A Canadian couple who have lived in the Xinjiang region for more than 10 years attended a symposium on “Exposing the Uighur Genocide” at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. They described witnessing the persecution of Uighurs by the Chinese authorities, describing it as a place of no joy and fear.
Gary and Andrea Dyck, who have lived in Urumqi, Xinjiang, since 2008, said that when the July 5 incident in Urumqi occurred in 2009, they really thought it was a terrorist riot that led to the crackdown and felt unsafe before moving to Turpan. The couple, who are fluent in Mandarin and Uyghur, set up a social enterprise in Turpan to manufacture fertilizer for sale to local farmers, and the family’s circle of friends is mostly ordinary working Uyghurs.
Gary Decker says the atmosphere has been different since 2016, and since 2017, the streets have been filled with police and public security, with “eyes in the sky” watching everywhere. “There are several security roadblocks on my drive to work, surveillance cameras and facial recognition devices everywhere. Once I saw a man accidentally tripped over a police officer’s foot and was strangled and dragged into the police station, everyone pretended not to see it because they were afraid the police would be watching them.”
There are several so-called “re-education camps” in Xinjiang, one within a 10-minute drive of the Dykes’ home, and it’s not uncommon to hear about families who have been arrested and taken into the camps, causing panic. My son’s classmates were afraid to grow up to be 18 and that they would be taken to a re-education camp,” Andrea Decker said. Muslim women are forced to take off their headscarves and show their hair in public, which makes them feel ashamed, so they don’t want to go out. Even the alarm in our neighborhood would ring at 6 a.m., waking everyone up, and then a few minutes later, the police would come to the house to check if everyone was in the house and ask, “Are you happy?”
The Deckers say it’s really ironic, how can you be happy in such a police state, with a concentration camp right next to your house? Because life was already full of tension and fear, and because they were worried that being foreigners would bring down their local friends, they left China and returned to Canada in 2018. Seeing that more Uyghurs have been persecuted in the past two years, they decided to stop being silent and help the local people make their voices heard.
The Canadian Museum for Human Rights, which is under the jurisdiction of the federal government, also invited German scholar Zheng Guoyen to explain the plight of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang at a symposium on “Exposing the Uyghur Genocide” held on the 22nd. Zheng said that the Chinese government’s strategy for the Uighurs in Xinjiang is to “break the bloodline and break the roots. “The first is to separate parents and children, the second is forced labor, transferring them to work in other provinces, and the third is birth control, forcing women to have birth control implants or sterilization. Local schools, even kindergartens, are equipped with barbed wire and monitors, trying to control by any means possible.”
Mehmet Tohti, president of the Uyghur Congress of Canada, said at the symposium that this persecution has also deeply affected Canada, and that he recently learned of a Uyghur man who immigrated to Canada in 2003 and has reached the final stage of his life, whose only wish is to see his daughter, whom he has been unable to see for more than a decade, but the Chinese government has prevented them from seeing each other and now has to write letters of representation to The Chinese government has prevented them from seeing each other, and now they can only write letters of representation to Immigration and Foreign Affairs Canada. “He wants to see his daughter one last time before he dies, but after a long struggle, the Chinese authorities are unwilling to issue his daughter a passport, forcing his flesh and blood to be separated from him. This is not one or two cases like this, it is a plight suffered by almost all Uighur communities in Canada.”
Mohamed Toddy is pleased that both Canada and Britain, one after another, are acknowledging that the Uighurs in Xinjiang face genocide, but says this is only a first step and hopes for more international sanctions and pressure on China.
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