China's crimes against humanity

China Targets Uighur Intellectuals to Erase an Ethnic Identity
By Austin Ramzy

Rahile Dawut, above with camera, is an anthropologist at East Turkestan University who studied Islamic shrines, traditional songs and folklore. She was detained in December 2017 and has not been heard from since.

ISTANBUL — As a writer and magazine editor, Qurban Mamut promoted the culture and history of his people, the Uighurs, and that of other Turkic minority groups who live in far western China.

He did so within the strict confines of censorship imposed by the Chinese authorities, who are ever wary of ethnic separatism and Islamic extremism among the predominantly Muslim peoples of the region.
It was a line that Mr. Mamut navigated successfully for 26 years, eventually rising to become editor in chief of the Communist Party-controlled magazine Xinjiang Civilization before retiring in 2011.
“My father is very smart; he knows what is the red line, and if you cross it you are taken to jail,” said his son, Bahram Sintash, who now lives in Virginia. 

“You work very close to the red line to teach people the culture. You have to be smart and careful with your words.”
Then last year, the red line moved. 

Suddenly, Mr. Mamut and more than a hundred other Uighur intellectuals who had successfully navigated the worlds of academia, art and journalism became the latest targets of a sweeping crackdown in the colony of East Turkestan that has ensnared as many as one million Muslims in indoctrination camps.
The mass detention of some of China’s most accomplished Uighurs has become an alarming symbol of the Communist Party’s most intense social-engineering drive in decades, according to scholars, human rights advocates and exiled Uighurs.
As the guardians of Uighur traditions, chroniclers of their history and creators of their art, the intellectuals were building the Central Asian, Turkic-speaking society’s reservoir of collective memory within the narrow limits of authoritarian rule. 

Their detention underscores the party’s attempts to decimate Uighur identity in order to remold the group into a people who are largely secular, integrated into mainstream Chinese culture and compliant with the Communist Party.
The Chinese government has described the detentions as a job training program aimed at providing employment opportunities for some of the country’s poorest people. 

But a list of more than 100 detained Uighur scholars compiled by exiles includes many prominent poets and writers, university heads and professors of everything from anthropology to Uighur history.
“The fact that highly educated intellectuals and academics and scientists and software engineers are being held in these facilities is one of the best counterarguments to authorities’ claims that this is some kind of educational program meant to benefit Uighurs,” said Maya Wang, a Hong Kong-based researcher for Human Rights Watch.
The removal of high-profile Uighur scholars familiar with the Chinese government, and the country’s education and legal systems, is aimed at erasing not only the group’s unique ethnic identity but also its ability to defend such traditions, said a Uighur professor now living in Istanbul who asked not to be identified because of possible risks to family in East Turkestan.

Qurban Mamut, a magazine editor in East Turkestan who has been detained. “My father is very smart; he knows what is the red line,” his son said.

Many scholars trace the assault on intellectuals to the imprisonment of Ilham Tohti, a Uighur economist, in 2014. 

Mr. Tohti, who was an outspoken critic of the discrimination Uighurs face in China, was sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty of separatism.
More detentions came in 2017. 

Many of those targeted worked on preserving Uighur culture.
Rahile Dawut, one of the most well known of the disappeared Uighur academics, is an anthropologist at East Turkestan University who studied Islamic shrines, traditional songs and folklore. 

Ms. Dawut was detained in December 2017 and hasn’t been heard from since.
Before the crackdown, the Uighur intellectual elite offered a bridge between the body of Uighur society, who number about 11 million and are largely poor farmers, and the much wealthier Han Chinese, who dominate economic and political power. 

The scholars also worked carefully to try to improve the lot of a group that complained of widespread discrimination and draconian restrictions on religious activity.
These scholars offered a moderate path, where Uighurs could maintain religious and cultural practices without turning to extreme and isolationist ideas, said Rune Steenberg, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen.
“This is the really big tragedy about the clampdown,” Dr. Steenberg said. 

“They were actually bridge builders of integration of broader Uighur society into modern Chinese society and economy.”
Many young Uighurs have been inspired by the scholars’ accomplishments, said Erkin Sidick, a Uighur engineer who went to the United States for graduate school in 1988 and now works on telescopes for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 

Mr. Sidick said hundreds would attend informal talks he gave on pursuing graduate degrees and many closely studied a book he published that compiled biographies of Uighur academics.
“Uighur people value education very much,” he said.
Now, Uighurs keep a grimmer list of Uighur intellectuals — those who have disappeared in the current campaign.
Tahir Hamut, a Uighur poet who lives in Virginia, began working with other Uighur exiles to collect the names of those detained over the past year based on news reports and information from families and classmates. 

The list has now grown to 159 Uighurs and five others from other minority groups.
“These people are all the most prestigious in East Turkestan,” Mr. Hamut said. 

“They are models who all study diligently and raise themselves up. Their arrest is a great injury, a great attack to all Uighurs.”
The Chinese authorities have accused Uighurs in official positions of being “two-faced,” or mouthing the official line in public but resisting the crackdown in private. 

Such labels have surrounded the removal of several top administrators at universities in East Turkestan.

Many scholars trace the assault on intellectuals to the imprisonment of Ilham Tohti, a Uighur economist, in 2014.

The East Turkestan government propaganda department and the news office for the State Council, China’s cabinet, did not respond to faxed requests for comment. 

But officials in East Turkestan have clearly stated their resolve to pursue people they see as hindering efforts to rewire Uighurs and steer them from what authorities have called religious extremism.
“Break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections and break their origins,” wrote Maisumujiang Maimuer, a religious affairs official, in a commentary in the state news media. “Completely shovel up the roots of ‘two-faced people,’ dig them out, and vow to fight these two-faced people until the end.”
The campaign has not spared scholars who expressed support for the party, such as Abdulqadir Jalaleddin, a scholar of medieval Central Asian poetry at East Turkestan Normal University who worked to preserve Uighur culture and identity.
“He was a very moderate man who always tried to give a balanced view, so much so that a lot of Uyghur nationalists accused him of selling out to the regime,” Rachel Harris, who studies Uighur music at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and has known Jalaleddin for more than a decade, said in an email. (Uyghur is an alternative spelling of Uighur.)
Last year, Jalaleddin joined a government-led campaign for prominent Uighurs to write open letters declaring their allegiance to the state.
Despite that declaration, he was detained in January 2018, according to overseas Uighur organizations.
“So many moderate intellectuals have been detained now,” Dr. Harris said.
“I don’t know how else to understand this, except as a deliberate policy to deprive Uyghurs of their cultural memory.”
It is a pattern that has repeated itself in the far western colony.
The authorities targeted Uighur intellectuals after the People’s Liberation Army occupied East Turkestan in 1949, and even before in the late 1930s, when East Turkestan was ruled by a Soviet-backed warlord, said Ondrej Klimes, a researcher with the Oriental Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences who studies East Turkestan and the Uighurs.
“It makes the community easier to be subjugated, more cooperative, more docile,” Dr. Klimes said.
“You have this whenever an authoritarian regime comes, they first target intellectuals.”
By detaining so many influential figures, the government appears to be acknowledging that its efforts to woo Uighurs to accept the primacy of the Chinese state have failed, and that it must use more forceful methods, Dr. Steenberg said.
“The government has lost,” he said, “and now like a chess player about to lose, it swipes the board.”

China vs. Islam

Star Scholar Disappears as Crackdown Engulfs East Turkestan
By Chris Buckley and Austin Ramzy

Rahile Dawut, third from left, an academic from the Uighur ethnic minority, working in the Chinese region of Xinjiang in 2005. She has been missing for eight months.

URUMQI, East Turkestan — She was one of the most revered academics from the Uighur ethnic minority in far western China. 

She had written extensively and lectured across China and the world to explain and celebrate Uighurs’ varied traditions. 

Her research was funded by Chinese government ministries and praised by other scholars.
Then she disappeared.
The academic, Rahile Dawut, 52, told a relative last December that she planned to travel to Beijing from Urumqi, the capital of East Turkestan where she taught. 

Professor Dawut was in a rush when she left, according to the relative, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of punishment from the Chinese authorities.
She has not been heard from since, and her family and close friends are sure she was secretly detained as part of a severe clampdown on Uighurs, the largely Muslim group who call East Turkestan their homeland.
Professor Dawut’s trajectory — from celebrated ethnographer at East Turkestan University in Urumqi to clandestine detainee — illustrates a wider crackdown that has drastically constricted Uighur life and culture.

A police officer standing guard as Muslims arrive for morning prayers during Eid al-Fitr at the Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar, China, last year.

The family member and Professor Dawut’s friends said they decided to speak out now, eight months after she vanished, because it had become clear that staying silent would not bring her release from a re-education facility, detention cell or perhaps prison.
“Virtually all expressions of Uighurs’ unique culture are dangerous now, and there’s no better evidence of that than the disappearance of Rahile Dawut,” said Rian Thum, an associate professor at Loyola University New Orleans whose historical research on Uighur pilgrimages and manuscripts drew on Professor Dawut’s pioneering studies. 

“There was a lot of hope that they would see that she was a nonthreat and release her, but that hope gradually dwindled.”
The East Turkestan region, more than anywhere else in China, has demonstrated how Xi Jinping, the country’s dictator, is determined to redraw the boundaries of what is permitted in religion, academic research, civil society and ethnic expression.
Under him, the government has redoubled a years long clampdown on Uighurs who are marked as potential supporters of independence or Islamist extremism. 

For many of East Turkestan’s 11 million Uighurs, their homeland has become a surveillance state swarming with checkpoints, security cameras and armed patrols.
Hundreds of thousands of Uighurs have been kept in secretive re-education centers for weeks, months and even years, scholars and international human rights groups estimate. 

Uighurs have also experienced increasing restrictions on movement, prayer and communications.

The Old City of Kashgar in 2016. For many of East Turkestan’s 11 million Uighurs, their homeland has become a surveillance state swarming with checkpoints, security cameras and armed patrols.

Chinese officials have mostly avoided acknowledging the mass internments. 

But not even moderate academics like Professor Dawut appear secure. 

The government has purged what it calls “two-faced” Uighur teachers and officials suspected of secretly resisting the hard-line policies.
“Since Uighurs are now collectively under suspicion, any Uighur academic with foreign ties is branded a ‘two-faced intellectual’ — disloyal to the state and in need of re-education,” said Rachel Harris, who studies Uighur music at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and knows Professor Dawut as a friend and academic partner.
“The accounts of the ‘re-education’ regime that people are undergoing in those camps are harrowing,” Professor Harris said by email. 

“I imagine my lovely, principled, dedicated colleague there, and I feel incredibly angry.”
Other prominent Uighurs who have vanished in the past two years, apparently into detention, include writers and website operators, a soccer star and a popular musician, according to Radio Free Asia and overseas Uighur groups with extensive contacts in East Turkestan.
At least one of Professor Dawut’s graduate students in China has also disappeared, according to John Kamm, founder of the Dui Hua Foundationin San Francisco, which lobbies the Chinese government on human rights cases. 

He said his attempts to get information about Professor Dawut from Chinese officials had been unsuccessful.

A poster showing the Chinese dictator, Xi Jinping, near the East Turkestan town of Hotan in 2017. Under Xi, the government has redoubled a clampdown on Uighurs who are marked as potential supporters of independence or Islamic extremism.

“Everyone who has known her is under suspicion,” Mr. Kamm said. 

“Rahile Dawut is the human face of this unspeakable tragedy.”
A month before Professor Dawut left her last message, her life had a semblance of normality. 

She gave a talk on Uighur women in November at Peking University, speaking to a forum of scholars who have backed Xi’s assimilationist ethnic policies in Xinjiang.
Uighurs are a Turkic people, much closer in appearance, language and customs to peoples across Central Asia than the Han who make up the vast majority of China’s population. 

The Chinese government had long been wary of defiance from them, given Uighurs’ heritage and history of independence. 

Official alarm skyrocketed after deadly riots in East Turkestan in 2009 and a series of primitive but bloody assaults on Han people, police officers and officials.
But until recently, Professor Dawut’s work was welcomed by Chinese bureaucrats, as evidenced by grants and support she received from the Ministry of Culture. 

She had earned an international reputation as an expert on Uighur shrines, folklore, music and crafts that had been neglected by previous generations of scholars.
“I was deeply drawn to this vivid, lively folk culture and customs, so different from the accounts in textbooks,” she said in an interview with a Chinese art newspaper in 2011. 

“Above all, we’re preserving and documenting this folk cultural heritage not so that it can lie in archives or serve as museum exhibits, but so it can be returned to the people.”

Men dancing in front of the Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar after morning prayers during Eid al-Fitr last year.

While Chinese policymakers worried that Uighurs were increasingly drawn to radical forms of Islam from the Middle East, Professor Dawut’s work portrayed Uighur heritage as more diverse and tolerant, shaped by Sufi spiritual traditions anathema to modern-day extremists. 

In 2014, she told The New York Times that she worried about Uighur women drawn to conservative Islam.
After finishing her doctorate in Beijing, Professor Dawut began teaching at East Turkestan University, the colony’s premier school. 

She founded a folklore institute and shared her work in Europe and the United States, becoming a guide to many foreign scholars.
“Most Western scholars doing research on East Turkestan knew to bring her coffee,” said Elise Anderson, a Ph.D. candidate at Indiana University who worked with Professor Dawut. 

“I remember a lot of the time she would say, ‘Let’s take a break from work. Let’s drink some coffee.’”
Professor Dawut stayed away from political disputes about the future of East Turkestan. 

If she needed any warning about the risks, there was Ilham Tohti, a Uighur economist at Minzu University in Beijing and measured critic of Chinese policy in East Turkestan. 

He was sentenced to life in prison in 2014 on charges of separatism. 

Seven of his students were also charged.
But Professor Dawut’s international prominence and pride in Uighur traditions may help explain her downfall.
Professor Dawut working in East Turkestan in an undated photo. She was known as an expert on Uighur shrines, folklore, music and crafts that had been neglected by previous generations of scholars.

After Xi came to power in 2012 and installed a hard-line party functionary to run East Turkestan, the drive to root out dissent here accelerated. 

East Turkestan University and other schools became a particular focus.
In March of last year, the university leaders were replaced, and soon afterward a team of party inspectors reported that the university had been politically lax. 

The new administrators vowed to unmask “two-faced” Uighur academics who resisted the new orthodoxies. 

Research and foreign ties that were once tolerated became increasingly suspect.
East Turkestan University held a rally of 4,300 teachers and students who were warned that separatist sympathizers would be driven out like “rats crossing the road.”
“The Chinese government, after arresting Uighur government officials, Uighur rich people, they’ve begun to arrest Uighur intellectuals,” Tahir Imin, a former student of Professor Dawut, said from Washington, where he lives. 

“Right now I can tell you more than 20 names, all prominent Uighur intellectuals.”
As her friends abroad expressed growing worry, Professor Dawut continued her teaching and research as far as new restrictions allowed. 

She was also reluctant to leave her mother alone in Urumqi, Professor Harris said.
“I always tried to bring some freshly ground coffee with me when I visited her,” she said of Professor Dawut. 

“That’s a painful memory when I think of her life now in the detention camp.”