The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
‘We had to round up Uyghur families for the police… We had no choice’
Gulpiya Qazybek was on her way home from work in north-west China when she got a call telling her to return to the office. The 46-year-old, an ethnic Kazakh from the Xinjiang region, worked for the local government ensuring families complied with the national three-child limit. But that night, her instructions were quite different: she and a group of colleagues were told to go and round up 10 Muslim families in the neighbourhood.
“We were told to remove their shoelaces, belts, buttons,” Gulpiya told
The Daily Telegraph. “Then, we had to escort them to the police, who bound their hands behind their backs, pulled a black hood over their heads, and loaded them on to buses.
“No one knew where they were going,” she said. “Were they going to their deaths, or to ‘study’ in a ‘reeducation’ camp? Would they return or would they disappear?”
It was March 2019, and China’s sweeping crackdown against Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other primarily Muslim ethnic groups, meant people were disappearing every day.
Families often had no idea where their loved ones had been sent – or even whether they were still alive.
Uyghurs and Kazakhs, like Gulpiya, were being forced to implement the crackdown in Xinjiang.
“Nobody wants to do that, but we had no choice… we were powerless,” she said. “The heaviest thing for us was that we had to do it to our own people – our brothers and sisters.”
Gulpiya’s account, which can be made public now that she is no longer in China, gives chilling new details of how the state detained upwards of a million people in “re-education” camps from 2017 to 2020.
Hundreds of thousands of people received lengthy prison sentences for alleged crimes including praying or having too many history books, according to leaked police records.
The disappearances and jailings continue today.
Gulpiya’s responsibilities started to change in 2017 when mass detentions quickly increased across Xinjiang. China had begun its crackdown – nicknamed “Strike Hard” – three years earlier, claiming it was necessary to combat terrorism.
She was ordered to monitor 60 families and report specific information about them including whether they owned religious materials, Uyghur or Kazakh literature, or goods from foreign countries. Even chocolate and soap were banned if they came from outside of China.
“We would write down their names… and send the list up the chain,” she said.
But Gulpiya realised something was wrong when people in those households started to disappear.
“[At first] I didn’t know why I had to make this list, but now, I realise that based on such information, a decision would be made at a more senior level about what to do with these people.”
“They were so scared of me because if I reported them up the chain, they would be finished,” she said. “But there was nothing I could do.”
Anyone with links to the foreign world could be detained as a “terrorist”.
By the end of that year, Gulpiya’s mother, Anarkhan Qanetbek, disappeared after three police officers bundled her into a car at a relative’s wedding.
“We didn’t know why she was detained, or where she had gone; we didn’t even have a right to ask where she was,” Gulpiya said. “Many of my siblings are also government employees, and I think they took our mother to control us, to pressure us.”
Indeed, anybody who refused to obey orders or opposed the government crackdown died or disappeared.
“Some would even die on the job and nobody knew why,” she said. “We weren’t allowed to question it.”
Eight months later, Gulpiya received a phone call, ordering her to visit a hospital. When she arrived, she found her mother shackled to a bed. Shortly before she disappeared, Anarkhan had been diagnosed with a brain tumour, and her health was failing.
Gulpiya didn’t have much time with her mother – Chinese authorities only wanted her to pay for 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.
A year later, Gulpiya’s brother rang.
‘They took our mother to control us, to pressure us. We didn’t even have a right to ask where she was’
Court representatives had visited him to say that their mother had been sentenced to 12 years for praying.
Gulpiya herself had become familiar with these harrowing visits. She too had been tasked with informing families of these prison sentences. Sometimes, she was even present when Chinese security dragged people from their homes.
Once, she was unable to hold back her tears as she watched police arrest a young man in his 20s.
“That day I couldn’t control myself anymore,” she said. I wanted to cry, and to embrace them, because I’m a mother, too. But I wasn’t allowed to cry in front of them like that.”
“We all know those people didn’t really break the law,” she said. “And the elderly – how could they really be committing crimes?”
A few times, Gulpiya even had to enter “re-education” camps to check up on the detained members of the 60 families she and her colleagues had been responsible for monitoring.
“I could see my supervisor was also scared to go, even though he was Han Chinese [ethnic majority],” she said.
Government officials from Beijing also visited Xinjiang about once a quarter to monitor work done by Gulpiya and others – evidence, she believes, that the most senior level of the ruling Communist Party knew exactly what was happening.
Chinese propaganda has since claimed that local officials in Xinjiang took things too far – a way to scapegoat them as global condemnation grew – and that the central government would get things under control.
As time passed and the crackdown showed no signs of letting up, Gulpiya realised she and her family had no choice but to flee China.
She applied for a passport from the Chinese government, saying she wished to seek treatment in Kazakhstan. This was more or less true – Gulpiya had suffered from heart issues and had been hospitalised in the past.
But even the act of requesting a passport could be considered a crime, punishable by being thrown in “camp”.
In the end, the authorities approved the passports for her, her husband and their children– but only after she signed a declaration that she wouldn’t tell anyone outside of China what she’d seen in Xinjiang.
Unknown to Gulpiya at the time, international pressure was growing against China over its “re-education” camps. The government was trying to whitewash the horrors by releasing some people and allowing others to leave the country – if they pledged to stay quiet about what they knew.
In May 2019, Gulpiya and her family left their home hours before dawn, heading west to Kazakhstan.
“All the way, I was in fear. I thought that the police would chase after me, and force me back,” she said.
The minute Gulpiya set foot in Kazakhstan, tears began streaming down her face.
Despite having 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 just so happy to be here [in Kazakhstan].”
And it was a relief to no longer have to worry about what would happen to her children if she had been detained.
Gulpiya now runs a small tea shop on the outskirts of Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, and campaigns relentlessly for the Chinese government to free her elderly mother.
Beijing still tries to intimidate her into silence. Authorities visit her siblings in China near-daily and have threatened to have Gulpiya kidnapped and brought back into China.
“People might wonder why we didn’t try to save people,”she said. “How can you save someone if you yourself are being persecuted?”