[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 region of Xinjiang that has ensnared as many as one million Muslims in indoctrination camps.]
By
Austin Ramzy
 |
|
Rahile
Dawut, above with camera, is an anthropologist at Xinjiang University who
studied Islamic
shrines, traditional songs and folklore. She was detained in
December 2017 and
has not been heard from since. Credit Lisa Ross
|
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 region of Xinjiang 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, observers say.
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 Xinjiang.
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 Xinjiang 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
Xinjiang,” 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 Xinjiang.
The Xinjiang 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 Xinjiang 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 Xinjiang 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 Mr.
Jalaleddin for more than a decade, said in an email. (Uyghur is an alternative
spelling of Uighur.)
Last year, Mr. 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 region. The authorities targeted Uighur intellectuals after the
People’s Liberation Army occupied Xinjiang in 1949, and even before in the late
1930s, when Xinjiang was ruled by a Soviet-backed warlord, said Ondrej Klimes,
a researcher with the Oriental Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences who
studies Xinjiang 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.”
