THE CHIEF WITNESS
ESCAPE FROM CHINA’S MODERN-DAY CONCENTRATION CAMPS
Sayragul Sauytby, a member of the Muslim Kazakh ethnic minority, was a doctor born to a Kazakh herder and bred in China’s north-western province of Xinjiang. In 2016 the authorities cracked down on the Kazakhs and Uighurs, destroying homes and holy places and herding them into ‘re-education’ camps. In a short lull in political controls, her husband and children fled to Kazakhstan, while she was forced into one of the camps and ordered to teach Chinese culture and language to the inmates. Temporarily released, she bribed her way into Kazakhstan to join her family, and they eventually gained political asylum and a new life in Sweden, where she has written what Publishers Weekly described as this ‘harrowing’ account of life in the camps, in which ‘Muslim detainees were force-fed pork, beaten for speaking their native languages, subjected to medical experiments and even “disappeared” for organ harvesting’.
Edward Lucas in the Times described her life as a testament to the power of stubbornness – in her ‘seeking an education and career in her remote rural birthplace; in pursuing professional success in the face of Chinese chauvinism; in retaining her sanity in the camp; and in her successful struggle to prevent her extradition back to China’. She admits that her memory has fragmented under the strain and she ‘sometimes confuses events, dates and places’. This, says Lucas, sometimes ‘makes her story less convincing than it could be’.
Michael Sheridan however pointed out in the Sunday Times that ‘Facts about what is going on in Xinjiang are notoriously hard to pin down’, and ‘It is only through accounts such as this that the world can sift the evidence for itself.’ Lucas described how Sauytbay’s ‘health is ruined, menacing phone calls tell her to shut up and the authorities send her sister and mother to the camps to underline their point’. ‘It’s my fault,’ she writes. ‘No,’ Lucas emphatically concludes. ‘It’s not.’