatist and terrorist organization. In 2006, Gulbahar Haitiwaji sold the apartment she owned with Kerim Haitiwaji in Karamay. In the same year, she had the hukou* of four people removed from the family registry: Kerim Haitiwaji, Gulhumar Haitiwaji, Gulnigar Haitiwaji and herself."

The Judge cleared his throat and motioned for me to stand up.  I did so. I was not shaking anymore. He said, "Gulbahar Haitiwaji, do you recognize your daughter in this picture?” Then he held up the picture of my daughter Gulhumar waving her sky blue flag in front of the Trocadero in Paris. His voice echoed in the courtroom. It was a large room with a tiled floor lined with black plastic benches and a podium, from which he and two other men glared at me. He was not wearing the robe I had imagined but gray fatigues, a military uniform. I said loudly and clearly, "Yes, that's my daughter." And then one of the three said, "Gulbahar Haitiwaji, it seems that you have little regard for your country."

I did not know what to say. The judge's voice was harsh and sententious. My throat tightened. I bowed my head. On the bench behind me, my sister choked back a sob. I turned around and asked her to be quiet.

“You asked her to be quiet?" said one of the girls on my bunk.

“Yes, it was embarrassing to hear her sobbing. If she had continued, I would have collapsed too. Besides, she wasn't the one on trial. If one of us had to cry, I should have been the one to do it, right?”

None of this was like a trial. In a trial, there is a courtroom that looks like a courtroom, not a clerk's interrogation room; a judge that looks like a judge; he doesn't wear a military uniform like the short, plump man across from me. The benches are filled with an audience, people closely or distantly related to the accused: family, friends, acquaintances. They are called to the stand to testify. Here the black plastic benches were empty and there was no lectern for any third party to speak. My sister was blowing her nose in a corner and, apart from her annoying sniffles, was only heard when she thanked the judge and the Chinese Communist Party for "giving me the opportunity to repent" right after my sentence was handed down. Of course, someone had dictated her text. A guy was filming the room from behind a camera.

In a normal trial, there is also a lawyer next to the defendant. He stands between his client and the judge, defends him. He is his shield against the judicial machine that is being used against him. Next to me, there was only my guardian, her face closed, her mouth pinched. She didn't say a word during the nine minutes that my trial lasted. Finally, in a real trial, there is a defendant who is an accused, that is to say, a person who has committed acts that can be judged and sentenced. I am innocent.

No, this trial was not a trial, but, of course, everyone acted as if it were: the judge-police officer; his cronies sitting to his left and right (police officers, also in uniform); the guardians who took pride in imitating lawyers, raising an eyebrow when the judge spoke, answering the worried looks of their clients with a perfunctory smile. Finally, the four of us, the defendants, caught in the trap of a Kafkaesque, illegal judicial system, where justice does not exist and in which, as was obvious to us, it was not a question of being judged for our acts but of being condemned for what we are: Uyghurs.

*The hukou system, the internal passport, takes the form of a household registration book in which information about the identity of each member of a family is recorded. This is the document to which the judge refers when he addresses Gulbahar here.

From: Rescapée du Goulag Chinois by Gulbahar Haitiwaji and Rozenn Morgat, Edition des Équateurs, 2021. Translated by Madeleine Schwartz.