This Manitoba couple lived in Xinjiang for 10 years. They can no longer
stay silent about what they saw
The Star (Toronto, Ontario) Online
April 21, 2021 Wednesday
Byline: Joanna Chiu Jeremy Nuttall
VANCOUVER-The two Canadians were walking down a sidewalk in their
neighbourhood in Turpan, a city in China's northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur
Autonomous Region, when everyone seemed to freeze.
A Uyghur man had accidentally tripped over a police officer's foot.
The man, who was in his 30s, grimaced and looked stricken about the
misstep. The officer flew into a rage and grabbed the man around his
neck with two hands, dragging him to one of the many police stations at
every major intersection.
No one dared look.
All around the street, everyone averted their eyes, and some even
plastered a smile on their faces.
"People were pretending not to see. Everyone acted calm, because nobody
wanted to be noticed by police, too," Andrea Dyck recalled of the 2017
incident.
Andrea and her husband Gary, who are both from small towns in Manitoba,
had lived in Xinjiang for almost 10 years by that point. They were
fluent in Uyghur and Mandarin, and their social group was made up of
mostly Uyghur families and "ordinary office workers."
After stints with poverty alleviation NGOs in Central Asia, the couple
had set up a social enterprise in Turpan that processed agricultural
waste and sold compost to local farmers.
They are now speaking out about the horrors they witnessed, when around
them, an estimated million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities were
forcibly taken to internment camps for "re-education."
Pressure has been mounting on the Chinese Communist Party over what some
governments, including the United States, have declared an ongoing
genocide of Uyghur and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang. In February,
Canada's House of Commons passed a motion recognizing genocide is taking
place there; the motion passed 266-0 with the Liberal cabinet abstaining.
Now the Dycks have decided to speak about their 10 years in Xinjiang and
how a massive clampdown on the Uyghur population eventually drove them
to leave.
When the roadblocks and extra security measures first appeared, some of
the Dycks' acquaintances believed the Chinese government was genuinely
trying to root out terrorists, and that the heightened security
checkpoints at every major road would protect Uyghurs, too.
After all, the Canadian family was living in the capital of Xinjiang,
Urumqi, in 2009 when violent riots broke out on the streets between
Uyghurs and people of China's majority ethnic group, Han Chinese.
Out of a 16th-storey apartment window, they looked down as clouds of
dust swept up from crowds below, and an American friend rushed in to
warn the family not to go outside. People were attacking each other with
makeshift weapons and knives.
Authorities blocked international media from verifying the numbers of
victims of the clashes, and Chinese officials said nearly 200 people
died, mostly Han Chinese. Many Uyghurs disappeared in police sweeps
following the riots, and seemingly overnight, the Dycks watched the
security presence ramp up around the remote western region of China to
scarcely believable proportions.
"Every restaurant had a scanning machine. We had to walk by police
guards just to buy tomatoes," Gary said.
The couple were speaking to the Star ahead of a public virtual event on
Thursday hosted by the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.
"We noticed racial tensions before, but after the (riots), it just
exploded. Hans and Uyghurs did not trust each other, and police acted
like a terrorist attack was going to happen at any moment," he said,
recalling an incident where a police officer berated his colleague for
sneaking away from his post to grab a cold Pepsi on a hot day.
Police vans soon seemed to circle city blocks non-stop.
Andrea said they started seeing less of their friends because of daily
flag-raising ceremonies which every Uyghur in their community had to
attend, where Muslim women had to take off their head scarves.
"They had never been in public with their hair exposed before, and were
covering their faces in shame," she said.
"There were also daily propaganda meetings at workplaces, and our
friends were very tired and had no energy to respond to what was happening."
One of their friends who worked at a government office was forced to
sleep in her office each night. She wasn't allowed to leave to cook
dinner for her son who had returned from boarding school on a holiday.
Then came hushed whispers of people disappearing, being taken to
internment camps. The Dycks were the only resident foreigners in the
area, and because they were such outsiders, Uyghur friends trusted them
with their stories.
"One woman I know had a sister who was taken to a camp because of an
international trip she did as a tourist years before. She was the
primary caregiver for her elderly parents and sibling's children. When
she was gone, the whole family structure fell apart," Andrea said.
"We could see one camp from the road we lived on ... just 10 minutes
down our street."
The compound was surrounded by walls at least 15 feet high, with
security cameras and a single entrance with multiple gates. Razor wire
could be seen along the wall surrounding the courtyard.
They estimate that in Turpan's surrounding farming villages, around a
third of farmers were either taken to the camps, or forced to take jobs
in other parts of China far away from their families, by mid-2018.
Uyghur farmers had made up their customer base for compost sales.
The couple decided to be part of Thursday's panel following increased
pressure on the Chinese government about Xinjiang and more accounts of
what has been happening inside the region coming to light.
On Monday, the NGO Human Rights Watch released a report into events in
Xinjiang titled "Break Their Lineage, Break Their Roots," the title
taken from a religious affairs official quoted on a social media page
belonging to China's state-run news outlet, Xinhua.
The report, and other accounts, have estimated in recent years more than
one million Uyghurs and other Turkic people have been sent to up to 400
facilities after being arbitrarily detained. Once there they are subject
to torture, forced labour and other abusive treatment, the report says.
"The oppression continues outside the detention facilities," it reads.
"The Chinese authorities impose on Turkic Muslims a pervasive system of
mass surveillance, controls on movement, arbitrary arrest and enforced
disappearance, cultural and religious erasure, and family separation."
It said in 2017, according to Chinese government statistics, arrests in
Xinjiang amounted to 21 per cent of all arrests in China despite the
region only being home to 1.5 per cent of the population.
Other accounts told to international media and a Canadian Parliamentary
committee detailed torture and sexual assaults against those detained.
Political indoctrination was also a staple function of the camps.
China has insisted they are merely vocational training centres, but
their presence looms large over the people of Xinjiang who are
constantly threatened with being sent to them if they step out of line,
the Dycks said.
The amount of arrests, Andrea said, caused her teenage son's friends in
Xinjiang to fear turning 18, believing they could be hauled away to a
camp for any reason at any time.
Many young men would post photos of themselves smoking or drinking on
social media attempting to distance themselves from perceptions about
Muslims, she said.
"Just watching those boys be terrified of turning 18 years old was very
hard to watch," Andrea said. "They're at risk of being taken to camps.
And they know it."
After 10 years of living in the region, opening a business and learning
two languages, the Dycks decided to return to Canada.
It wasn't just the increasing security measures making everyday life a
hassle spurring their departure, such as a once five-minute trip to the
market now taking 20 minutes; they began to fear they were putting
Uyghurs they knew in danger for being associated with foreigners.
Talking about their final days in the region before leaving in May 2018,
tears begin to well up as the two share the same overpowering memory of
leaving.
"Everybody said, 'don't forget us,' " Andrea said. "As though us
remembering them was a way to help them keep existing."
Jeremy Nuttall is a Vancouver-based investigative reporter for the Star.
Follow him on Twitter: @Nuttallreports
Joanna Chiu is a Vancouver-based reporter covering both Canada-China
relations and current affairs on the West Coast for the Star. Follow her
on Twitter: @joannachiu
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