User:Paul221199/Gulbahar Haitiwaji

Gulbahar Haitiwaji, born on December 24, 1966 in Ghulja in the Xinjiang region of China, is a member of the Muslim and Turkic-speaking Uyghur ethnic minority.

In 2016, while she was living in France for ten years, she was recalled to China where she was arrested and interned in a re-education camp for three years.

Youth
Gulbahar Haitiwaji was born on December 24, 1966 in Ghulja, in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the birthplace of the Uyghur people.

She wanted to become a doctor or a nurse, but finally decided to study engineering. She married Kerim Haitiwaji and worked with him at the Oil Company in Karamay, a large city in the north of the region. They have two daughters, Gulhumar and Gulnigar, who were born in 1992 and 1997 and live in an apartment provided by the company.

In 2006, China increased repression against Uyghurs and denied them access to many jobs, the Haitiwaji family left for France where they were granted political asylum.

The arrest, the imprisonment and the hell of the concentration camp
On November 19 2016, while Gulbahar Haitiwaji and her family have been living in France, in Boulogne-Billancourt, for ten years, she receives a call from her former employer, the Oil Company, asking her to return to Xinjiang for administrative formalities related to her retirement. She tries to evade the call by offering to send a friend to settle her affairs for her but the caller insists. Gulbahar Haitiwaji then flies to Karamay on 25 November 2016. Five days later, the police arrested her at her employer's house, she was handcuffed and taken to the police station for an initial interrogation. She is then released but remains under constant surveillance by the police who have taken away her passport, which prohibits her from leaving the country. On January 20, 2017, she was arrested for terrorism based on a photo of her daughter Gulhumar Haitiwaji participating in a demonstration organized by the association of Uyghurs of France in Paris to denounce Chinese repression in Xinjiang. She claims to have never been interested in politics and spent six months in prison, in an icy cell with thirty other Uyghur women, where she was chained at the hands and feet and regularly subjected to physical and psychological torture such as sleep and food deprivation, neon lights and cameras turned on day and night, the prohibition to pray, to speak Uyghur, to start a hunger strike or to draw on the walls .... She also had to memorize the internal rules or be punished.

Since then January 29, 2017, her family has not heard from her for at least two years.

On June 9, 2017, after several weeks of detention, she is sent to a "school", supposed to save Uyghurs from poverty and obscurantism. In this school life is punctuated by grueling physical training, brainwashing, insults, physical and verbal abuse as well as daily humiliations. The camp is more like a gulag than a school. In this camp she had to attend classes daily for 11 hours a day where she learned history, law and Chinese. Before and after each class, she had to thank the Chinese Communist Party and the party leader Xi Jinping. She was subjected to daily evaluations and had to learn a propaganda song of the Chinese Communist Party by heart or face sanctions. This forced assimilation to the Chinese culture orchestrated daily aims at erasing from the consciousness any feeling of belonging to the Uyghur culture.

She was also subjected to forced vaccination, officially for the flu twice a year, but she quickly realized that some young women no longer had their periods. It was only upon her return to France that Gulbahar learned that Uyghur women were in fact subjected to forced sterilization. This sterilization campaign aims to gradually erase the Uyghur ethnic group in a vast program of cultural genocide organized by the Chinese government.

On November 23, 2018, after a mock trial, where police officers play the role of judge, she is sentenced to seven years in prison because her husband and daughter are accused of being separatist activists. She was transferred to a larger camp and then sent back to the prison.

Thanks to the intervention of the French government, put under pressure by her daughter, the living conditions of Gulbahar Haitiwaji improve significantly from March 2019. On August 21, 2019, she can return to France, after three years of detention.

Nevertheless, three years after her release, Gulbahar Haitiwaji is still suffering from the after-effects of her three years in prison. Her health has considerably deteriorated, her eyesight has diminished, she suffers from recurrent back and joint pain, and her memory has also deteriorated. On the mental and psychological level, the after-effects of her imprisonment are still present despite the support of her family, her relatives and the whole Uyghur community in France and in the world.

After the publication of her book Rescapée du Goulag chinois on January 13, 2021, the Chinese Embassy in France issued a lengthy statement outlining the reasons for Gulbahar Haitiwaji's conviction and denying the detention conditions she describes.

Publication

 * Gulbahar Haitiwaji et Rozenn Morgat, Rescapée du goulag chinois, Paris : Des Equateurs, 2021, ISBN 2849908231
 * Sylvie Lasserre, Voyage au pays des Ouïghours, de la persécution invisble à l'enfer orwellien, Editions Hesse, 2020

Internal link

 * Xinjiang Internment Camps