“It is not possible to make a power of attorney, you have to go to Karamay”, replied the one who presented himself as an employee of the accounting department of the oil company for which the Uighur Gulbahar Haitiwaji worked for a long time, in northern Xinjiang, before leaving the region shortly after her husband, tired of discrimination and benefits given to the Chinese majority, the Han.
A few days earlier, the same man had already called her to ask her to travel to China to sign administrative documents regarding her early retirement. It had been ten years since Mme Haitiwaji lived in France. But, if her husband and her daughters had the status of political refugees, she had preferred to keep her Chinese passport, to keep the possibility of going to see her family, her aging mother.
In this month of November 2016, Mme Haitiwaji, after hesitating, took a plane ticket to China. After all, she had never been interested in politics, what would you blame her for. Above all, the Uighurs were already undergoing repression, but there was no question of these indoctrination camps through which at least a million members of this Muslim and Turkish-speaking minority have since passed, according to the work of researchers and NGOs. . And for good reason, the policy of mass internment of Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang was only just beginning.
In two years of detention, brainwashing, in cold and hunger, she was going to see the deployment of the concentration camp system targeting her community, to eradicate her religion, Islam, her thought, her culture and her language, before d ‘be released thanks to pressure from her family and the efforts of the Quai d’Orsay. She gives a detailed account of it with journalist Rozenn Morgat, from Figaro, in Chinese Gulag survivor (Editions des Ecateurs, 200 pages, 18 euros).
“Your daughter is a terrorist! “
His testimony confirms Beijing’s effort to force Uighurs living abroad to return for internment. “Gulbahar entered these camps without knowing what it was, and she saw this system build around her”, notes the co-author, Rozenn Morgat.
On November 30, 2016, Mme Haitiwaji is therefore in the premises of the oil group in Xinjiang to sign the paperwork, when the police arrest him and take him to the station, where the interrogations begin. One of them soon holds up a photo of his eldest daughter, Gulhumar, at a demonstration organized by the Association des Uïgours de France, Place du Trocadéro. “Your daughter is a terrorist! “, he says.
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