Keeping a watchful eye on the door, Arzu begins telling her story. Although she is in her workplace in the center of Sydney in the middle of a weekday, every time anyone walks in, she tenses.
She warns that if any Chinese enters the building, we must stop the interview.
If anyone asks, we must tell them the Guardian is writing a feature about her business, she said.
Illustration: Lance Liu
She will tell her story, but she will not use her real name. Arzu is a pseudonym.
Arzu, 52, is an Australian citizen and has been in the country for almost two decades. The reason for her fear is that she is belongs to the Uighur Muslim minority ethnic group, from Xinjiang, a far western region of China.
An estimated 1 million Muslims are currently held in detention camps in Xinjiang by the Chinese government as part of a sweeping crackdown on the rights of the minority group.
The authorities in Beijing call the camps “vocational training centers,” saying those detained within them are taught language, culture and vocational skills.
In August, the UN called for the immediate release of people from the camps, saying they had received many credible reports that 1 million ethnic Uighurs were held in what resembled a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy.”
Despite living thousands of kilometers from Xinjiang, in the safety of Australia, Arzu fears the long arm of the Chinese state. Primarily she is frightened for her family back in China and believes four of her relatives have been imprisoned — but she is also frightened for herself.
A few months ago a man came into her business, who she is convinced was a Chinese spy. He asked aggressive questions, probing for her opinion on the situation in Xinjiang, her political views and the ethnicity of her employees.
“The way he presented was just not normal. We think it was a test,” she said.
She jokes that the room might be bugged, but it is clear she is only half-joking.
“We can’t speak openly. They might hurt my family,” she said.
Among the Uighur diaspora scattered across the world, news of the situation in Xinjiang is hard to come by. Many live in countries closer to China — such as Kazakhstan and Turkey — but one of the largest populations is in Australia, which an estimated 3,000 Uighurs call home.
The Guardian spoke to nearly a dozen Uighurs living in Australia. They all told stories of pain, fear and separation, most using pseudonyms.
For the diaspora, contacting their family members is fraught with fear, as communication on WeChat and phone calls is monitored by the Chinese government.
As a result, if they do ever ask about the fate of relatives, they have to do so in coded ways.
“We don’t say ‘camps,’ we say ‘the hospital’ or ‘school,’” said Alim, who believes his father has been imprisoned.
This is how Gul, 25, learned her father had been taken to a detention center. Gul is an Australian citizen and her parents are Australian permanent residents, but both went back to China for a visit late last year. That was the last time she saw them.
“I called my mom and she was crying. I thought my grandparents had died. She said: ‘Your dad is in the hospital.’ Immediately I understood, she can’t tell me he was captured,” Alim said.
Her mother’s passport was confiscated, preventing her from returning to Australia.
Gul has written to her local lawmaker in western Sydney asking for help getting her parents back to Australia, but has not received a reply.
It is clear that Gul, who is virtually alone in Australia and who looks very young as she tells her story, twisting a tissue between her hands, has no idea how to contend with the geopolitical nightmare her family has been swept up in.
When Arzu went back to Xinjiang for a visit this year, she traveled with a long list of names and telephone numbers given to her by Australian Uighurs desperate for news of their loved ones.
“When I came back everyone came around and was asking: ‘Did you talk to them? What did they say?’” she said.
However, it was not safe for her to have long conversations with people.
“I could just say: ‘They are alive, the phone was connected, I heard them, they did not die,’” she said.
While Arzu was able to return safely to Australia, the visit back to Urumqi was highly dangerous. She was called in to the police station and questioned about what she was doing back in China, a common experience for all the Australian-Uighurs who spoke to the Guardian who have visited Xinjiang in the past five years.
“Police called me and said you must come to the police station. They said: ‘Why are you here? Why are you smiling?’ I said ‘I’m an Australian citizen, you have to talk to the Australian government, ask your questions to them,’” she said.
Last month, at Senate estimates, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade confirmed that three Australian citizens were detained and released from China’s political re-education camps in Xinjiang in the past year.
“It will never stop,” Sultan Hiwilla, 56, and his wife, Meryem, run a restaurant in Sydney’s west.
Sitting in the restaurant one morning before it opens for the lunch rush, Hiwilla and Meryem reel off a list of people they know who have been arrested, often for activities that express Uighur culture or the Muslim faith.
A friend who worked for a company that published the Uighur-language textbook was jailed along with 40 of his colleagues. A father and son were jailed for going to Mecca to complete the Hajj.
Another friend in Gulja organized a cultural gathering called a meshrep. Police got hold of a photo of the gathering, which showed 30 Uighur men in traditional Uighur clothes — the square dopa (hat) and the kanway (embroidered shirt) — and rounded up and arrested every person in it.
“It will never stop,” said Hiwilla, a Uighur activist.
“There are no people who are willing to stop trade with China,” he said.
Earlier this month, Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs Marise Payne raised China’s internment of Uighurs at a meeting with her Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi (王毅), on her first visit to Beijing.
Hiwilla is unimpressed with the response from the international community, though he notes that the plight of Uighurs is becoming better known.
Gul, who arrived in Australia as a teenager, is used to Australians not having heard of Uighurs — but that has started to change.
When she recently told a colleague that she was a Uighur from China, the word meant something to him.
“Oh, the camps people,” he said.
Alim, who like Gul is an Uighur and an Australian citizen, reports experiencing something similar.
“People know about us now, they used not to know who we are, but now they say: ‘Uighur? You’re the ones the Chinese are trying to kill,’” he said.
Ali Ahmed, 29, runs a business in Sydney’s inner west. This, as well as his young family, keeps him busy, but the crisis in Xinjiang dominates his life.
“We are a community in unbelievable pain,” he said. “We are always meeting together to talk about the situation.”
He estimates that 80 percent of Uighurs in Australia would have a relative who has disappeared into the camps. His uncle and brother-in-law are currently imprisoned and a few months ago he lost contact with his sister. He does not know if she, too, has been taken to a camp.
Ahmed is gathered with a group of his friends, all Uighurs, all in their late 20s and early 30s, in his Sydney apartment. They are a successful group — first-generation migrants who are well-educated, articulate, running businesses, raising families — but all of them tell stories that sound unbelievable.
Zuly’s parents are both Australian permanent residents, but on a trip back to China her father was imprisoned, and they have had no word of him for almost a year. Zuly’s mother barely escaped, getting out of the country the day before police went around confiscating passports.
Now back in Australia, Zuly’s mother is required by the Chinese police to take a photo of herself holding her passport and the day’s paper and send it to them every few weeks. Zuly is unsure why, but thinks it might be to prove to the authorities that she has not attempted to return to China.
Zuly shows a picture on her phone of a dark-haired, middle-aged woman holding a copy of the Daily Telegraph, like a state-sponsored ransom photo.
Zuly and her husband, Alim, report seeing escalating oppression of their people on their trips back to China over the past decade — passports being confiscated, people preparing late-night meals to break their Ramadan fast in the dark, lest the police see the lights on and come to arrest them.
Alim’s mother was recently stopped by police at a police checkpoint, which are on most street corners in Urumqi and often house a disturbing contraption known as a “tiger chair,” a chair with metal restraints that lock people’s hand and feet in place. As well as presenting her ID and phone, she was made to give a blood sample.
Alim’s friend, Sirajipin Dolkuni, 30, was also required to give a blood sample to police before he fled China a few years ago.
Dolkuni’s brother was arrested in 2014, when he was just 18. Police stopped him in the street and found a video on his phone about the Muslim faith. He was imprisoned for one month, during which time he was held in an overcrowded room with men who had infectious diseases. They were not allowed to speak to or even look at one another. One night, he was taken out and beaten by guards all through the night.
After his release, Dolkuni said his brother was traumatized.
“He was crying, just crying. For months he couldn’t sleep, he had bad dreams and he would punch himself when he woke up,” Dolkuni said.
In 2016, Dolkuni’s brother was arrested again and Dolkuni has not had news of him since.
“I don’t know if he is alive or not. I’ve tried so hard to get information about him,” he said.
Dolkuni recently learned his mother had also disappeared.
Because everyone has a story of loss, the pain always hangs over the community, Ahmed said.
“Let’s say you’re having a party, you can’t really enjoy it, your mom is gone, your dad is dead, your brother is ...,” he tails off.
“I think if the situation continues as it is, within the next five to 10 years there will be no Uighurs left,” he said.
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