Published on February 3, 2020.
This article discusses an essay by Gulistan Eziz, a Uyghur living in Japan, published in the monthly magazine Sound Argument, focusing on the oppression of Uyghurs in East Turkestan by the Chinese Communist Party, so-called re-education camps, the loss of contact with her entire family, the abduction of her younger brother, and the need for Japanese people to regard the Uyghur issue as their own.
It also warns of China’s ethnic eradication, human rights oppression, and its impact on Japan, including land purchases in Hokkaido, while stressing the danger of the Chinese Communist Party regime.

2020-02-03
I even find myself thinking: Are we such a people unworthy of living?
Would the Chinese be satisfied if we Uyghurs disappeared from the face of the earth?
The February 1 issue of the monthly magazine Sound Argument is a must-read not only for the Japanese people but for people throughout the world.
In particular, I believe there is not a single Japanese person who would not weep after reading the essay by Gulistan Eziz, a Uyghur living in Japan, published under the special feature “China’s Human Rights Oppression: A Cry of Despair,” and titled “Even If I Lose Contact with My Entire Family, I Will Continue to Testify.”
If there are people in the news media who read this and still do not raise even a single voice, they must immediately go out of business.
Every Japanese person should take 900 yen and head to the nearest bookstore!
Right now, in my homeland, East Turkestan, known in China as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, more than one million Uyghurs are locked up in camps called “re-education facilities.”
My younger brother, too, was sent to a camp more than two years ago, and I have no idea what has happened to him.
Furthermore, since last spring, I have lost contact with every member of my family in my homeland.
What on earth has happened to my family?
I intend to continue appealing through videos and other means.
Intensifying Oppression by the Chinese
I was born in 1984 in a town called Kucha.
When I was in the third grade of elementary school, we moved to Urumqi, the central city of the autonomous region, and there, in 1997, my younger brother Askar Bekiri was born.
He was a younger brother born many years after me, so when the family talked about sending him to a kindergarten where he would be educated in Chinese, I was the one who searched for kindergartens and handled the procedures for him.
The reason we decided to send him to a Chinese-language kindergarten was that Uyghurs who could not speak Chinese were looked down upon not only by Chinese people, but also by Uyghurs who could speak Chinese.
When I was a child, I attended an elementary school where classes were conducted in Uyghur, but there was one Chinese-language class every day.
At that time, education in the Uyghur language was still being carried out, but from around 2011 to 2012, I hear that all classes at local schools came to be conducted in Chinese.
Also, when I was a child, schools regularly conducted questionnaires asking what religion we believed in.
Because the teachers advised us, “It is better to say you have no religion,” those of us who believed in Islam wrote, “I do not believe in anything,” while saying in our hearts, “God, forgive me…”
Even at that time there was discrimination by Chinese people against Uyghurs, but regardless of what the Chinese did, Uyghurs lived their own lives.
We are originally a quiet and obedient people.
If we were not, China would not have been able to rule East Turkestan in this way for decades.
People say that Uyghurs carried out terrorism, but even the gentlest person will resist if he is beaten.
In that sense, most of what is called terrorism was staged by the Chinese themselves.
In the Kuldja Incident of 1997, in which the authorities suppressed a peaceful demonstration in the northwestern city of Kuldja and hundreds are said to have died, so many young men were killed that it became difficult for Uyghur women to find marriage partners.
Parents who could no longer bear living in the local areas then flowed into Urumqi all at once.
For that reason, in Urumqi a policy was adopted to prevent Uyghurs from the provinces from living densely together.
Then the incident in Urumqi on July 5, 2009 became a major turning point.
The massacre of innocent Uyghurs became known overseas, but in China oppression is carried out after all telephones and the internet have been cut off, so there are many similar massacres that never became news and never came to light.
The Urumqi incident was triggered by an incident in late June of the same year at a factory in Guangzhou on the coast, where more than a dozen Uyghur workers were assaulted and killed by Han Chinese.
Uyghur students held a peaceful demonstration, carrying the Chinese national flag, to protest by asking why the police had not stopped the mob assault and what had happened in the handling of the incident.
The Chinese authorities disguised that peaceful demonstration as a riot, waited until nightfall, and then began a massacre.
Anyone who was Uyghur was arrested indiscriminately.
Even a teacher who was going to a university to supervise an examination there was detained and slammed to the ground.
At that time, the Chinese authorities had issued an order saying that it was permissible to kill Uyghurs indiscriminately, and even according to the authorities’ own announcement, about two hundred people were killed.
There were also many people who disappeared and returned home only after three or four months.
Through this incident, many Uyghurs came to know the true nature of the Chinese, and resentment toward China spread at once.
Also around this time, campaigns such as the “300-Day Strict Crackdown Campaign” began to be carried out repeatedly whenever there was an occasion, and vehicles of the armed police and tanks of the People’s Liberation Army began running through the streets.
As for me, I came to Japan in 2005 as a family member of my husband, who was studying in Japan.
For the first several years, I was busy as a full-time housewife and had no time to return to my family home, but after the Urumqi incident I also took part in demonstrations in Japan protesting China’s oppression, and I came to think that it would be dangerous if I returned to China.
That is why, since coming to Japan, I have not returned to China even once.
My Younger Brother Was Taken Away
After 2009, China’s oppression of Uyghurs intensified, but at that time I was still able to contact my family in Urumqi by telephone and other means.
However, everyone assumed that telephone calls were being monitored by the authorities, so even when speaking with family members by phone, we kept to harmless topics.
We even said to each other during the calls, “Congratulations on National Day” and “Long live China,” so that it would be all right even if the authorities were listening.
However, from around 2017, the existence of concentration camps became clear, and more and more people woke up when their relatives were detained.
When I first heard about the concentration camps, I thought, “Surely even China would not go that far.
And the international community would not remain silent.”
Yet even after the story of the camps became clear, the international community did not raise its voice, and the United Nations did not act.
During the Second World War, Germany forcibly interned the Jews amid the chaos of war.
China is doing something similar in peacetime.
It is said that approximately one million Uyghurs are detained, but I believe the actual number of those detained is far larger.
Under such circumstances, around the summer of 2017, I noticed that my younger brother’s WeChat, a short-message posting site, had stopped being updated.
When I asked my family back home, they said, “He was taken away to study.”
That was how I learned that my younger brother had been taken to a camp, but at that point about half a year had already passed since he had been taken.
Of course, since calls with people back home may be monitored, I could not talk in detail.
My family told me, “Do not ask any more than this,” and all I could do was answer, “Yes, that is right.”
I do not know where my younger brother was taken.
The only thing I learned was that he had gone out saying, “I am going to celebrate a friend’s birthday,” and never came back.
More than two years have passed since then, but my younger brother has not returned.
Has what China calls “re-education” still not ended…?
Because of worry and fear for those who have been taken away, the family members left behind are mentally driven into a corner.
Simply because one is Uyghur, one can be put into a camp or have one’s life taken without any reason.
I even find myself thinking: Are we such a people unworthy of living?
Would the Chinese be satisfied if we Uyghurs disappeared from the face of the earth?
My younger brother had a dream of studying in Japan in order to become an automobile mechanic.
That is why I was waiting for him, telling him, “Come to Japan after you graduate from high school,” but around the time he graduated from high school, the authorities stopped issuing passports to Uyghurs.
In recent years, the issuance of passports to Uyghurs has become strict, but there was still a possibility that issuance would resume if he waited for a while, so I told him, “Wait for one or two years.”
So my younger brother became an apprentice mechanic there.
He was a kind younger brother who loved his family, had a strong sense of justice, and was gentle, but where is he now, and what is he doing?
I feel as if everything before my eyes has gone dark.
Rather Than Feeling Sympathy for Us…
From the summer of 2018, I joined an activity proposed by a Uyghur man living in Switzerland who said, “Let us testify to the reality for the sake of our families,” and I too testified for my younger brother on a video site.
Then, before many days had passed, the police contacted my older sister back home and said, “Is your younger sister overseas?
Why did you not report it?”
My mother, who has aftereffects from a stroke and is in poor health, was also summoned by the police.
I testified so that my younger brother, who had been taken away, would not be killed, but because of that, harm extended even to other members of my family.
Because things like this happen, many Uyghurs living in Japan cannot openly testify about the reality of the oppression.
Even so, I continued to testify, and at the end of 2018 I was also interviewed by NHK.
For a time, the movements of the police back home stopped.
But my older sister became a target of police surveillance, and it became difficult for her to contact me.
That sister suddenly called me by video phone in March of last year.
When I answered the phone in surprise, my sister said, “Father is in the hospital, and this may be the last time, so I made this call knowing the danger.
Talk to Father.”
My sister, too, seemed to recognize the danger approaching her and to have resolved herself, thinking, “Whatever happens will happen.”
My father, who was hospitalized with kidney disease, was crying on the other end of the phone.
He asked me, “When are you coming home?” but I could not say when I would return.
All I could do was tell him, “You will get better after the surgery tomorrow, so please do your best.”
After that, I waited, but no contact came from my sister, so on April 14 I made up my mind and contacted her myself.
Then my sister said, “Father passed away on April 7.
I wanted to let you know then, but as you know, I am someone who is not allowed to contact anyone, so please forgive me.”
So I, too, told her, “It is not your fault, so I will not resent you.”
It was such a short conversation, but after that I lost contact with my sister.
Both of my sister’s telephone numbers no longer connect, one having been canceled and the other suspended.
It may be that she was forced to change her number under pressure from the authorities.
Therefore, I have no idea at all what has happened to my family now.
Not knowing makes me anxious, and there are times when I agonize over whether, in trying to save my one younger brother, I may have sacrificed the rest of my family as well.
The Chinese authorities say that I have committed the crime of “splitting the state,” but in the first place, the ones who split the state are the Chinese authorities themselves.
The people who truly need re-education are surely the Chinese who are causing trouble overseas.
The only thing I can do for my younger brother and older sister is to continue testifying.
If there is anyone who can go to the area, I would like that person to see whether my family is there.
And I want those who have been forcibly detained, and those who have been falsely charged and put in prison, to be released.
I hope that no more Uyghurs will die.
I am not asking you to feel sympathy for us.
What I would like the people of Japan to do is to think of what is happening in Uyghur as something that concerns yourselves.
What is being carried out in Uyghur is the eradication of a people, and this is a problem connected to every place on earth.
Even from the standpoint of Japan’s national interest, the Chinese Communist Party regime should need to be brought down.
If that is not done, Japan may eventually become the “Japan Autonomous Region.”
In fact, land in Hokkaido has been bought up by Chinese capital, making it impossible for Japanese people to enter, and Japanese people who go to China are being unjustly detained.
What is happening in Uyghur is beginning to happen in Japan as well.
From the standpoint of protecting Japan, I ask the Japanese people not to leave what is happening in Uyghur unattended.