NO ESCAPE EB

Nury Turkel

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780008498641
• eBook ISBN: 9780008498627
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Diritto internazionale

'Anyone interested in the future of autocracy should buy it' Anne Applebaum, author of Twilight of Demoracy

**Shortlisted for the Moore Prize for Human Rights Literature**

A devastating account of China's genocide of the Uyghurs, by a leading Uyghur activist and Time #100 nominee

Nury Turkel was born in a 're-education' camp in China at the height of the Cultural Revolution. He spent the first several months of his life in captivity with his mother, who was beaten and starved while pregnant with him, whilst his father served a penal sentence in an agricultural labour camp. Following this traumatic start – and not without a heavy dose of good fortune – he was later able to travel to the US for his undergraduate studies in 1995 and was granted asylum in the country in 1998 where, as a lawyer, he is now a tireless and renowned activist for the plight of his people.

Part memoir, part call-to-action, No Escape will be the first major book to tell the story of the Chinese government's terrible oppression of the Uyghur people from the inside, detailing the labour camps, ethnic and religious oppression, forced sterilisation of women and the surveillance tech that have made Xinjiang – in the words of one Uyghur who managed to flee – 'a police surveillance state unlike any the world has ever known'.

PART 1

The Student

1

I’ve always been my mother’s favorite. Our family used to joke that I was an only child, as if I didn’t have three younger brothers. It’s me that Mom turns to when she gets sad or stressed and needs to talk. She always used to say, as she got older and her health became more fragile, that her one dream was to live long enough to see me marry. I guess that’s the bond you forge when you were born in a Communist reeducation camp during China’s Cultural Revolution.

And that is why China still uses my mother to torture me, even though I have lived in Washington, DC, as a free Uyghur for more than twenty years. I have not seen her since 2004. I have been able to spend only eleven months—six months in California and five in Washington, DC—with my parents since I left China twenty-seven years ago.

Mom was first arrested when she was about five months pregnant. She was just nineteen years old at the time. Her crime: she had opened the door to some of her father’s guests when they used to visit our home in the late 1960s. While the ’60s were a decade of cultural upheaval in the West, in China they were an era of extreme repression, when Chairman Mao and his Red Guards were attempting what his late Russian counterpart Joseph Stalin had once described as the “engineering of human souls.”

My mom’s name is Ayshe. She came from an influential family. Her father had once been a fairly important official in the ministry of culture in the Second East Turkistan Republic, a short-lived and now mostly forgotten country that flourished briefly in the 1940s. It had been backed by the Soviet Union but then ceded by Stalin in post-war horse-trading to China’s newly victorious Communists in 1949. The Chinese reverted its name back to Xinjiang in 1954, which in Chinese means “New Frontier,” a colonial name that dates back to the mid-eighteenth century, when generals of the Chinese Qing dynasty conquered the region to their far west, a vast area of desert oases, mountains and glacier-fed lakes. It is a beautiful, haunting landscape: in places, it looks like the mountainous forests of California or the sculpted deserts of Arizona. In its farthest western reaches, the grasslands of Central Asia spread out as far as the eye can see, still peopled by Tajik and Kazakh herders in yurts, living the same lifestyle that Turkic tribesmen lived since before the days when the Ottoman and Seljuk Turks moved out to conquer the Middle East. Its ancient cities had been key bazaars lining the Silk Road, a crosscurrent of Middle Eastern, Central Asia and Chinese cultures, where Buddhist fiefdoms slowly ceded to the eastward advance of Islam a thousand years ago. But its capital, Ürümchi, is one of the largest and most modern cities in Central Asia.

My grandfather, a jeweler by trade, used to keep up with his old contacts from those heady days of independence, and they would pay social visits to his house. This obviously marked him in the Communist Party’s eyes as a highly suspect person. So he was carted off to a camp and his daughter was sent for “reeducation,” accused of being “intoxicated with separatist ideology.” Guilty by association.

While my mother, with me in her belly, was being “educated” into the joys of Mao’s workers’ paradise of collectivization and labor camps that cost the lives of millions, my father, Ablikim—who had been raised in the north of what we Uyghurs still call East Turkistan—had been sent to an agricultural labor camp. A math teacher, he knew little about working in the fields from dawn till dusk. But he had cousins who, during the Chinese reannexation of our land, had ended up on the other side of the border, in the Soviet Union. By the late 1960s, China and the USSR were no longer friends. My father’s crime was listed as “intoxication with Soviet ideology” and having relatives in a hostile country. And so it was, just about a year after they were married, that both my parents entered the vast Communist penal system.

The reeducation camp wasn’t hidden out of sight, like Stalin’s gulags that had once sprawled just across the border in Siberia. In fact, this one was in downtown Kashgar, in an old Soviet-era government building, a brutalist slab of early-twentieth-century concrete whose windows were boarded up to prevent inmates from seeing more than thin cracks of sunlight.

In these gloomy confines, I came into the world in 1970. Food was scarce and my mother suffered terribly, both physically—­there was little nutrition for anyone, let alone the mother of a newborn baby—and mentally due to her worry over me. She wasn’t quite sure what she had done to offend the rulers in Beijing, but she could see quite clearly the effects of her incarceration on her baby. I was badly malnourished because she was malnourished. When she tried to breastfeed me, almost no milk came out and she would cry in pain. I was a scrawny infant, lacking calcium and vitamin D because so little sunlight came into the prison. The only times she was allowed outside were for the raising of the red flag at dawn and the singing of songs about the glory of Chairman Mao at sunset, after eating the scraps that passed for dinner.

Between those tiny cracks in the boarded-up window, she could just steal glimpses of Kashgar, a city that was already a trading post on the Silk Road two thousand years ago. The onetime desert oasis now blended timeless markets and twisting alleyways with modernist monstrosities like the one she was trapped inside. If you have ever seen the movie The Kite Runner, then you have seen old Kashgar, before the authorities knocked it down and built a new Disneyland-like heritage site to attract tourists and spy on the residents: Kabul was considered too dangerous to shoot the movie in, so Kashgar became the Afghan capital’s stunt double. Every day, her mother would stand in the street outside the prison, hoping to catch a glimpse of her and the new grandchild she had never laid eyes on, and praying for some sign they were both still alive. And somewhere out there, beyond the city limits, was her husband, a man twelve years older than her whom she had met at a university dance just a year or so before.

My father came from the town of Ghulja in the north, near the border with Kazakhstan, a more European part of the country where the Soviet influence had taken greater hold than in the more conservative and religious south, where my mother hailed from. My father was the son of a famous Uyghur dancer who was known across the country, the way a celebrated tango dancer might be known in Argentina at the time. Dad was a good dancer and had been brought by authorities to Kashgar as part of a move to integrate Uyghur intellectuals from the north into the ancient city of Kashgar, once a hub for scholars, merchants and artists but now a conservative, traditional town.

As a young high school teacher, he was showing off his ballroom dancing skills at an event when my mother, then only 18, caught his eye. She had fair skin and light brown eyes, and Dad was immediately smitten. He asked her to dance, but she was too intimidated by his fancy footwork, his suit and his tie. So instead, she offered to hold his coat while he danced with another young lady. But my father has always been a persuasive man and was determined to dance with her. Eventually, she relented, and a romance quickly blossomed. Even though they were from different parts of the country, their parents shared a connection: his mother and her father, who was also a musician, worked in cultural affairs such as performing Uyghur music and dance to various audiences including the soldiers in the East Turkistan Republic Army. Despite the age difference, her parents were happy with the match, and in 1969—three years after Mao declared his Cultural Revolution—they were married. By September 1970, when I was born, they were both behind bars. Sadly, thousands of Uyghur children, if not millions, are in a similar situation today as I was fifty years ago.

Weakened by hunger and nursing a scrawny newborn, my mother—still only 19 at the time—had a hard time surviving in what was, despite its euphemistic title of “reeducation center,” a prison camp. One of the guards was a Uyghur woman, a party loyalist who had taken a particular dislike to the pregnant young inmate. She used to beat her frequently, even hitting her across her swollen belly. This woman would kick her and call her a whore for marrying an older man, and repeating the absurd, trumped-up accusations against my father. Mom was terrified she would miscarry and lose her first child. But she was young and strong and that’s what saw her through. Then one day, just weeks before she was due to give birth, she fell down a flight of steps, weak and dizzy from hunger. Her ankle and hip bone were fractured. When she finally gave birth to me, her hip bone was still broken, her body in a cast from the waist down.

When I was about five months old, we were released from prison. We had both survived, but my mother never made a full physical recovery. When I was growing up, on cold winter days she’d struggle to find a comfortable position to sit in the evenings as we gathered around the coal stove in our living room. When we went out walking in Kashgar, I would notice her limp as we walked downtown. We would often pass the building where I’d been born. She’d point up at a second-floor window and say, “That’s the one, that’s where we were locked up.”

It was hard to miss the building: it loomed over the entrance of the old bazaar where two of my uncles had shops selling Chinese products to tourists from Central Asia. At weekends I would help them out in their stores and would pass the place where I was born. As I got closer to my teen years, my mother would tell me about how I was barely able to open my eyes when she was allowed to take me outside, because I was so accustomed to living in the gloom of the prison.

I was a studious kid. I read a lot—in part because we had no video games or cable TV—and in my spare time I’d play soccer or run, or join a school friend to play keyboard and guitar. While some of my friends would mix in Chinese expressions when speaking Uyghur, I was always careful to keep the two languages separate. Even at that young age, I had started sensing that one would inevitably dilute the other.

Not surprisingly, I never aspired to join the Chinese elite. I knew what the Communist leadership had done to my family and to my people. I also saw the discrimination against my own people—the “Uyghurs need not apply” at the bottom of the job advertisements, and the fact that the Communist Party always loomed large in every aspect of daily life.

So instead of Beijing, my eyes turned to the West and the allure of freedom. I wanted to be free and live with respect and dignity.

I was one of those “lucky” students selected by the regional government to attend college in China proper after I graduated from the Kashgar Uyghur High School, one of the top schools in the region. The authorities had renamed my school from No. 6 High School to Uyghur High School in the ’80s, along with establishing the first and only Uyghur publishing house in Kashgar. I was always a good student and a short-distance runner in high school. Every student who was not a native Chinese speaker was required to attend a two-year language course before going to universities in China proper—it was a soft-power method of trying to Sinicize the Uyghurs. I went to study the language in Ürümchi, the largest metropolis in Central Asia. Some American travelers liken the city to a combination of Houston and Los Angeles. It lies in the northeast of Xinjiang, the most cosmopolitan part of the region, where my paternal grandmother, aunts and other close relatives lived.

Even though it was the capital of the Uyghur region, more than 80 percent of the population of Ürümchi was already ethnic Chinese by the time I arrived. After completing my Chinese language training, I was sent at the age of 20 to the Northwest A&F University in the Yangling District of Xiangyang, a city of some seven million people in Shaanxi province.

While I was studying there, the world started to change in dramatic ways.

2

The 1980s had seen something of a cultural renaissance for the Uyghurs. After the genocidal excesses of Chairman Mao, whose efforts to completely reshape China in the “Great Leap Forward” and then the “Cultural Revolution” cost the lives of tens of millions of people, came a more reformist leadership under Deng Xiaoping, who introduced some free market elements to revive the devastated central-command economy. Deng’s right-hand man, Hu Yaobang, who was the first top Chinese leader to dispense with the Chairman Mao uniform and wear Western business suits, allowed the Uyghurs more breathing space in their cultural life and education, triggering a flourishing of the Uyghur region while I was at high school.

Those were hopeful days in Xinjiang. My father had been released from the labor camp after three years but had been barred from working until the late 1970s, and even then, was only allowed to take a menial job organizing a high school library and distributing newspapers to various offices. My mother had been obliged to take a job in a grocery store just so we could get by. Now he was allowed to return to his lectern and once again teach math.

The new attitude also opened up potentially lucrative investment and cashed in on tourists curious to see this remote and strangely exotic corner of the world.

The Soviet-era monstrosity where I had been born was knocked down and replaced by a shopping center, designed in a traditional Uyghur architectural style, with an ornate spiral staircase. Much of ancient Kashgar was redeveloped, its ancient bazaars revamped, and the old livestock market moved outside the city. I used to go to see movies in the theater, an odd experience given my history with the place, but there was nowhere else to see the latest releases in Kashgar. Right around the corner was a famous Uyghur restaurant that made the best “polo,” or pilau rice, a famous Uyghur dish. Two of my maternal uncles had shops nearby, on the most scenic old street in the city, covered like a European arcade and full of shops selling traditional trinkets and clothing to the new visitors arriving from overseas.

They even went as far as restoring the crumbling mausoleums of medieval Uyghur leaders and scholars, including that of Mahmoud Kashgari, who compiled the first Turkic dictionary in the eleventh century for the Arab caliphs in Baghdad, to help them communicate with their new Turkic allies in Central Asia—the same ones who would soon eclipse the Arabs’ power. Another of them, the tomb of Yusuf Has Hajip—a poet, scholar and royal adviser—happened to be right inside a Chinese elementary school, and the authorities actually carved out a piece of land within the school to restore his mausoleum. That is an unthinkable act these days when Uyghur mosques and cemeteries are being bulldozed by the dozen to build parking lots, and to erase our historic ties to the land.

We may not have had our own country, but we had an “autonomous region,” at least on paper, that allowed us to practice certain aspects of our culture. But real governing power was still in the hands of the Chinese Han elites. Nevertheless, it was an interlude between the horrors of Mao and the terror lurking, unbeknownst to us then, just around the corner. We could celebrate Kurban, the feast that ends the fasting month of Ramadan, and I was able to take all my classes in my mother tongue, learning to write poetry in the sentimental style of the Uyghur language. One of my compositions that my father helped me write was read out on a Uyghur radio station. He may be a mathematician by profession, but he has always been an avid reader and is a gifted writer.

Then in 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. The failure of the Soviet system became clear to the whole world. Across Central Asia, the Turkic republics that had once been part of the Soviet empire declared their independence: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan. New countries sprang up across the region. Long-suppressed nationalist sentiments started to rise again, and we saw the dark side of that seismic shift when Yugoslavia slipped into a brutal civil war. Where the rotted old Communist structure collapsed, old dreams of liberty arose, but alongside long-buried resentments.

In April of that same year, Hu Yaobang died. The reformist had been forced out as secretary-general of the Chinese Communist Party a couple of years earlier by party hardliners who blamed him for anti-Communist student protests. The hardliners wanted to shut down the reforms he had led, so they gave him a very low-key funeral. Thousands of pro-reform students in Beijing took to the streets demanding a state funeral, centering their protest on the Monument to the People’s Heroes, on the capital’s Tiananmen Square.

Already alarmed by the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Chinese regime cracked down hard on the Tiananmen Square protesters, killing hundreds if not thousands. The subsequent bloodshed in Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, turbocharged by long-suppressed ethnic rivalries and resentments, further spooked the Communist leadership. The Uyghur renaissance came to an abrupt halt.

As I finished school, in my early twenties, I could see no future for myself in China. I started to lose interest in staying there, and devoured the news from overseas. At the time, the US had just invaded Iraq to free Kuwait from its occupation. It inspired me and gave me hope that another country would go to war against occupation and oppression. I was also envious of the Turkic republics that had gained their freedom, and I was young and naive enough to hope that the end of the Soviet Union might presage the end of China’s Communist Party. Tiananmen Square cured me of that. Now it seemed to me—as it had to so many before me—that America was the only safe place for me to go.

3

As a young man stuck in China and desperately trying to find a way to get to the US, I’d spend several hours a day studying English. I knew it could be my ticket out of a world where, as a Uyghur, I would be constantly treated as a second-class citizen, maybe landing a government job where the keys to promotion were either being Han Chinese or a member of the Communist Party. Eventually, I passed the TOEFL exam, which was required for nonnative speakers who wanted to apply for college or graduate schools in the United States. Back then, it was still quite unusual for students from China to go to the US: China was still quite a poor country at the time. It was even rarer for Uyghurs. So I was even more ecstatic when I received an admission letter from the University of Idaho. How did I end up applying to the University of Idaho? I briefly dated an American woman from Seattle who was born in the university’s town of Moscow, Idaho. Her parents came to visit her in Xi’an, and her father encouraged me to app...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Man in the Tiger Chair
• PART 1: THE STUDENT
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• PART 2: THE LAWYER
• 6
• 7
• PART 3: THE WAR ON UYGHUR WOMEN
• 8
• 9
• 10
• 11
• 12
• 13
• 14
• 15
• 16
• 17
• PART 4: HOW TO DELETE A CULTURE
• 18
• 19
• 20
• PART 5: THE REINVENTION OF GENOCIDE
• 21
• 22
• 23
• 24
• PART 6: A MESSAGE FROM A SLAVE
• 25
• 26
• 27
• PART 7: THE DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP
• 28
• PART 8: FIGHTING BACK
• 29
• Epilogue
• Endnotes
• About the Author
• About the Publisher