MY JOURNEY WITH the Uyghur people began in 1985 when I accepted a teaching position at Xinjiang University in Urumqi, a regional capital on China’s far western border. My wife and I made many friends during our seven years there. The Uyghur, an ethnic Turkic people of 12 million, are predominantly Muslim and live in the only Muslim-majority area in China, called the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (by China) or East Turkestan (by the Uyghur and Kazakh peoples).
In 2017, we were greatly distressed to hear credible reports that the Chinese government was interning citizens in (what the government calls) “reeducation” camps. As many as a million people have been detained in 300 to 400 facilities in Xinjiang province, according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, including “political education” camps (part of a 70-year program of forced cultural assimilation), pretrial detention centers, and prisons. Detainees are subjected to torture, cultural and political indoctrination, and forced labor. The U.S. Holocaust Museum says this state-sponsored violence meets the threshold for genocide and crimes against humanity. Friends and colleagues have disappeared.
In May, I met Uyghur poet, linguist, and human rights activist Abduweli Ayup on a Zoom call. Ayup spent 15 months in Chinese prisons for his defense of Uyghur linguistic culture. On our call, he told the terrible story of his failure to save from the camps his 30-year-old niece, Mihriay, who taught Uyghur children in the Chinese education system.
Early in 2019, two years into China’s concentration camp era, Mihriay’s parents told her they were in danger because of Ayup’s activism. Mihriay asked her uncle, “Do you want me to die? You are between two stones, and they are squeezing me.” Ayup told her that he would not stop his activism. His niece responded by refusing to talk to him. Shortly after, her father Erkin—Ayup’s brother—was “disappeared,” rumored to be held in a concentration camp in Kashgar in the predominantly Uyghur area of south-ern Xinjiang.
In May 2019, Mihriay called her uncle from the plane. She was returning to Kashgar amid the genocide. While afraid for her, Ayup’s advice was, “Don’t betray yourself. Keep your dignity. Throw away your cell phone after you land.” A year and a half later, Ayup received news that Mihriay had died in the same detention center where he had been incarcerated. Mihriay’s arrest was part of a larger campaign by local government authorities against participants in a 2013 Uyghur linguistics conference, presumably for the promotion of Uyghur language education. Ayup estimates that 72 participants in the conference have been arrested by the Chinese authorities. He hopes that Mihriay’s death will bring renewed attention to the hundreds of Uyghur intellectuals unjustly imprisoned by the Chinese government.
As activism has blossomed in streets across the United States to address unjust deaths, many of us are learning the biblical practice of lament, an anguished cry reaching up to God, and learning to enter the stories of our neighbors. Can we do the same for Mihriay and with our Uyghur and Kazakh neighbors in China?
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