Interview: Tahir Imin Uyghurian (Part 1)
Tahir Imin spent nearly a year at a re-education camp in the Xinjiang region of China. Today, he is a writer and activist shedding light on the Uyghur genocide being committed by the CCP.
Tahir Imin has been arrested, persecuted, and disowned by his family; all because he stood up to the Chinese Communist Party in the face of genocide. Altogether, he spent over two years as a prisoner of the CCP. After fleeing China, he moved to Israel, where he studied at Haifa University. Today, he lives in Washington, D.C., where he works to tell the world what is happening to his people in eastern China. The CCP has killed Uyghur culture and now they are killing the Uyghur people. This is part 1 of my discussion with Tahir Imin Uyghurian.
Antonio: Hello, Tahir, thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule to talk with me. I want to begin by allowing you to introduce yourself to my readers. Tell us a little bit about who you are and your background.
Tahir Imin: Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity. My name is Tahir Imin. I am ethnically Uyghur and originally from Uyghur land—what the Chinese call Xinjiang, even though that is not the original name of the land; and I am now a human rights activist based out of Washington, D.C.
A: So for my readers who may not be aware, can you layout for us what is happening with the Uyghurs in China.
TI: Yeah, basically the Chinese government is using all of its state power to eradicate the Uyghur identity and exterminate all of the Uyghur nation. And they are using political, economical measures, whatever they have to do to achieve this goal. They are doing everything they can to assimilate—a very nice term for it—the Uyghur people into the Chinese population. But really they are trying to kill all of the Uyghur nation.
Specifically, what they are doing to carry out this genocide are things like detaining and arresting millions of Uyghur people for no good reason. Many estimates put the number of Uyghur people at the forced labor camps at three or four million people, some say higher. Most of those are basically slaves.
They are also separating children from their parents to educate the children as Han Chinese. Because of all this, the next generation of Uyghurs doesn’t have any collective memory of their history or their culture or their ethnic roots. They are also forcing Uyghur women to marry Han Chinese men.
They have destroyed all of our religious and cultural sites. They have banned the Uyghur language from being taught from primary school to college. They have arrested all of our prominent religious and cultural figures and even business leaders.
They sent millions of Han Chinese officials into Uyghur homes and sent the male figure in the home to the concentration camps. These officials then basically became the head of these Uyghur homes with the goal of making the Han Chinese men more acceptable to the Uyghur women.
Of course, they have burned and confiscated all of the Uyghur religious and cultural books, so that there is no way for the next generation to learn about where they came from.
Also, when I was there, I knew that they were forcing the Uyghur women to undergo forced abortions and sterilization. Even if they are six or seven months pregnant, the Chinese are forcing the women to have abortions.
It’s totally genocide. Under the United Nations Commission on Genocide Prevention, it’s very easy to see that what is happening is full-on genocide.
I think China’s goal is to eliminate everything that is different from the Han Chinese culture, ethnicity, and political ideology.
I think China’s goal is to eliminate everything that is different than the Han Chinese culture, ethnicity, and political ideology. And, basically, I think the Uyghurs are the most different from the Han Chinese in those respects.
A: I don’t think many people realize how long this has been going on, it’s just been the past few years that it has been brought to the forefront. How long has this been going on in China?
TI: I think people should know that nothing comes suddenly. When I was a kid, I heard stories of Uyghurs being arrested—young and old people, religious leaders, cultural leaders. I myself have been a target of the Chinese Communist Party police.
The CCP has been implementing, to some extent, these policies since they took our homeland in 1949. And sometimes they have changed the policy to make it a little more acceptable for the local people, but then they turn around and make it harsher.
But when it comes to the current reality, they really started to implement this hard policy around 2009. Many point to the bloody July 5th incident. After that, the Chinese became convinced that if they don’t eliminate the Uyghurs, they will become a threat.
They have been imposing more radical policies one by one. They started with arresting religious leaders, and then cultural leaders, and then in 2015, they started to expand the so-called education camps.
The anti-Uyghur policy did not start yesterday.
Generally, the anti-Uyghur policy did not start yesterday. It really started in 1949 when they took our land. And then in 2009, they accelerated those policies. And then the policies in place now—the widespread genocide—started around 2016. In August 2016, the Chinese government installed the current CCP Committee Secretary Chen Quanguo, who used to be the Party Secretary of Tibet. He came to power in the Uyghur region in August 2016 and uses all kinds of radical, hardline, genocidal policies. We can now very plainly say the assimilation and/or elimination of the Uyghur people is the long goal of the Chinese Communist Party.
A: So if I’m not mistaken, you were held at one of these “re-education” camps or concentration camps—depending on who you ask, the name will change—but can you tell us a little bit about what it was like in one of those camps?
TI: Yeah, it was 2005. I was working as a teacher at an Uyghur school. I wrote an article titled “Uyghur Culture in Danger,” raising awareness about the situation and the way in which Uyghur culture was in danger from the Chinese, from globalization, and from the policy that brought millions of Han Chinese people to the Uyghur nation, marginalizing us. In my article, I was simply talking about how we can protect Uyghur culture.
And the Chinese government took it as a very serious challenge to their policy and arrested me and put me in jail for two years, including fourteen months in a detention house, and ten months in an education camp. It was called an education camp at the time.
First of all, what’s happening now is totally different from what happened to me. But it was called an “education through labor” camp. We were considered the most heinous, dangerous, bad people on earth. Especially me, I was considered very dangerous. They arranged for four people to monitor everything I did and said from morning until sleep.
We had to get up at six in the morning and go outside and stand in line. We then sang songs like “long live Chinese Communist Party,” “long live Communism,” “long live Hu Jintao.” And then we got one steamed bun—which is a very thin piece of bread, no oil, just flour and water. Just enough to keep us alive.
So we eat and then we go to work. Usually something like digging water channels, and we usually worked ten or twelve hours a day. At lunchtime, we had thirty minutes to put away our tools, get in line, receive our one steamed bun, eat, and try to get a little rest. It was also always very, very hot. But maybe we would get ten or fifteen minutes to just lay down in a field with the sun beating down on us and get some rest. Of course, the whole time, the military and the police are monitoring us. But we can’t think of anything besides getting five more minutes to sleep or ten minutes to sit down.
And then after the thirty minutes, they give us the order to get back in line and we go back to work—hard work. Usually for another five or six hours and then we go to the camp and sing political songs and eat our one steamed bun. At that point, our bodies are just exhausted.
Our dorms did have a bathroom which was shared by around twenty or so people. But the bathroom was also where we got all of our water. And, honestly, that bathroom water is probably what kept us alive because we were getting almost nothing to eat.
Freedom is so important. That was a big lesson for me. And now I’ve been using all of my time in America to save my life and the lives of my people.
At that time, I definitely realized that food is so important. And sleep is so important. And freedom is so important. That was a big lesson for me. And now I’ve been using all of my time in America to save my life and the lives of my people.
For me, I’ve gone through a lot of bad experiences—too many to tell in this interview—but that was probably the worse. During my time in the camp they forced us to sit through two hours of CCP propaganda every day, things like how great China is and how great Chinese language and culture are, how important Chinese culture is to humanity. Very nationalist and fascist ideas.
Two hours of propaganda a day. Twelve hours of hard work. Just three steamed buns. And going to bed basically a dead person. I’ll never forget that experience.
A: As you were discussing your experience, I couldn’t help but think about the Holocaust of the Jews. The one difference that occurred to me was at Auschwitz the goal was to kill them in the gas chambers or work them to death. But at these Uyghur camps, they are trying to teach you Chinese propaganda.
Would you say the CCP’s goal is not the extermination of the Uyghur people, but the destruction of Uyghur culture and the complete assimilation of the Uyghur people?
TI: Before answering this question I have to say that the current camps are totally different from what I experienced. The place where I was is much worse now. There is torture, killings, mass rape. There is a lot of video of killings; so it’s totally different from when I was there.
But addressing your question, the Chinese goal is two-part. Before the Chinese began the genocide of the Uyghurs, they had already killed Uyghur culture. We have a very strong sense of independence from the Chinese. Uyghurs don’t consider themselves a part of the Han Chinese culture. Even those who can’t or don’t practice the Uyghur religion don’t consider themselves to be Han Chinese.
We can say that, originally, the Chinese goal was the assimilation of the Uyghurs into the Han Chinese, and getting rid of the Uyghur language, culture, religion, music, et cetera.
Their goal is no longer just eliminating Uyghur culture, their goal is the extermination of the Uyghur people. It is so clear.
But now, they have already killed Uyghur culture, so why are they still pursuing such a harsh policy? Their goal is no longer just eliminating Uyghur culture, their goal is the extermination of the Uyghur people. It is so clear.
Uyghur women are being forced to marry Han Chinese men and give birth to Chinese children. They will be raised as Chinese and taught the Chinese language. Who is left? The old people, but they are dying. And the men and the young people are in concentration or work camps.
The Chinese are not killing Uyghur people in the streets with bombs or guns. They do it quietly and one by one. They put people in either the forced labor camps, concentration camps, or prison. If you go to the concentration camp, you will have to undergo political reeducation. If you go to the forced labor camp, you become a slave. If you go to the prisons, they will use you as prison labor.
It’s naive to think the Chinese just want a new generation of Uyghurs who aren’t “extreme” and are integrated into Chinese society. That’s not true. Before, many Uyghurs embraced the Chinese culture. But many don’t.
China will not be satisfied until they have eliminated every unique culture which might be a potential threat to their power in the future.
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