Aliyah, a Uyghur exile
A simple refusal to eat lunch started Aliyah Yusuf’s long journey from her homeland in Western China to exile in Australia.
Aliyah Yusuf is a slim, petite girl, but it is no surprise that she loves her food. The traditional cuisine of her people, the Uighurs of western China, is an exotic and mouth-watering blend of East and West that is renowned throughout the country for its breads, meat pies and mutton kebabs. So it is no wonder that when I finally search out Aliyah at the café where we have agreed to meet, I find her regarding a sausage roll with the practised eye of a gourmet.
‘Just like Uyghur food,’ she tells me as she digs in.
For Aliyah, a practising Muslim, there is only one occasion on which she forces herself to renounce the pleasures of her native cooking: during the holy month of Ramadan. Like hundreds of millions of others around the world, Aliyah has always observed Ramadan strictly by not allowing food to pass her lips during daylight hours, continuing a tradition that harks back over one and a half millenia to the dawn of the Muslim faith.
There is nothing unusual about that. But in the life of this extraordinary young woman, fulfilling this basic religious duty began a train of events that has had a profound effect on her life: a road that has led to hardship, prison and now exile from her native land.
‘Because I am a Muslim’
It began some years ago, Aliyah tells me, when she was still a university student in the westernmost Chinese province of Xinjiang. Living in common quarters, Aliyah’s refusal to eat lunch during Ramadan was noticed by her roommates. For the university, observing Ramadan was an illegal act which is forbidden by the official state policy, and the more zealous amongst Aliyah’s colleagues – she has no hesitation in calling them spies - promptly reported her to the university authorities.
Aliyah was called up to her teacher’s office and ordered to break her fast. But she refused point-blank. She was given warnings and threatened with expulsion, but still she did not give in. After a few days, when it became clear that she had no intention of complying with orders, those threats were carried out: she was expelled from her degree, just months from completion.
To the Western mind, accustomed to regarding religion as a negotiable part of one’s life, such stubbornness seems difficult to comprehend, even foolish. I ask her why she refused to compromise in the face of such personal cost, and she gives me a simple answer.
‘I couldn’t. I told them I must observe Ramadan, because I am a Muslim, and a Uighur,’ she says.
It was a straighforward statement of identity, one that would have been unobjectionable in a free country. But as Aliyah packed her bags and left university empty-handed, she was immediately at risk. In modern-day Xinjiang, the Uighurs’ ancestral land, decades of Chinese rule has made Aliyah’s brand of straightforwardness a dangerous policy.
Xinjiang – the other Tibet
What is now called Xinjiang is a vast area between Tibet and Siberia, a forbidding landscape of mountains, bleak steppes and deserts that constitutes almost a fifth of China’s land mass. The Uighurs have lived there for many hundreds of years, their settlements clustered around the oases that dot the harsh terrain. Lying directly on the ancient Silk Road, the area was conquered by a succession of invaders: the Huns, the Turks, and the Mongols, amongst others. Following a violent period of uprisings, wars and turmoil at the end of the nineteenth century, the Uighurs enjoyed a brief period of independence from the 1930s. But it didn’t last, and in 1949 the area was annexed by the victorious Chinese communists.
For Uighurs today, the 1930s were a brief golden age in which they were able to establish their own state, which they called East Turkestan. Since being incorporated into China as Xinjiang (which means ‘New Land’) the Uighurs have chafed under China’s yoke. Officially, the Chinese state recognises and protects the rights of the Uighurs to maintain their culture and practise Islam. But the reality is that over the last fifty years the Chinese have tightened their grip over the region at the expense of the Uighurs’ freedoms. Religious expression and mosques have been banned or rigidly controlled by the state, and the Uighur language has been steadily removed from schools and universities in favour of Chinese. Any expressions of Uighur culture, from wedding ceremonies to traditional music, have been controlled, discouraged or even outlawed. Since the middle of the last century, Chinese policy has progressively weakened the distinct identity of the Uighur people.
Strangers in their own land
Even though they may not say it in public, the Uighurs of Xinjiang see themselves as under colonial occupation, according to Ahmet Igamberdi, a dissident writer and a prominent member of the Uighur diaspora who now lives in Australia. A frail, softly-spoken man of over sixty, it is hard to believe that he is now designated as a ‘terrorist’ by the Chinese government. He doesn’t mince words when asked about relations between the Uighurs and the Chinese.
‘Every Han Chinese who comes to East Turkestan regards himself as lord of this country, master of this country. Our relationship with the Chinese government and the Han Chinese is not friendly. They are occupying our country and killing our people.’
Mr Igamberdi has paid a grim price for his views: in his younger days he spent a decade in a Chinese jail for his political writings. Now settled in a modest area of suburban Sydney, he is still politically active as an official with the East Turkestan Government-In-Exile, which works for Uighur rights on the world stage. He travels the world to attend meetings, despite his health, and he is still writing, most recently releasing a book of poetry in his native Uighur language.
But events have not been kind to the cause for which Mr Igamberdi still fights. The Uighurs have been on the wrong side of the two most important global developments of the new century – the growth of the Chinese economy and the international ‘War On Terror’.
China’s phenomenal growth has allowed the state to move massive numbers of Chinese immigrants into Xinjiang, progressively swamping the native population. For the first time in their history, the Uighurs are a shrinking minority in their own country. At the same time, their physical landscape has been ravaged by rapid industrialization in the name of progress. Xinjiang is rich in oil and mineral wealth. But some estimates say that as little as one percent of what is extracted remains in the province, while the rest is transported away to feed the voracious appetite of the thickly-populated east coast.
While making Uighurs strangers in their own land, the Chinese government has also been able to justify intensified state repression in Xinjiang as part of the international effort against terrorism. Seizing on some reports of Uighurs participating joining Al-Qaeda, the Chinese have aggressively arrested and convicted thousands of Uighurs in Xinjiang for ‘terrorist’ or ‘separatist’ activities. I ask Mr Igamberdi if there are elements within the Uighur political space who are willing to use violence.
‘Our people are really non-violent people, but sometimes a few use violence,’ he says, ‘We need to be non-violent. But Chinese government uses this pretext to kill our people.’
Though there have been cases of Uighurs training and participating in armed jihad, they have been very few in number and are universally condemned by Uighur organisations. In Xinjiang, though, you don’t need to build a bomb to get arrested. The official charge of ‘separatism’ can mean almost anything: from keeping banned books or discussing religious topics to simply calling Xinjiang by its Uighur name of East Turkestan.
Prison and persecution
Aliyah’s own act of rebellion in observing Ramadan did not amount to ‘terrorism’, but it did cost her a university degree. Not only was she was expelled, but she earned a permanent black mark on her official record. In the eyes of the authorities, she was now a troublemaker.
That she was an Uighur was bad enough, but now she faced even more problems in Xinjiang. She found herself seeking employment in a job market which not only actively discriminated against her ethnicity but frowned upon her past. She spent a year or two moving from job to job; during which time, through her own reading and research, she became even more aware of the plight of her people. Everywhere she went, her outspoken views on Uighurs’ rights earnt her disapproval and censure, often leading to harassment or dismissal from her job.
Her luck seemed to have turned, though, when she eventually landed a plum private-sector position with a medical marketing company in Urumchi, the capital of Xinjiang. Within a short time she was making good money, working in finance and being given more responsibility in recognition of her ability. Things finally seemed to be going right.
Little did she know that she had got the job for all the wrong reasons. Uighur girls are famous throughout China for their appearance, and Aliyah herself is no exception: she has the dark, striking good looks typical of her race. It’s a fact that was not lost on her boss, who soon began to harass and proposition her at every opportunity. Although she flatly rejected his advances (“I hit him”, she explains matter-of-factly) the unwanted attention continued. But Aliyah never gave in to him. Eventually, she paid dearly for defending her honour.
When the Chinese police arrived to arrest her, Aliyah was the only person at home. She was being arrested for embezzling from her company, they told her, and she would have to leave immediately for the police station. She was not given time to inform anyone. Confused and terrified, Aliyah spent the first night alone in a police lockup in freezing conditions. When she recounts the story now, her eyes automatically brim with tears.
‘If I had a knife, I would have killed myself, that first night,’ she says.
Fate had dealt Aliyah a cruel blow. In those first lonely days in prison, it seemed to her that she was the victim of chance, arrested and locked up for no reason at all. But the truth that she found out within a few days was even worse. The real reason for her misery was revenge. Embittered by her rejections, it was her boss who had framed her for stealing money from the company accounts.
Aliyah was not alone during her time in prison. Lack of information makes it very difficult to estimate the numbers of Uighurs imprisoned at any one time, but most external estimates range well into the tens of thousands. Many, like Aliyah, have committed no crime, but are marked as ‘special’ prisoners, those who have been politically troublesome. Those who get a trial are convicted behind closed doors and often sent to labour camps. The unlucky ones are summarily executed.
In a tiny cell with twelve other women, Aliyah endured horrific conditions. It was so cramped that they could not all lie down together, so they took it in turns to sleep. Their solitary toilet overflowed every night, covering the floor in a layer of filth which froze to a slush by the morning. Aliyah tried to hold her own with the other prisoners, but she is not a strong or large girl, and although some prisoners showed her sympathy and even kindness, she was subjected to frequent violence and physical abuse.
And it was not just from the other prisoners. When Aliyah refused to eat one day, she suffered a vicious beating at the hands of Chinese policewomen. Hit repeatedly in the abdomen, she developed internal injuries that failed to heal, and she was eventually taken to a hospital. To this day, she suffers the ill-effects: she is still not sure if she can ever have children.
But her beating had a silver lining. When brought to hospital, Aliyah’s family was able to locate her and bribe officials to buy her release. They took her from her hospital bed and brought her home. Not for the first time, someone had slipped through that enduring loophole in the otherwise brutally efficient Chinese system: official corruption.
A choice
Back at home, Aliyah had a choice to make as she recovered her health. She knew the police and government officials were still monitoring her, and keeping a close eye on her activities. She could be re-arrested again at any time, on any pretext, especially if she tried to do anything that might be represented as political. At the same time, her experience of the injustices of the Xinjiang administration had made her even more determined to work for her compatriots’ rights.
It is a choice Mr Igamberdi faced too, many years earlier: whether to stay in China and risk his own life, or leave forever. When I ask him about that decision, and whether he ever regrets leaving, his soft grey eyes cloud over with sadness.
‘I have children there [in Xinjiang]. I cannot see them,’ he says simply.
For Aliyah, in the end, it was an easier decision than she had thought. She knew her family was at risk because of her, and that she would never be entirely safe in China any longer. Through contacts in Hong Kong, Aliyah was able to organise holiday visas and air tickets to Australia, at times tricking officials into giving her the requisite permissions and signatures. The night before she left, the Chinese police came to her house on a routine visit, but they did not find her tickets. The next day, with an anxious heart and a tear in her eye, Aliyah left China for the first time and flew to Australia with her holiday tour group.
On arriving in Sydney, she managed to slip away at night from under the watchful eye of the official Chinese government tour-guide and meet local Uighurs, who urged her to leave with them immediately. She did, taking only a carry bag with her to start her new life.
‘East Timor … why not East Turkestan?’
Within eighteen months of her arrival, Aliyah has received her political asylum in Australia and has settled down to a new life – working as a translator for the World Uighur Network and training to be a masseur. Speaking with her, it is clear that like many Uighurs, she is very grateful to the Australian government for granting her asylum. But she also shares the feeling that – like most Western countries – Australia’s official position is to turn a blind eye to the mistreatment of Uighurs in China. Despite being one of the most pro-Western Muslim communities in the world, the Uighur people and their struggles today warrant no more than the occasional story in the media.
‘With East Timor, the world paid much attention, even the Australian people helped them to gain independence. Why don’t Western governments, American government pay attention to our problem?‘ asks Mr Igamberdi.
It is a common lament of the Uighur diaspora, but everyone knows the answer to the question. In the face of the opportunities offered by the booming Chinese market, Western interest in human rights in China has waned and disappeared. That the Uighurs are Muslims makes their plight doubly difficult. Any support for Uighur nationalists is immediately denounced by China as meddling and double standards, given the West’s own battle with radical Islam.
I wonder aloud if the Uighur cause is hopeless, whether they should simply give it up and make the best of what they have. To my surprise, Aliyah simply laughs. To her it is not even an option, she tells me. And I can see that she is telling the truth; there is a vitality to her, a joy in her work, that entertains no hint of defeat. Despite the bleak outlook, she still seems happy.
‘I am happy,’ she tells me, ‘From here I can do something for my people.’
We take our leave, and agree to meet for a meal again at Sydney’s only Uighur restaurant. If there is nobility in fighting a losing battle, I reflect, the Uighur people have it. Marginalized in their own land, pinned firmly in the grip of the world’s most efficient state machinery, labelled as terrorists and ignored on the world stage, their plight seems impossible. Yet then there is someone like Aliyah, tirelessly and cheerfully working against the odds. I don’t know whether to feel sad or inspired.
Perhaps, someday, the Uighur people will get what they want, however hopeless it may seem now. We in Australia need only look as far as our northern neighbour to see an example of a people who did the impossible. If East Timor, why indeed not East Turkestan? Their day, too, may come. And if and when it does, one hopes that we in the West – the self-proclaimed “free world” – may have played a role that brings us credit, not shame.
