--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is The Sunday Story. A couple of years ago, we aired two episodes by NPR's international correspondent, Emily Fang. They were about an ethnic Uyghur family struggling to survive a brutal crackdown by the Chinese state.
--:-- Abdul Latif Kuchar: I've experienced unbelievably difficult days. I do not know whether it's a test from God or what.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: In her series, Emily tells the story of how Chinese authorities detained his wife and his young children. Kuchar spent years trying to get his family back.
--:-- Emily Fang: Since then, I've kept reporting on Uyghurs like the Kuchar family, and I join us today to talk about some of my latest work and the revealing view it gives us into how the Chinese government has been targeting Uyghurs.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Emily, thank you for being here today.
--:-- Emily Fang: Thank you so much for having me, Aisha.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Emily, you've spent years reporting on the repression and violence Uyghurs experience in China's Xinjiang region. The United Nations has warned that the arbitrary and discriminatory detentions ethnic minorities face there may constitute crimes against humanity. Why is China doing this?
--:-- Emily Fang: That's a great question. And it starts with the fact that Uyghurs make up just under half of Xinjiang's population. They speak their own language, which is completely different from Mandarin Chinese. And if they're religious, they usually practice Islam. But the Chinese authorities that control the Xinjiang region are mainly ethnic Han, that is China's ethnic majority. And they want to reshape Xinjiang into a region that's more quote unquote Chinese in their eyes. So they've been imprisoning tens of thousands of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities by saying that they are a national security threat.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I would imagine that something like this is not easy to report on. You are absolutely right. Uyghurs outside of China are afraid to speak out. And China does not let many foreign journalists into the country. And let's say you are in China. authorities there often intimidate and surveil journalists when they try to report on Uyghur-related issues.
--:-- Emily Fang: But in my reporting, I've had help making contacts through an important source, a Uyghur writer and activist. My name is Abdueli Ayub. I'm from Kashgar, and I am living in Norway right now. So Abdueli fled China after spending 15 months in prison in Xinjiang for starting a Uyghur language school. He's a very well-known intellectual, which is how I met him. And he has a talent for convincing people who otherwise might be too scared or too suspicious to speak to the media.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But even with Abdueli's help, sometimes sources we've been talking to have gone strangely silent. And that led me into what's become this story. It's a kind of meta story about people who work to silence stories, some of whom have felt silence themselves, and how they help perpetuate and justify systems they know are wrong.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: We'll be right back.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: This message comes from NPR sponsor AARP. Where do you see your career in 12 years? What are you doing now to help you get there? The sooner you start enhancing your skills, the sooner you'll be ready. That's why AARP has management, finance, and small business reskilling courses, all to help your income live as long as you do.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Because the steps you choose to take today will help you love what you do in the future. Learn more at aarp.org slash skills.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: This message comes from NPR sponsor Adobe. Introducing the all-new Adobe Acrobat Studio, now with AI-powered PDF spaces. Need to turn 100 pages of market research into five insights with a click? Templates for a sales proposal that'll close that deal? or an AI specialist to tailor the tone of your market report. You can do all that with the all-new Adobe Acrobat Studio. Learn more at adobe.com slash do that with Acrobat.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is a Sunday story. We're back with NPR's Emily Fang, and a story about the people helping China purposefully or inadvertently crack down on the Uyghurs.
--:-- Emily Fang: Emily, you spoke with two men, Uyghurs themselves, who you say silenced other Uyghurs. So where do we start with this?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I want to start with a man who's known as a kind of fixer for Uyghurs living in Turkey, where many Uyghurs have relocated. He is a powerful Uyghur businessman rumored to have close ties to Chinese authorities. And people who are desperate for help reconnecting with family and with associates in China, they come to him. He's a man known to make things happen. But he's also rumored to request things in return, like silence. As in, don't speak out against the government and I'll see what I can do.
--:-- Emily Fang: He's tried to silence at least one of my sources before. So I had to wonder, who is this man? And why does he do what he does? Is he a spy for China?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I had lots of questions. And it turns out my contact, the activist Abdueli Ayyub, knows about him. This guy's name, Abdueli told me, is Sabir Baghda. Sabir is one of the most famous Uyghur around the world. With, Abdueli says, a huge public presence. I have seen him on the screen. I have read articles even about him. And I heard a lot of rumors about him. Rumors about his ability to work with Chinese government officials.
--:-- Emily Fang: Because he is the one that easily gets visa from Chinese embassy. This is apparently one of Saber's magic powers. He's able to obtain visas for Uyghurs hoping to get back into China. Since China's crackdown, it's been almost impossible for Uyghurs to leave China or to return.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But Saber floats between these worlds, and he promises others the same opportunity. To save their family members and help them, because he can back and forth between China and Turkey, between Istanbul and Urimci.
--:-- Emily Fang: One Uyghur guy I talked to who was having trouble getting his Chinese passport renewed remembers Saber when he was whipping out his phone, calling a Chinese diplomat, and fixing the problem within the week.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So that's what we knew about Saber. But we never met him in person or been able to talk to him. Then last fall, Saber, out of the blue, reached out. So we headed to Istanbul.
--:-- Emily Fang: Turkey is now home to an estimated 50,000 Uyghurs, including many who have fled the crackdown in China.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Abdullah met Sabr first at his office, and later I met him at an upscale restaurant in Istanbul. Sabr is tall, thin, dapper, and very charismatic. Almost immediately after we sat down, he launched into his backstory.
--:-- Sabir Baghda: I first left China in 1998 and came to Turkey as a student. When I first arrived in Istanbul, Uyghurs were scarce in numbers. But there were plenty of opportunities for me. While still a student, I also became an entrepreneur. During that period, I juggled business ventures alongside my college studies, frequently traveling between Central Asia and Turkey.
--:-- Emily Fang: Specifically, I was involved in antler and copper trades, which were thriving industries at the time. He says he made a ton of money, but his real claim to fame in Istanbul was a Chinese restaurant he opened called The Golden Dragon.
--:-- Sabir Baghda: Our restaurant has attracted celebrities like Sophia Loren and Jackie Chan, as well as hosted heads of state. If a patron didn't spend at least $50 on food, then we wouldn't even look them in the face.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: The restaurant also became a hotspot gathering place for Turkish and Chinese government officials.
--:-- Emily Fang: I met several Uyghurs in Turkey who described meeting Sabra there for business and running into Chinese officials.
--:-- Sabir Baghda: In 2010, I set up a non-profit organization in Istanbul called the Turkish Uyghur Industrialists and Entrepreneurs Association, which promotes Xinjiang, how great it is, and tries to drum up investment in the region.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Just a few weeks after the organization's launch, Saber, as its president, got to meet with the then-Chinese premier, Wen Daobao, who was in Turkey on a state visit.
--:-- Sabir Baghda: I took the meeting as a chance to press for greater rights for Uyghur people in China. I told the premier about the embarrassing interrogations I'd suffered when trying to enter China and emphasized how common this is.
--:-- Emily Fang: Sabers continue traveling to China and meeting with officials, despite the crackdown in Xinjiang. He maintains that open lines of communication with the Chinese state actually help the Uyghur people.
--:-- Sabir Baghda: This is a problem a problem that could be solved through dialogue in a formal manner over many years. It can be addressed through dialogue and negotiation done in the right way.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Saber says he does not take sides in this conflict but he's repeated false claims about Uyghurs on Turkish media.
--:-- Emily Fang: In 2020, he said COVID was the reason Uyghurs were not allowed to leave China or contact their relatives, but he never mentioned the state crackdown.
--:-- Sabir Baghda: I don't view China as a problematic country. In Turkey, we might see things that are different as normal. China's political structure has its limitations, and it may resort to aggressive actions for certain issues.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: The truth is, it's impossible to really know where Saber stands. Is he trying to help the Uyghur people? or is he being used as a pawn by the Chinese state?
--:-- Emily Fang: Abduwali says not having those answers creates mistrust. If you do something underlyingly, people feel suspicious and the people will not trust each other.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: People suspect that, are you working with Chinese government? Are you working for Chinese government? This does happen.
--:-- Emily Fang: Some Uyghurs have said they're asked by Chinese police officers to spy on other Uyghurs in Turkey. And suspicion is rife among the Uyghur diaspora about potential spies and informants lurking in their midst.
--:-- Sabir Baghda: For example, right after Wen Jiabao, that Chinese premier, visited Turkey, a second Uyghur businessman told me he received a phone call. It was from a young, low-level Chinese diplomat who was ethnically Uyghur.
--:-- Emily Fang: And this Chinese diplomat politely asked the businessman to start a second branch of the organization Saber began in Istanbul. The Chinese diplomat said they wanted eyes on the ground in every Turkish city.
--:-- Sabir Baghda: China regularly sets up surveillance operations to monitor diaspora and dissonant groups abroad in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, for example. And Turkey is no exception.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: This businessman told me, however, that he said no.
--:-- Emily Fang: In his interview with us, Saber hedged when asked about whether he worked with China, whether it spied on Uyghurs, and he even suggested Uyghurs were in part to blame for their predicament.
--:-- Sabir Baghda: We often place all the blame on China, on various factors, on America, on Turkey, but as Uyghurs, are we completely innocent?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And Sabra was really skillful in sidestepping every question lobbed at him about whether he's a spy.
--:-- Emily Fang: He does not deny he works with Chinese officials. After all, Chinese state media reports show he's been an official representative at political meetings in Beijing for at least two years and met at least several times with officials from China's United Front.
--:-- Sabir Baghda: That's the Communist Party body tasked with co-opting dissident groups outside China.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But for Uyghurs desperate to connect with family inside China, Sabar is a lifeline, in large part because he has this unusual access.
--:-- Emily Fang: So what are Sabar's motivations? To this day, Abdu'l and I still don't totally understand.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I wanted to believe, I still want to believe he has done something good. I should be fair that he has done nothing harmful to the people.
--:-- Emily Fang: But we don't know the motivation. So that secret lobbying is harmful to Uyghur society because you can't tell what you have done. to the people. But I don't have evidence to prove this. I don't believe something without evidence.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: When I met Saber in Istanbul in October 2023, he was preparing to lead another delegation of Uyghur businessmen from Turkey to China, and dozens of Uyghurs had tried to sign up.
--:-- Emily Fang: Saber had given the Chinese foreign ministry a list of Uyghur men, and Beijing got to handpick the people they wanted to come. Those who were selected were guaranteed safe passage in and out of China.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But there is a cost to going. Spying is too big of a word for what these people do.
--:-- Emily Fang: This is M, another Uyghur businessman who desperately wanted to be included in Sabra's delegation, despite knowing it might mean he'd get approached by Chinese authorities.
--:-- M: The Chinese public security and state security bureaus contact Uyghur businessmen and threaten them and ask them to pass on information about the Uyghur people around them, where they live, and what they do for work.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: M left his hometown of Urumqi, that's Xinjiang's capital, in 2015, after a lot of his friends were detained, which is why M did not want to be named in this story.
--:-- Emily Fang: His family in Xinjiang has come under a lot of state pressure because he now lives abroad. Yet after nearly eight years in Turkey, M still misses China.
--:-- M: His life's work was there, including his business. Normal logic dictates we shouldn't have any contact with Chinese people. But we only know how to work with Chinese people.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: We've all gone bankrupt working with people here because we do not know how to work here.
--:-- Emily Fang: We have to keep up contacts with China. Among us Uyghur businessmen, more than 99% of us still have links to China.
--:-- M: Which is why Em wanted to go on Sabra's trip to China, despite the risk of having to pass on information to the state.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Our tragedy is that we have to live. Survival is our biggest priority. We have families, children. We need to survive.
--:-- Emily Fang: I used to criticize the Uyghur people for not being united against the Chinese. But I learned the hard way that to survive, we have to have contact with China and do bad things.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But in the end, Em was rejected. He was not allowed to enter China. He does not know why.
--:-- Emily Fang: And he's reeling. Chinese business partners he's worked with for years have abandoned him because they think they could get in trouble by associating with him.
--:-- M: All it takes is one phone call from the local Chinese police. They'll say, don't work with so-and-so person, otherwise it'll bring trouble. All it takes is one call.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And the other person will immediately cut ties with you. They can't ask why.
--:-- Emily Fang: Still, M told me he does not fault Sabar and other Uyghurs who keep up a two-way street with Beijing.
--:-- M: So many people have fear, fear of losing their families, their businesses being affected. That's the biggest problem right now.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: In order to survive, they turn their backs on their own people.
--:-- Emily Fang: I heard this again and again during my reporting in Turkey. People do what they do to survive, and there are no easy black and white moral choices to make.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And as for Saber, he never really explained why he'd reached out to us and wanted to talk.
--:-- Emily Fang: But by the end of our meeting with him, it seemed pretty clear he was just trying to justify what he does and how he does it.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But justifications like that don't sit well with Abdueli. He's a writer and activist. He's taken a clear stand.
--:-- Abdueli Ayyub: Abdueli thinks the Uyghur people are in crisis and engagement with the Chinese state is a betrayal. People feel that they are on the battlefield at the war.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So at the war, we have only two sides. One attack and the other defend themselves. At the time, it's really clear that who is who. If you commute between two sides, it's really obvious. People feel who you are.
--:-- Emily Fang: But one thing that stuck out to me during my years reporting on the ground in Xinjiang was this. There are a lot of Uyghurs in this position. A lot of the low-level staff enforcing China's crackdown are ethnic Uyghurs.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I've always wondered how this Chinese police state in Xinjiang endures, how it continues to keep Uyghurs outside China from speaking out, and also how it controls Uyghurs inside China, who comprise just under half of Xinjiang's population.
--:-- Emily Fang: China's success, it turns out, has a lot to do with the help it receives from people like Saber.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: In a moment, I'll tell you about one of those low-level enforcers. He's a Uyghur man who worked for the Chinese government in Xinjiang.
--:-- Emily Fang: I knew in my heart that the government's policy was wrong.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: We'll be right back.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I'm Emily Feng with a story about complicity and China's crackdown on Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic groups. So in Turkey we met Saber a powerful businessman with ties to China He insists he helping Uyghurs by keeping good relations with the Chinese authorities He has no regrets about working within the system China has established
--:-- Emily Feng: I met another man who at first sounds a lot like Saber. He was sympathetic to the Chinese government and thought he was helping in the work he was assigned. But over time, he changed his mind. And his story ends in a very different place from Sabar's.
--:-- Abdul Latif Kuchar: Abdoulaye Ayyub first met this man in Istanbul, where the man now lives. We got to know him at a Uyghur-run restaurant in the city. The owners pulled some curtains around us to give us privacy, and then served us steaming plates of polo, a kind of rice pilaf beloved by Uyghurs.
--:-- Emily Feng: We can make an order. But also with dumplings, okay. We're calling this man by his first initial only, A, because he also has family left in China whose safety he worries about.
--:-- A: It's been a long journey to Turkey. Back in China, I says he trained as a teacher, then got a job in his hometown in the local government. Most of his work was administrative.
--:-- Emily Feng: He registered marriages and divorces, maintained land records and registrations and things like that.
--:-- A: But in 2014, I started to notice something different happening. I began to get a lot of new assignments at work and requests to do overtime.
--:-- Emily Feng: Since mid-2014, working groups were formed. We don't get breaks anymore at work. We can't even ask for one.
--:-- A: And part of my new role was to report Uyghurs who appeared to be practicing Muslims. We were sent out to surveil the Uyghur farmers, for example, to see if there were abnormal situations, such as if they had a beard or not.
--:-- Emily Feng: At the beginning, actually, the government didn't say that they had to get rid of their beards altogether, nor did they tell Uyghurs to take off their long religious robes. They were very soft in their turn, and they said that they should change their long clothes to shorter ones.
--:-- A: In 2016, it fell on me to notify working adults that it was their turn to go to school and bring them from their home or workplace directly to what are essentially detention camps.
--:-- Emily Feng: These camps were part of a vast system China started rapidly expanding that year. Estimates from the U.S. State Department, the U.N., and investigative journalists show from 2017 to 2021, about 1 million to 3 million Uyghurs were detained.
--:-- A: But the truth is, nobody really knows exactly how many were detained or how many camps were built. China euphemistically calls these camps schools because they're where Uyghur adults are sent for months or even years to be re-educated, in China's words, taught correct political thinking and forced to memorize Xi Jinping's speeches.
--:-- Emily Feng: But state procurement documents and satellite images of these camps show the schools have come to resemble correctional facilities with barbed wire, high walls, and guard towers. And people cannot leave.
--:-- A: But at first, I was not too concerned about them. I didn't pay close attention to it, such as who was taken there and how it was done. When I attended the training, there weren't that many people.
--:-- Emily Feng: A thought this was just another round of ideological campaigning. He'd experienced numerous ebbs and flows in how China controls Xinjiang. And he saw it as his duty to his fellow Uyghurs to implement state policy.
--:-- A: Basically, to get whatever this is over with more quickly.
--:-- Emily Feng: And soon, A told us he got assigned a new job teaching at one of the detention camps. The school, as he calls it, was in the chilly northern mountain ranges of Xinjiang, and it had been built quickly out of once empty land.
--:-- A: It was also run very strictly. Every morning, summertime around 5 o'clock, wintertime is 5.30, a bell's rung, like bells rung in military camps.
--:-- Emily Feng: After the bell rings, we all stand up, make our beds. You have 20 minutes to brush your teeth and wash your face and get on the field, where we did military-style drills, such as running in the field.
--:-- A: Then we'd shout political slogans. There are a lot of them to be read. We'd do drills of turning left and right and push-ups. Very hard military training.
--:-- Emily Feng: A says he was assigned to help with the studying bit, teaching classes in Mandarin Chinese language, in Xi Jinping speeches, and in lessons against religious extremism.
--:-- A: At first, I exerted my utmost effort because, in my opinion, terrorism is morally unjustifiable. It is fundamentally wrong to take the lives of others.
--:-- Emily Feng: I was passionate about training them, encouraging them to pay attention to modern science and technology, democracy and human rights.
--:-- A: I emphasize how the bombings and terror attacks in Afghanistan were wrong and harmful to others.
--:-- Emily Feng: When I spoke of democracy and human rights, their hearts were deeply moved.
--:-- A: His students were forced to be there, though, remember. They were under pressure to show they'd reformed in some way in order to leave.
--:-- Emily Feng: A few months later, A was reassigned to a second detention camp near the city of Korla in Xinjiang's north.
--:-- A: This one built on the grounds of an actual middle school.
--:-- Emily Feng: I wanted to know exactly where both camps were. So he took a break from the interview, and I pulled up Google Maps on my phone.
--:-- A: A pointed to where he'd worked. And both camps match exactly to two camps identified and confirmed by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, an Australian think tank.
--:-- Emily Feng: And it was at the second camp that he was assigned to that A says he started doubting the work when he questioned the treatment of the detainees and whether he was complicit in all of it.
--:-- A: There was a man in the class, over 60 years old. Unfortunately, his responses were not as quick as the others.
--:-- Emily Feng: This elderly man struggled to write a reflection essay, and when he couldn't keep up, he was subjected to beatings with sticks and slaps by the teachers.
--:-- A: It pained me to see an elder treated this way. There were seven or eight others like him who endured similar punishment.
--:-- Emily Feng: While some of them deliberately resisted the system and reacted poorly, he remained a well-behaved man. He would listen attentively, but his slower reactions left him behind.
--:-- A: He was subject to harsh beatings several times, and my heart ached for him. On the contrary, he deserved respect.
--:-- Emily Feng: In society or any community, everyone should have shown him respect and greeted him warmly.
--:-- A: A says he started trying to help the detainees out, helping the older residents remember their Chinese, and sneaking the younger ones extra eggs from his own breakfast because he knew they weren't getting as much food.
--:-- Emily Feng: But he also started to fear for his own safety. He realized the teachers, and not just the students, were being watched closely.
--:-- A: At that time, I had a sad feeling in my heart. But despite that, even if we knew what was happening was wrong in our hearts, I couldn't let the government know that I felt that way.
--:-- Emily Feng: We had a boss that watched out every move. If they found out that we had emotions about what was going on, they would file a report on us.
--:-- A: A told his story, and Abdoulaye and I found it hard to understand how he could justify his work, given what he was seeing.
--:-- Emily Feng: So I asked him why he kept teaching, despite his doubts.
--:-- A: I thought that by working diligently, the number of students would decrease and there would be no need for further training in the future.
--:-- Emily Feng: Unfortunately, the exact opposite occurred. Some of the students I taught relinquished their hidden books and tapes. However, the government still maintained that their camp incarceration action was justified.
--:-- A: That was when I experienced the most distress. I believed that through training, they would find liberation and no longer injure treatment, but their numbers grew to a thousand.
--:-- Emily Feng: And as the detention camps were filling up with Uyghurs, the economy tanked. With their owners or employees in detention, small businesses around Xinjiang began to fail.
--:-- A: Chinese investors started pulling out because of the political instability. And A, who could no longer stand teaching at these camps, tried to find another stable source of income.
--:-- Emily Feng: One of the only jobs left, however, was in the police force. And so in 2019, he says he reluctantly became a police officer in Kuala.
--:-- A: If I work someone else will take my place. If someone worse than me or less educated than me were hired they might enforce police work more harshly leading to further oppression of Uyghur people.
--:-- Emily Feng: When we met A showed me his police badge to verify his identity and former occupation.
--:-- A: He says his hardest assignment as a police officer, when he's asked to really prove his loyalty, came later in 2019.
--:-- Emily Feng: It was June, the Eid al-Fitr festival, an important holiday on the Muslim calendar. And A is told to go to Kashgar, a city in the south of Xinjiang that's the heart of Uyghur culture.
--:-- A: These Chinese state media videos from that day in Kashgar and around Xinjiang show beautiful scenes of Uyghur life in the lead-up to the holiday.
--:-- Emily Feng: There are video diaries of young Uyghur men and women preparing for Ramadan. And shots of these long rows of men bowing to prayer outside mosques.
--:-- A: A is at one of those mosques too, with about 30 children he's been asked to look after.
--:-- Emily Feng: At the time of Eid, they tell us, this day is Eid, you should assign Uyghur police, three or four of them from one police station. Go to the mosques on the Eid mornings, we'll tell you what your assignments are when you get there.
--:-- A: We bring with us 15 or 20 Uyghur officers to a station, and another 15 are Chinese. Half Chinese, half Uyghur. They assigned three or four of us, mostly young officers, the ones without family. I was also assigned.
--:-- Emily Feng: We gathered in a hall of a big building in front of the mosque together on the day of Eid.
--:-- A: A tells the children he's brought to dance, to put on a show for reporters who are watching. to create this fiction of ethnic unity and that Uyghurs are free to celebrate religious holidays.
--:-- Emily Feng: Chinese state media broadcast videos of the dancing.
--:-- A: It seems that there were reporters everywhere. They took pictures and filmed the scene to show that we are living normally.
--:-- Emily Feng: A says it was all staged by the government.
--:-- A: Later, we found out that those who came out of the mosque were retired Communist Party cadre who organized some pro-government party members to pray at the mosque.
--:-- Emily Feng: A sort of laughs in disbelief as he recalls this event for us.
--:-- A: We witnessed with our own eyes that the government was propagandizing to the international community that religious rights were being protected here.
--:-- Emily Feng: We requested comment from China's foreign ministry, and in response, it sent a statement saying Western media is, quote, slandering China's governance policies in Xinjiang.
--:-- Emily Feng: It also said, quote, the legal rights of the Uyghur ethnic group have been fully protected.
--:-- Emily Feng: We're still waiting for comment from the public security ministry.
--:-- A: But for A, what he saw at the mosque that day, it was his breaking point. He does not want to do this work anymore.
--:-- Emily Feng: And he started to look for ways out of Xinjiang.
--:-- A: He finds out if you can get a job outside of Xinjiang and you can register your identification card elsewhere, you might be able to apply for a passport and leave China.
--:-- Emily Feng: So he came up with a plan. He had a friend running a school training kids to use computers in the southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu.
--:-- A: And his friend agreed to hire him as a teacher in 2020.
--:-- Emily Feng: Once he was outside of Xinjiang, A says he began to realize what a mental cage it had been working and living there.
--:-- A: One he had helped to create.
--:-- Emily Feng: Since A's time in the camps, the security measures in the Xinjiang region appeared to have eased a bit.
--:-- A: And China claims the camps have been closed.
--:-- Emily Feng: But recent reports out of the region suggest many of the sites remain and detentions continue.
--:-- A: When he reflects on his time teaching in the detention camps, A says he's struck by how easy it was to get people to turn on one another through fear alone.
--:-- A: We would gather a large number of people and tell them, if you confess, we'll give leniency and let you go. If you don't confess, we will start arresting you in two or three days.
--:-- Emily Feng: Then people would start coming to the station in droves to confess out of fear.
--:-- A: And that's all it took for people to panic. There was a feeling that the government knew everything they did.
--:-- Emily Feng: So when a policeman arrested someone and asked him if he had done this or that, we knew he would confess everything he did since birth and give up four, five, or even seven or eight people to save himself.
--:-- Emily Feng: In 2023, A managed to leave China using his new identity documents.
--:-- A: For now, he's in Istanbul, but hopes to settle elsewhere and start a new life.
--:-- Emily Feng: During our interview with A, I kept wondering what Abdueli thought of A's story.
--:-- Abdul Latif Kuchar: So I asked Abdueli after we returned from our trip to Turkey what it was like to hear from someone who had been on the other side in the camps.
--:-- Abdueli Ayyub: He told me the story just like happened to somewhere else, not our hometown. Somebody else, not us.
--:-- Emily Feng: With detachment, Abdueli means.
--:-- Abdueli Ayyub: A had described what had happened to him, but what bothered Abdueli is he had not taken any responsibility for what he had done.
--:-- Abdueli Ayyub: Like I asked him one question that how can you become a police? After you stayed in the camp as a teacher, you have experienced those torture, those humiliation, those indoctrination. And how can you become a police?
--:-- A: That's the job I can find. I have to feed myself. I have to support my family.
--:-- Abdul Latif Kuchar: Abdueli thought A should repent. Just confess what you have done. Just tell me it's wrong.
--:-- Abdueli Ayyub: I think he does feel bad. Yeah, of course. Of course he does feel bad. But he told part of the truth, but not all of the truth.
--:-- Abdueli Ayyub: Do you see this man as a victim himself?
--:-- Abdueli Ayyub: Yes he's a victim himself because of he didn't realize what he has done is wrong that's the biggest victimhood how can you do this how can you arrest your brothers and sisters yes I can understand as a scholar. But I can't understand it. As a Uyghur, I can't.
--:-- Abdul Latif Kuchar: No.
--:-- Abdueli Ayyub: But this policeman did come forward. He did tell us his story, finally.
--:-- Abdueli Ayyub: I hope that in some way is a way for him to repent. Yeah, yeah, he did. Yeah, like, he dead.
--:-- Abdul Latif Kuchar: Abdueli says that's one step towards telling Uyghur stories to the world.
--:-- Abdueli Ayyub: We have enough evidence, but we don't have enough people to tell the truth.
--:-- Emily Feng: That was NPR correspondent Emily Feng who reported this episode with translation help from Abdueli Ayyub.
--:-- Abdul Latif Kuchar: If you'd like to hear our first two stories about the Kuchar family or a detailed history of the Uyghur people from our friends at the ThruLine podcast we've linked to those episodes in our episode description.
--:-- Abdul Latif Kuchar: Adelina Lantianese produced this episode. It was edited by Jenny Schmidt.
--:-- Abdul Latif Kuchar: Liana Simstrom is our supervising producer. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi.
--:-- Abdul Latif Kuchar: Special thanks to Didi Skanky and Vincent Nee of NPR's International Desk.
--:-- Abdul Latif Kuchar: Uyghur translations by Akita Juma.
--:-- Abdul Latif Kuchar: Uyghur Abdullah, Arsalan Hidayet, and Babur Ilchi recorded the voiceovers you heard in this episode.
--:-- Abdul Latif Kuchar: Fact checking by Will Chase.
--:-- Abdul Latif Kuchar: Mastering by Kwasi Lee.
--:-- Abdul Latif Kuchar: Thanks to our managing editor of standards and practices Tony Kavan and to Micah Ratner for legal support.
--:-- Abdul Latif Kuchar: We appreciate hearing from you so feel free to reach out to us at the Sunday story at npr.org.
--:-- Abdul Latif Kuchar: Up first is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week.
--:-- Abdul Latif Kuchar: Until then, enjoy the rest of your weekend.
--:-- Abdul Latif Kuchar: This message comes from NPR's sponsor, Odoo Business Management Software.
--:-- Abdul Latif Kuchar: Some say Odoo is like fertilizer because it promotes growth. Others say it's a magic beanstalk, scaling with efficiency.
--:-- Abdul Latif Kuchar: Odoo, exactly what a business needs. Sign up today at odoo.com.
