‘I was wrong to think Cairo was safe for Uyghurs’

Twenty years after fleeing China for Egypt, member of Muslim minority reveals how state still harasses him

The police tugged a black hood over Seypiddin’s head, shoved him into a car and sped away. Locked in solitary confinement in China, he was interrogated daily about his activities as a student in Egypt – who he’d met, what he’d done.

Officers threatened his parents to make him co-operate. They hinted he might otherwise someday die in an “accident” – a car crash, food poisoning. Sometimes, he’d hear people screaming from other cells.

“There were days I thought about killing myself. I was under so much pressure,” said Seypiddin, a Uyghur whose name has been changed to protect his identity.

A month later, he was released as suddenly as he’d been detained.

“I desperately wanted to get away; I was so afraid I might be brought in and interrogated again,” he said. China “no longer felt like home anymore. It felt like one big prison.” Seypiddin raced back to Cairo, hoping to be free from the Chinese state. He never dared to return home again.

It was 2004, and he was 28 – years before China’s crackdown accelerated against the Uyghurs, an ethnic Muslim minority, prompting the US government and UK Parliament to call it a genocide.

Indeed, this was just Seypiddin’s first brush with the authorities. Over nearly two decades, they would continue to haunt him, though he was thousands of miles away from China.

Even after obtaining asylum in Europe, Seypiddin, now 46, still doesn’t feel free. In recent months, the Chinese police have been harassing him, calling and sending messages asking about his activities. “I can’t really believe that we’ve come here, and I don’t yet feel strong emotional relief,” he said from his new home, over a plentiful spread of apples, biscuits, tea and noodles.

More than a million Uyghurs have been penned in extralegal “reeducation” camps by the Chinese state in the north-west region of Xinjiang, with detainees subject to torture including beatings and electrocution.

The Daily Telegraph has uncovered evidence that China, under international pressure, has scaled back some of the camps from around 2020.

But some detainees have been shuffled into other parts of a vast system – for instance, sentenced to prison for religious “crimes”, such as studying the Koran, or put in a forced labour programme. Others have been coerced into work for little or no pay.

Some have been released, though Xinjiang residents have indicated that they feel they are watched constantly by facial recognition cameras, police and informants.

Eighteen years ago, before surveillance technology proliferated, Seypiddin already felt he had lost his freedom. After landing back in Cairo, he was called periodically by Chinese police officers, asking him to report his whereabouts and interactions with other Uyghurs.

Often the calls would come after he had socialised with Uyghur friends in Egypt, a sign, he thinks, that the Chinese secret police were monitoring the diaspora.

Spying on the Uyghur community in Egypt had been a condition of Seypiddin’s release from solitary confinement, and the police offered him a job after he finished studies abroad. Seypiddin played along, in order to get his passport back to flee China for good.

So he dutifully took their calls and gave vague answers for about a year, before finding the courage to toss his phone in favour of a new number.

For a while, the harassment stopped. He learnt Arabic, married, had children, and earned enough as a small-time trader selling prayer rugs and Korans from Egypt to China.

Sometimes he’d chauffeur Uyghurs who visited Egypt for tourism and business. But the Chinese authorities kept coming back.

In 2011, when his wife, Ayshe – also a pseudonym – and children went home to Xinjiang for her brother’s wedding, their relatives started getting calls from the police.

Officers wanted them to hand over their passports, forcing them into hiding – a challenge with a newborn. Eventually, they managed to flee back to Egypt.

In the years that followed, it became harder to stay in touch with relatives at home. By 2016, calls no longer connected, and he feared trying to get in touch by other means would put them at risk. Soon, “mass arrests started at home, so I was afraid to contact them and they were afraid to do the same”, he said.

Sending money to relatives abroad, visiting other countries and having Whatsapp on a phone was enough for the authorities to lock up Uyghurs.

Seypiddin’s sister and brother-inlaw were detained and sent to camps.

Some of his Uyghur friends in Egypt, put under pressure by Chinese authorities to return – and surely face arrest – began fleeing to Turkey. But Seypiddin stayed put.

“I didn’t believe the Egyptian government would sell us to the Chinese,” he said. “I was sure that China wasn’t actually that strong, that there was no way they could reach me.” He was wrong. In 2017, Egyptian authorities started rounding up and deporting Uyghurs to China.

Seypiddin and his family happened to be out during the first raids. In fact, he was nearly home when he saw Uyghurs being herded into a police truck in the street and got a call from a friend warning him to stay away.

An Egyptian officer looked straight at him, telling him to get out of the way. “It was pure coincidence based on how we looked,” said Seypiddin, who could pass for Egyptian, with his shaved head and moustache. For the next five years, they were in hiding, living in constant fear, and moving 10 times to avoid being detected.

Seypiddin tossed anything that might give them away – embroidered Uyghur textiles, traditional hats, called doppa. But he couldn’t let go of everything, insisting his children continue studying the Uyghur language with a tutor online. “Egypt was my new homeland. I had felt free and safe…my children were going to good schools,” said Seypiddin. “To lose that hit me very heavily.” The more time that passed, the more danger Seypiddin and his family faced as deportation targets, though that pushed to the top of the pile his asylum claim, granted last year.

On a recent call with his brother, Seypiddin held up a piece of paper saying they were safe in Europe; he didn’t dare utter the words given pervasive surveillance. His brother – who sometimes calls from other parts of China as his job occasionally allows him to leave Xinjiang – cried. Seypiddin’s mother died a few years ago, potentially because of health complications from her detention – though he did not learn of her death until much later given the communications blackout.

And he suspects his father has been detained again – his brother said he had been taken “to hospital”, a euphemism among Uyghurs for being locked up.

“These last years have been very tough,” Seypiddin said. “I’m completely exhausted.”

‘Egypt was my new homeland. I had felt free and safe. To lose that hit me very heavily’