Gulpiya Kazybek fled to Kazakhstan in 2019
Gulpiya's account, which may be made public now that she is no longer in China, is scary new details of how the Chinese state held more than a million people in «re-education» camps from 2017 to 2020.
Hundreds of thousands of people received long prison sentences for alleged crimes including prayer, fasting and travel. abroad or have too many history books, according to leaked police reports and interviews with former detainees to The Telegraph. Disappearances and imprisonments continue today.
Gulpia's responsibilities began to change in 2017, when mass detentions increased sharply across Xinjiang. China began the crackdown, nicknamed «Strike Hard», three years earlier, claiming it was necessary to fight terrorism.
She was ordered to monitor 60 families and report specific information about them, including whether they owned religious materials, Uighur or Kazakh literature, or goods from foreign countries.
Even chocolate and soap were prohibited if they were brought from abroad. China.
“We wrote down their names… and sent the list up the chain,” she said.
But Gulpiya realized something was wrong when people in these families began to disappear. .
“[At first] I didn’t know why I had to make this list, but now I understand that based on such information, a decision will be made at a higher level about what to do with these people.”
“They were so afraid of me because if I reported them up the chain, they would be finished,” she said. «But I couldn't do anything.»
Anyone with connections to the foreign world could be detained as a «terrorist.»
Local residents walk past an abandoned mosque in Kashgar in northwestern China, in the Xinjiang region. Photo: PEDRO PARDO/AFP via Getty Images
Towards the end of that year, Gulpiya's mother, Anarkhan Kanetbek, disappeared after three police officers dragged her into a car at a relative's wedding.
“We didn’t know why she was detained or where she went; we didn’t even have the right to ask where she was,” Gulpiya said. «Many of my brothers and sisters are also government employees, and I think they took our mother to control us and put pressure on us.»
Indeed, anyone who refused to obey orders or opposed government in its repression, died or disappeared.
“Some even died on the job, and no one knew why,” she said. “We were not allowed to question it.”
Eight months later, Gulpiya suddenly received a call ordering her to visit the hospital.
When she arrived, she found her. elderly mother in handcuffs and shackles to the bed. Shortly before her disappearance, Anarkhan had been diagnosed with a brain tumor and her health was deteriorating.
Gulpiya did not have much time to talk to her mother — the Chinese authorities only wanted her to pay for the treatment.
“When I said goodbye, she whispered in my ear: “Save me, my child, save me; they beat me.» She looked so helpless, like a child.”
That was the last time Gulpiya saw her mother.
The next year, Gulpiya’s brother suddenly called. Representatives of the court came to him and said that their mother was sentenced to 12 years in prison for praying.
Construction site in Khotan, Xinjiang, for the new Hilton hotel, where there used to be a mosque. Photo: Lorenz Huber
Gulpiya herself will become familiar with these painful and heartbreaking visits. She, too, was tasked with informing families about these prison sentences. Sometimes she was even present when Chinese security forces pulled people out of their homes.
Once she could not hold back her tears as she watched the police arrest a young man in his 20s.
“It was so hard to bear,” she said. “That day I could no longer control myself. I wanted to cry and hug them, because I am also a mother. But I wasn’t allowed to cry like that in front of them.”
“We all know that these people did not actually break the law,” she said. “And the older people — how could they even commit crimes?”
“After seeing how they were arrested, I realized that there was a chance that I could be arrested too,” she said. “As a woman, what if someone rapes or attacks me while I'm in prison? What will happen to my children?
Several times Gulpie even had to travel to “re-education” camps to check on the detained members of the 60 families for which she and her colleagues were responsible.
“I saw that my boss was also afraid to go, although he was a Han Chinese [ethnic majority],” she said.
The detainees begged her for news about their children or their spouses.
“If these were ordinary, normal “educational” centers, would people go crazy? Will young women get pregnant? Will people die?
A woman from the Uyghur community living in Turkey holds an anti-China sign during a protest in Istanbul Photo: AP Photo/Emra Gurel
Government officials from Beijing also visited Xinjiang about quarterly to monitor the work of Gulpiya and others. In her opinion, this indicates that the highest level of the ruling Communist Party knew exactly what was happening and supported the repression.
Chinese propaganda has since claimed that local officials in Xinjiang had gone too far (to be made scapegoats as global condemnation grew) and that the central government would take control of the situation.
Time passed and a crackdown was not forthcoming stop, Gulpiya realized that she and her family had no choice but to flee China.
She applied for a passport from the Chinese government, saying she wanted to undergo treatment in Kazakhstan. This was more or less true — Gulpiya suffered from heart problems and had been hospitalized in the past.
But even the very act of requesting a passport could be considered a crime for which one could be thrown out of the “camp.” as interest in traveling abroad was again seen by the authorities as a sign of “terrorist” behavior.
On the day Gulpiya was called to a government office to find out whether she, her husband and children had been issued passports, she took taking painkillers with her is a way to commit suicide if she really was arrested.
< p>Authorities eventually approved the passports—but only after she signed a statement saying she would not tell anyone outside China what she saw in Xinjiang.
What she didn’t know at the time was that International pressure on China grew over its «re-education» camps. The government tried to whitewash the horrors by releasing some people and allowing others to leave the country — as long as they promised to remain silent about what they knew.
In May 2019, Gulpiya and her family left their home for China a few hours before dawn, heading west towards the border with Kazakhstan.
“I was in fear the whole way. I thought the police would chase me and force me to return,” she said. “I was so worried until we crossed the border.”
The minute Gulpiya set foot in Kazakhstan, tears flowed down her face.
Even though she had left so much behind—her mother was still in prison and her siblings and their children remained in China—she finally felt safe for the first time in years.
“I didn’t know what the future would bring, but I was so happy to be here [in Kazakhstan].”
It was a relief to no longer have to worry about what would happen to her young children if she was detained. .
“When we first arrived in Kazakhstan, I woke up in horror for some time at night, remembering how people were crying there, and everything that we witnessed.”
Gulpiya now owns a small tea shop on the island. on the outskirts of Almaty, Kazakhstan's largest city, and has been tirelessly fighting for the Chinese government to release her elderly mother.
She, along with several other dissenters, regularly gather outside the Chinese consulate to organize protests demanding their relatives released.
Beijing is still trying to intimidate her into silence.
The authorities visit her brothers and sisters in China almost daily and threaten to kidnap Gulpiya and return her back to China.
They even invited Gulpiya and her brothers and sisters to meet in Khorgos, a special economic zone located on the border of Kazakhstan and China. She thinks it's a trap: others have been kidnapped from this no man's land.
“People may wonder why we didn't try to save the people… We didn't have the chance to save each other, even though we didn't agree with this policy «, said Gulpiya. “How can you save someone if you yourself are also being persecuted?”
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