Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet's Memoir of China's Genocide - Hardcover

Izgil, Tahir Hamut

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593491793 ISBN 13: 9780593491799

Verlag: Penguin Press, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, awarded to the best first book of the year

Named one of the best books of the year by: THE NEW YORK TIMES • THE WASHINGTON POST • THE ECONOMIST • TIME

A poet's account of one of the world's most urgent humanitarian crises, and a harrowing tale of a family's escape from genocide

One by one, Tahir Hamut Izgil's friends disappeared. The Chinese government's brutal persecution of the Uyghur people had continued for years, but in 2017 it assumed a terrifying new scale. The Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim minority group in western China, were experiencing an echo of the worst horrors of the twentieth century, amplified by China's establishment of an all-seeing high-tech surveillance state. Over a million people have vanished into China’s internment camps for Muslim minorities.

Tahir, a prominent poet and intellectual, had been no stranger to persecution. After he attempted to travel abroad in 1996, police tortured him until he confessed to fabricated charges and sent him to a re-education through labor camp. But even having endured three years in the camp, he could never have predicted the Chinese government’s radical solution to the Uyghur question two decades later. Was the first sign when Tahir was interrogated for hours after a phone call with a fellow poet in the Netherlands? Or when his old friend was sentenced to life in prison simply for calling for Uyghurs' legal rights to be enforced? Perhaps it was when the police seized Uyghurs’ radios and installed jamming equipment to cut them off from the outside world.

Once Tahir noticed that the park near his home was nearly empty because so many neighbors had been arrested, he knew the police would be coming for him any day. One night, after Tahir’s daughters were asleep, he placed by his door a sturdy pair of shoes, a sweater, and a coat so that he could stay warm if the police came for him in the middle of the night. It was clear to Tahir and his wife that fleeing the country was the family's only hope. 

Waiting to Be Arrested at Night is the story of the political, social, and cultural destruction of Tahir Hamut Izgil's homeland. Among leading Uyghur intellectuals and writers, he is the only one known to have escaped China since the mass internments began. His book is a call for the world to awaken to the unfolding catastrophe, and a tribute to his friends and fellow Uyghurs whose voices have been silenced.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Tahir Hamut Izgil is one of the foremost poets writing in Uyghur. He grew up in Kashgar, attended college in Beijing, and worked as a film director in the Uyghur region. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. In 2024, he was awarded the Václav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent by the Human Rights Foundation. He lives near Washington, DC.

Joshua L. Freeman is a historian of modern China and a translator of Uyghur literature. His writing and translations have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, and elsewhere. He is an assistant research fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, in Taiwan.

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one

A Phone Call from Beijing

I keep returning to the first day of 2013.

That evening, I received an unexpected call from Ilham Tohti, an economics professor at Beijing's Central University for Nationalities. It had been years since we'd talked. He was at a Uyghur restaurant behind the university, celebrating the new year over dinner with a mutual friend of ours from Beijing.

After exchanging pleasantries, Ilham declared: "Xi Jinping has taken power. Things will get better for us now. Don't lose heart, and let our friends in Urumchi know that they should feel optimistic." Ilham was in an excellent mood. When he said things would get better, he was referring to Uyghurs' rapidly deteriorating political circumstances.

While today it's clear how absurd it was to expect any good to come to Uyghurs from Xi Jinping, at the time numerous Uyghur intellectuals cherished such hopes. Some liberal Han intellectuals likewise suggested that Xi might turn out to be relatively liberal. Given the lack of transparency in Chinese politics, the political inclinations of new leaders were often subject to speculation.

Xi's father, Xi Zhongxun, had been the ranking Communist Party official in northwest China soon after the party took power, and had criticized repressive state policies in the Uyghur region. Uyghur intellectuals preferred to think that Xi Jinping would follow in his father's footsteps on the Uyghur issue. These were hopes born of desperation, a battered community's daydream of better treatment by its colonial rulers.

I had met Ilham Tohti in the early 1990s at Central University for Nationalities (as it was then known), where I was finishing my bachelor's degree and Ilham was studying for his master's in economics. Ilham was an immensely energetic and loquacious man; he spoke quickly, as if his head was packed with words and he was rushing to get them all out. When we ran into each other on campus, he would begin talking excitedly on the spot as professors and students passed by. Once Ilham got started, he was hard to stop, especially on his favorite topic, the economy and demography of the Uyghur region.

Ilham would go on to become perhaps the most prominent dissident Uyghur intellectual in China. In the mid-2000s he founded a Chinese-language website called Uyghur Online, where he published articles defending Uyghurs' legal rights. Ilham argued that the Chinese government's own autonomy policies were not being implemented in the Uyghur region; that the Production and Construction Corps in Xinjiang functioned as a lawless state within a state; that the rapid influx of Han settlers was making the region's indigenous communities into minorities in their own homeland; that Uyghurs faced crushing unemployment; that the Uyghur language had been marginalized in the educational system.

A central goal of Uyghur Online was encouraging healthy dialogue between Han and Uyghurs and strengthening interethnic understanding. The website became a hub for like-minded intellectuals and students-Uyghurs, Han, and others-and became increasingly influential abroad. My cousin had introduced me to Uyghur Online; he told me that numerous young Uyghurs had become active readers and that they often debated what they read on the site.

Needless to say, Ilham Tohti's dissenting views drew the attention of the Chinese government. The police regularly invited him to "tea," a euphemism for taking someone for an informal warning or questioning. During some sensitive periods, like the 2008 Beijing Olympics or visits by Western leaders to Beijing, police would take Ilham's family for a monthlong "vacation." In 2009, following the government's declaration that Ilham bore responsibility for the July violence in Urumchi, he and his family disappeared. People assumed Ilham had been arrested. But after a month and a half of informal detention in the Beijing suburbs, he and his family were allowed to return home.

Despite all this, Ilham never believed that the government would formally arrest or imprison him. He was, after all, a professor at a university in the national capital, and considered his vocal criticism to be entirely within the law. The fact that his household was registered in Beijing also lent him some peace of mind. But the political climate in the capital was very different from that in the Uyghur region. If Ilham had engaged in the same activities in Xinjiang, he would already have been arrested.

Things did not turn out as Ilham thought they would. In mid-January 2014, news of Ilham's arrest at his Beijing apartment reached us in Urumchi. When I heard the news, I inquired as to which police force had arrested him, and was told that the officers had arrived from Urumchi.

It was not normal for Urumchi police officers to travel more than two thousand kilometers to arrest a professor at a university in Beijing. Normally, if Ilham were to be arrested, the Beijing police would have jurisdiction. The involvement of the Urumchi police meant that Ilham's arrest was a decision made at the highest levels. Not long after, we learned that a number of Ilham's Uyghur students had disappeared from their school around the same time, likely into police custody. In other words, the situation was grave.

I was alarmed by the arrest of an intellectual who had merely called for the government to enforce its own laws. It gave me the sinking feeling that catastrophe lay ahead for Uyghur intellectuals as a group. As a measure against the approaching danger, I set aside time to review the files in my laptop as well as my desktop computer at work, and deleted every document, video, recording, and image that police could conceivably seize on as a pretext. I directed every employee in our office to conduct a similar "cleaning" of their own computer.

Not long before, while browsing the internet, I had come across "Charter 08," a manifesto in which the Nobel Prize-winning Han dissident Liu Xiaobo and others called for democracy and civil liberties in China. After reading the manifesto, I decided to translate it into Uyghur; but, as I had no chance to publish the translation, it just sat on my computer. A couple of years earlier, a friend had given me a Word file with a Chinese translation of Xinjiang: China's Muslim Borderland, a collection of scholarly articles by more than a dozen specialists from the United States and elsewhere. The People's Liberation Army's political department had translated the book into Chinese, presumably for internal circulation. Given the tight state control over information from abroad, I was eager to get my hands on any foreign materials I could relating to Uyghurs and our homeland, and I read the book cover to cover at least three times. I also had a PDF of Han writer Wang Lixiong's book My Western Regions, Your East Turkestan, which had been published in Taiwan. And there was a photo that the Dalai Lama had taken with exiled Uyghur leader Rebiya Kadeer, his arm draped affectionately around her shoulder. I had been moved to see this warm connection between leaders of two communities facing oppression in China.

It had taken me a great deal of effort to find and translate these materials, and my unease grew as I reluctantly deleted them one by one. Later events, though, would prove this decision correct. Things were getting worse.

The repression following the 2009 violence in Urumchi had not yet concluded when the government began a separate campaign directed at Uyghurs. Known as "Strike Hard," this campaign was supposed to target "religious extremism, ethnic separatism, and violent terrorism," and its effects were far-reaching. Han migrants began arriving in Xinjiang in even greater numbers than before; Uyghurs' homes were demolished and their land confiscated. Uyghur religious practice and cultural life were increasingly suppressed, and Uyghurs...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593491793
• ISBN 13: 9780593491799
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland