Uyghur refugee remembers: “My childhood in China was dark”

China is taking a million Uyghurs to forced camps to be tortured. The regime even subdues children with cruel methods. Fear of death still haunts a person who fled to Berlin today – now he is campaigning for the rights of the Muslim minority.

“Murderer”, “rapist”. Haiyuer Kuerban knew these words well as a small child. He heard them every time soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army passed his family’s home in Yarkant, a town in eastern Xinjiang Province, China. They brought convicts before them in military vehicles, their hands tied behind their backs, their heads down, and signs with alleged crimes around their necks. A military parade of a special kind. As a child he always watched curiously, says Kuerban. For him and his siblings, these parades were almost a kind of spectacle. “Murderer,” “rapist,” rang out the soldiers’ megaphone. The men were pilloried one last time before their execution. What all those condemned had in common: They were Uyghurs.

The images are burned into Kuerban’s memory. He himself belongs to the Muslim Uyghur minority, which the communist regime in Beijing is persecuting with the greatest severity. His origins shape him to this day.

Kuerban in his office in Berlin-Mitte, where he works as an activist for the World Uyghur Congress.

(Photo: lve)

Kuerban has not set foot on Chinese soil since 2006. At that time he started studying in Germany. He initially lived in Munich and completed a master’s degree in business informatics. After being recognized as a refugee, he moved to Berlin, where he now lives with his wife and two sons. He has given up hope of going back to Yarkant. Hopeless.

“The regime is concerned with extinguishing every individuality”

Because Kuerban has dedicated his life to the fight against the oppression of his people. That afternoon he takes a seat on a black leather armchair in his office on Schillingstrasse in Berlin-Mitte. Here Kuerban works for the World Uyghur Congress, an international organization of exiles who campaign for the rights of the minority in China. Beijing classifies the world congress as a “terrorist organization” and describes itself as a peaceful advocacy group. It is financed, among other things, by the semi-public US think tank National Endowment for Democracy.

“What happens to the Uyghurs in China is unimaginably horrific,” says Kuerban, moving forward in his armchair and closing his eyes. For years, human rights organizations have accused Beijing of taking up to a million Uyghurs to internment camps in order to exploit them as forced laborers. It was only in October that Germany and 40 other nations signed a declaration condemning “torture, forced sterilization, sexual violence” in the camps. In addition to the US, the EU also imposed sanctions on China earlier this year. She frozen the accounts of four men who she said were responsible for the situation in Xinjiang.

Internal documents of the Chinese government, which the “New York Times” received two years ago, show that China’s head of state and party leader Xi Jinping personally initiated the suppression of the Uyghurs. Accordingly, shortly after militant Uyghurs killed 31 people in an attack on a train station, the head of state called for a crackdown on the minority in several private speeches. “We have to be just as tough as them. And show no mercy at all,” he said, according to the documents. He is also said to have declared the “poison of religious extremism” a danger. Uyghurs have reportedly already aroused suspicion when they wear headscarves, pray in mosques or maintain contact with relatives abroad. Beijing nevertheless denies using violence against the Uyghurs and only speaks of transports to “re-education camps”.

Re-education – that means, in the context of internment camps, compulsion to adapt. Uyghurs are said to be robbed of their religion, culture and language there. “The regime is concerned with extinguishing every individuality,” says Kuerban. “The diversity of society that is being promoted in the West is a danger to him.” The feeling of self should be subjected to the party apparatus from a young age. For example, when children in China are asked who they are, they don’t say their first name, but rather: “I’m Chinese.”

Forced labor was a school subject for Uyghurs

Kuerban experienced firsthand the repression of President Xi Jinping’s party before he emigrated to Germany. There were no internment camps at that time. But other types of punishment succeeded in creating terror among the Uyghur children.

As a school child, for example, Kuerban had to work hard. He and his classmates had to clean the school building every week, he says. He was graded for these cleaning actions because they were considered a school subject. When Kuerban entered high school, that was in the late 1990s, the government tightened its course against the Uyghurs. He then had to do forced labor. Several times a year he and his classmates were forced to plant trees. The fields were owned by Han Chinese, who are part of the regime’s ruling ethnic group. “It was sold to the public as social work for the common good, but we suffered physically from the difficult conditions,” he says.

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Kuerban 1988, photographed in his native Yarkant in eastern Xinjiang Province.

(Photo: private)

Islam, the religion of the predominantly moderate Uyghurs, was and is a thorn in the side of the communists. In Ramadan, the month of fasting for devout Muslims, members of the party committee paid regular visits to the classrooms of his high school, according to Kuerban – during lunch. The functionaries at their tables looked to see whether the Muslim children were also eating their meal, he remembers: “We were force-fed back then.” Because according to the Koran, nothing should be eaten or drunk during Ramadan until dark.

China is now setting up children’s camps

By moving to Germany, Kuerban discovered a “completely new world”: critical thinking. While his school days were still characterized by military drill – commands, lockstep, flogging – he enjoyed the debate in the language course at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich: “At last we discussed political things. In China we only had to read the history of the Communist Party by heart. “

Kuerban began to be interested in politics, devouring books on totalitarian regimes. It was only then that he realized that the fear he suffered as a child had become normal. “And this fear of death that was implanted in me haunts me to this day.” He notices this particularly in moments when he has to speak publicly – for example on the podium at the meetings he organizes for the World Congress. Although he is self-confident, he begins to panic that something could happen to him or his family if he expresses his opinion freely.

“My childhood in China was dark,” says Kuerban. However, none of this is comparable to the horror that Uyghur children can experience there today. When their parents are interned, they too are sent to what the regime calls “kindergartens”. Satellite images prove their existence. Nobody really knows what happens there. The government bans filming in Xinjiang. Journalists from abroad are not allowed to enter the region. A story about the children’s camps, which no one has been able to check so far, gives Kuerban a shuddering inkling of the inmates’ despair: “The children there are supposed to try to kill themselves. Some try to intentionally swallow small stones in order to die.”

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