I'm Ayesha Rasko, and this is the Sunday Story. A couple of years ago, we air two episodes by NPR's international correspondent, Emily Fang. They were about an ethnic Uyghur family struggling to survive a brutal crackdown by the Chinese state.

I've experienced unbelievably difficult days.

I do not know whether it's a test from God or what.

This is Abdulatief Kuchar. In her series, Emily tells the story of how Chinese authorities detained his wife and his young children. Kuchar spent years trying to get his family back. Since then, Emily has kept reporting on Uyghurs like the Kutxar family, and she joins us today to talk about some of her latest work and the revealing view it gives us into how the Chinese government has been targeting Uyghurs. Emily, thank you for being here today.

Thank you so much for having me, Ayesha.

Emily, you've spent years reporting on the oppression and violence Uyghurs experience in China's Xinjiang region. The United Nations has warned that the arbitrary and discriminatory detentions ethnic minorities faced there may constitute crimes against humanity. Why is China doing this?

It's a great question, and it starts with the fact that Uyghurs make up just under half of Xinzhan's population. They speak their own language, which is completely different from Mandarin Chinese. If they're religious, they usually practice Islam. But the Chinese authorities that control the Xinjiang region are mainly ethnic Han, that is China's ethnic majority. They want to reshape Xinjiang into a region that's more Chinese in their eyes. So they've been imprisoning tens of thousands of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities by saying that they are a national security threat.

I would imagine that something like this is not easy to report on.

You are absolutely right. Uyghurs outside of China are afraid to speak out, and China does not let many foreign journalists into the country. And that's why you are in China. Authorities there often intimidate and surveil journalists when they try to report on Uyghur-related issues. But in my reporting, I've had help making contacts through an important source, a Uyghur writer and activist.

My name is Abduweli Ayup. I'm from Kashkar, and I am living in Norway right now.

Abduweli fled China after spending 15 months in prison in Shinjiang for starting a Uyghur language school. He's a very well-known intellectual, which is how I met him, and he has a talent for convincing people who otherwise might be too scared or too suspicious to speak to the media. But even with Opdueli's help, sometimes sources we've been talking to have gone strangely silent. And that led me into what's become this story. It's a meta story about people who work to silence stories, some of whom have felt silenced themselves, and how they help perpetuate and justify systems they know are wrong.

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I'm Ayesha Rosco, and this is a Sunday story. We're back with NPR's Emily Fange, and a story about the people helping China purposefully or inadvertently crack down on the Uyghurs. Emily, you spoke with two men, Uyghurs themselves, who you say silence to other Uyghurs. So where do we start with this?

I want to start with a man who's known as a a fixer for Uyghurs living in Turkey, where many Uyghurs have relocated. He is a powerful Uyghur businessman, rumored to have close ties to Chinese authorities. And people who are desperate for help, reconnecting with family and with associates in China, they come to him. He is a man known to make things happen, but he's also rumored to request things in return, like silence, as in, don't speak out against the government I'll see what I can do. He's tried to silence at least one of my sources before. So I had to wonder, who is this man and why does he do what he does? Is he a spy for China? I had lots of questions, and it turns It turns out my contact, the activist Abduweli Ayup, knows about him. This guy's name, Abduweli told me, is Saber Bagda.

Saber is one of the most famous Uyghur around the world.

With, Abduweli says, a huge public presence.

I have seen him on the screen. I have read articles even about him, and I heard a lot of rumors about him.

Rumors about his ability to work with Chinese government officials.

Because he is the one that easily get visa from Chinese embassy.

This is apparently one of Saper's magic powers. He's able to obtain visas for Uyghurs hoping to get back into China. Since China's crackdown, it's been almost impossible for Uyghurs to leave China or to return. But Saber floats between these worlds, and he promises others the same opportunity.

To save their family members and they helped them because he can back and forth between China and Turkey, between Istanbul and Ürimchi.

One Uyghur guy I talked to who was having trouble getting his Chinese passport renewed, remembers Saber went swipping out his phone, calling a Chinese diplomat, and fixing the problem within the week. So that's what we knew about Saber, but we never met him in person or been able to talk to him. Then last fall, Saber, out of the blue, reached out. So we headed to Istanbul. Turkey is now home to an estimated 50,000 Uyghurs, including many who have fled the crackdown in China. Abdueli met Saber first at his office, and later I met him at an upscale restaurant in Istanbul. Saber is tall, thin, dapper, and very charismatic. Almost immediately after we sat down, he launched into his backstory. He says he first left China in 1998 and came to Turkey as a student.

When I first arrived in Istanbul, Uyghurs were scarce in numbers.

But there were plenty of opportunities for Saber. While still a student, he also became an entrepreneur.

During that period, I juggled business ventures alongside my college studies, frequently traveling between Central Asia and Turkey. Specifically, I was involved in antler and copper trade restaurants, which were thriving industries at the time.

He says he made a ton of money, but his real claim to fame in Istanbul was a Chinese restaurant he opened called the Golden Dragon.

This restaurant, Nurgun, Our restaurant has attracted celebrities like Sophia Loren and Jackie Chan, as well as hosted heads of state.

If a patron didn't spend at least $50 on food, then we wouldn't even look them in the face.

The restaurant also became a hotspot gathering place for Turkish and Chinese government officials. I met several Uyghurs in Turkey who described meeting Saber there for business and running into Chinese officials. In 2010, Saber set up a nonprofit organization in Istanbul called the Turkish Uyghur Industrialists and Entrepreneurs Association, which promotes Shinja, how great it and tries to drum up investment in the region. Just a few weeks after the organization's launch, Saber, as its President, got to meet with the then Chinese Premier, Windabao, who was in Turkey on a state visit. Saber says he took the meeting has a chance to press for greater rights for Uyghur people in China. He says he told the Premier about the embarrassing interrogations he'd suffered when trying to enter China and emphasized how common this is.

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All Uyghur people living around the world face the same problem at the Chinese border. It's unfair to treat Uyghurs like this upon entering the country.

Saberz continued traveling to China, and meeting with officials despite the crackdown in Shinja. He maintains that open lines of communication with the Chinese state actually helped the Uyghur people.

.

This is a problem, a problem that could be solved through dialog in a formal manner over many years. It can be addressed through dialog and negotiation done in the right way.

Saber says he does not take sides in this conflict, but he's repeated false claims about Uyghurs on Turkish media. In 2020, he said COVID was the reason Uyghurs were not allowed to leave China or contact their relatives, but he never mentioned the state crackdown.

I don't view China as a problematic country. In Turkey, we might see things that are different as normal. China's political structure has its limitations, and it may resort to aggressive actions for certain issues.

I consider this normal.

The truth is, it's impossible to really know where Saber stands. Is he trying to help the weaker people, or is being used as a pawn by the Chinese state. Abduwali says not having those answers creates mistrust.

If you do something underlyingly, people feel suspicious and people will not trust each other. People suspect that, Are you working with Chinese government? Are you working for Chinese government?

This does happen. Some Uyghurs have said they're asked by Chinese police officers to spy on other Uyghurs in Turkey. And suspicion is rife among the Uyghur diaspora about potential spies and informants lurking in their midst. For example, right after Wun Zia Bao, that Chinese premiere visited Turkey, a second Uyghur businessman told me he received a phone call. It was from a young, low-level Chinese diplomat who was ethnically Uyghur. And this Chinese diplomat politely asked the businessman to start a second branch of the organization operations Saber began in Istanbul. The Chinese diplomat said they wanted eyes on the ground in every Turkish city. China regularly sets up surveillance operations to monitor diaspora and dissonant groups abroad in the US and the United Kingdom, for example. And Turkey is no exception. This businessman told me, however, that he said no. In his interview with us, Saber hedged when asked about whether he worked with China, whether it spied on Uyghurs, and he even suggested Uyghurs were in part to blame for their predicament.

We often place all the blame on China, on various factors, on America, on Turkey. But as Uyghurs, are we completely innocent?

And Saber was really skillful in sidestepping every question loved at him about whether he's a spy. He does not deny he works with Chinese officials. After all, Chinese state media reports show he's been an official representative at political meetings in Beijing for at least two years and met at least several times with officials from China's United Front. That's the Communist Party body tasked with co-opting dissident groups outside China. But for Uyghurs, desperate to connect with family inside China, Saber is a lifeline, in large part because he has this unusual access. So what are Saber's motivations? To this day, Abduel and I still don't totally understand.

I wanted to believe. I still want to believe he has done something good. I should be fair that he has done nothing harmful to the people. From his description and from my understanding, from my knowledge, people asked him help, and then he helped. But we don't know the motivation. So that secret, the lobbying, is harmful to bigger society because you can't tell what you have done. To the people. But I don't have evidence to prove this. I don't believe something without evidence.

I reached out to the Chinese government, seeking information on Saber Bagda and his relationship to China. My questions went unanswered. When I met Saber in Istanbul in October 2023, he was preparing to lead another delegation of Uyghur businessmen from Turkey to China, and dozens of Uyghurs had tried to sign up. Saber had given the Chinese Foreign Ministry a list of Uyghur men, and Beijing got to handpick the people they wanted to come. Those who were selected were guaranteed safe passage in and out of China. But there is a cost to going.

Spying is too big of a word for what these people do.

This is M, another Uyghur businessman who desperately wanted to be included in Sabre's delegation, despite knowing it might mean he'd get approached by Chinese authorities.

The Chinese Security and State Security bureaus contact Uyghur businessmen and threaten them, and asked them to pass on information about the Uyghur people around them, where they live and what they do for work.

M left his hometown of Urumji. That's Jinjiang's capital in 2015, after a lot of his friends were detained, which is why M did not want to be named in this story. His family in Xinjiang has come under a lot of state pressure because he now lives abroad. Yet after nearly For eight years in Turkey, M still misses China. His life's work was there, including his business.

Normal logic dictates we shouldn't have any contact with Chinese people. But we only know how to work with Chinese people. We have no other options. Turkey is even worse. We've all gone bankrupt working with people here because we do not know how to work here.

We have to keep up contacts with China.

Among us Uyghur businessmen, more than 99% of us still have links to China.

Which is why M wanted to go on Sabre's trip to China, despite the risk of having to pass on information to the state.

Our tragedy is that we have to live. Survival is our biggest priority. We have families, children. We need to survive.

I used to criticize the Uyghur people for not being united against the Chinese, but I learned the hard way that to survive.

We have to have contact with China and do bad things.

But in the end, M was rejected. He was not allowed to enter China. He does not know why, and he's reeling. Chinese business partners he's worked with for years have abandoned him because they think they could get in trouble by associating associating with him.

All it takes is one phone call from the local Chinese police.

They'll say, Don't work with so-and-so person, otherwise it'll bring trouble. All it takes is one call, and the other person will immediately cut ties with you. They can't ask why.

Still, M told me he does not fault Saber and other Uyghurs who keep up a two-way street with Beijing.

.

That's the biggest problem right now. In order to survive, they turn their backs on their own people.

I heard this again and again during my reporting in Turkey. People people do what they do to survive, and there are no easy Black and White moral choices to make. As for Saber, he never really explained why he'd reached out to us and wanted to talk. But by the end of our meeting with him, it seemed pretty clear he was just trying to justify what he does and how he does it. But justifications like that don't sit well with Abdueli. He's a writer and activist. He's taken a clear stand. Abdueli thinks the Uyghur people are in crisis, and engagement with the Chinese state is a betrayal.

People feel that they are on the battlefield at the war. At the war, we have only two sides. One, attack, another, defend themselves. At the time, it's really clear that who is who. If you commute between two sides, it's really obvious people feel who you are.

But one thing that stuck out to me during my years reporting on the ground in Xinjiang was this. There are a lot of Uyghurs in this position. A lot of the low-level staff enforcing China's crackdown are ethnic Uyghurs. I've always wondered how this Chinese police state in Xinjiang indoors, how it continues to keep Uyghurs outside China from speaking out, and also how it controls Uyghurs inside China, who comprise just under half of Xinjiang's population. China's success, it turns out, has a lot to do with the help it receives from people like Saber. In a moment, I'll tell you about one of those low-level enforcers. He's a Uyghur man who worked for the Chinese government in Xinjiang.

I knew in my heart that the government's policy was wrong.

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This is the Sunday Story. I'm Emily Fang with a story about complicity and China's crackdown on Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic groups. In Turkey, we met Saber, a powerful businessman with ties to China. He insists he's helping Uyghurs by keeping good relations with the Chinese authorities. He has no regrets about working within the system China has established. I met another man who at first sounds a lot like Saber. He was sympathetic to the Chinese government and thought he was helping in the work he was assigned. But over time, he changed his mind, and his story ends in a very different place from Saber's. Abdoulay Ayyup first met this man in Istanbul, where the man now lives. We got to know him at a Uyghur run restaurant in the city. The owners pulled some curtains around us to give us privacy, and then served us steaming plates of Palo, a rice pilaf beloved by Uyghurs.

We can make an order.

But also with Dumpling is okay. We're calling this man by first initial only, A, because he also has family left in China, whose safety he worries about. A tells us it's been a long journey to Turkey. Back in China, he says he trained as a teacher, then got a job in his hometown in the local government. Most of his work was administrative. He registered marriages and divorces, maintained land records and registrations and things like that. But in 2014, A started to notice something different happening. He began to get a lot of new assignments at work and requests to do overtime.

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Since mid-2014, working groups were formed. We don't get breaks anymore at work. We can't even ask for one.

And part of A's new role was to report Uyghurs who appeared to be practicing Muslims.

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We were sent to surveil the Uyghur farmers, for example, to see if there were abnormal situations, such as if they had a beard or not. At the beginning, actually, the government didn't say that they had to get rid of their beards altogether, nor did they tell Uyghurs to take off their long religious robes. They were very soft in their tone, and they said that they should change their long clothes to shorter ones.

In 2016, it fell on aid to notify working adults that it was their turn to go to school and bring them from their home or workplace directly to what are essentially detention camps. These camps were part of a vast system China started rapidly expanding that year. Estimates from the US State Department, the UN, and investigative journalists show from 2017 to 2021, about 1 million to 3 million Uyghurs were detained. But the truth is, nobody really knows exactly how many were detained or how many camps were built. China euphemistically calls these camps schools because they're where Uyghur adults are sent for months or even years to be reeducated, in China's words, taught correct political thinking and forced to memorize Xi Jinping's speeches. But state procurement documents and satellite images of these camps show the schools have come to resemble correctional facilities with barbed wire, high walls, and guard towers, and people cannot leave. But at first, A was not too concerned about them.

I didn't pay close attention to it, such as who was taken there and how it was done.

When I attended the training, there weren't that many people.

A thought this was just another round of ideological campaigning. He'd experienced numerous ebbs and flows in how China controls Shinzhen, and he saw it as his duty to his fellow Uyghurs to implement state policy, basically to get whatever this is over with more quickly. And soon, A told us he got assigned a new job teaching at one of the detention camps. The school, as he calls it, was in the chilly northern mountain ranges of Xinjiang, and it had been built quickly out of once empty land. It was also run very strictly. Here's how A remembers the routine.

Every morning, summertime, around five o'clock, wintertime is 5:30, a bell's rung, like bells rung in military camps. After the bell rings, we all stand up, make our beds. You have 20 minutes to brush your teeth and wash your face and get on the field, where we did military-style drills, such as running in the field. Then we'd shout political slogans. There are a lot of them to be read. We do drills of turning left and right and pushups. Very hard military training.

A says he was assigned to help with the studying bit, teaching classes in Mandarin-Chinese language, in Xi Jinping's speeches, and in lessons against religious extremism. At first, he said he did his job with gusto.

During the session, I exerted my utmost effort because, in my opinion, terrorism is morally unjustifiable.

It is fundamentally wrong to take the lives of others. I was passionate about training them, encouraging them to pay attention to modern science and technology, democracy, and human rights. I emphasize how the bombings and terror attacks in Afghanistan were wrong and harmful to others. When I spoke of democracy and human rights, their hearts were deeply moved.

His students were forced to be there, though, remember. They were under pressure to show they'd reformed in some way in order to leave. A few months later, A was reassigned to a second detention camp near the city of Khorla, in Shin-Chung's north. This one built on the grounds of an actual middle school.

.

. I wanted to know exactly where both camps were. So he took a break from the interview and I pulled up Google Maps on my phone. A pointed to where he'd worked.

.

And both camps match exactly to two camps identified and confirmed by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, an Australian think tank. It was at the second camp that he was assigned to that A says he started doubting the work when he questioned the treatment of the detainees and whether he was complicit in all of it.

.

It was a man in the class, over 60 years old. Unfortunately, his responses were not as quick as the others. This elderly man struggled to write a reflection essay, and when he couldn't keep up, he was subjected to beatings with sticks and slaps by the teachers.

It pained me to see an elder treated this way.

There were seven or eight others like him who endured similar punishment. While some of them deliberately resisted the system and reacted poorly, he remained a well-behaved man. He would listen attentively, but his slower reactions left him behind. He was subject to harsh beating several times, and my heart ached for him. On the contrary, he deserved respect. In society or any community, everyone should have shown him respect and greeted him warmly.

A says he started trying to help the detainees out, helping the older residents remember their Chinese, snaking the younger ones extra eggs from his own breakfast because he knew they weren't getting as much food. But he also started to fear for his own safety. He the teachers and not just the students were being watched closely.

At that time, I had a sad feeling in my heart. But despite that, even if we knew what was happening was wrong in our hearts, I couldn't let the government know that I felt that way.

.

We had a boss that watched our every move. If they found out that we had emotions about what was going on, they would file a report on us.

As E told his story, Abduwali and I found it hard to understand how he could justify his work given what he was seeing. So I asked him why he kept teaching despite his doubts.

I thought that by working diligently, The number of students would decrease, and there would be no need for further training in the future.

Unfortunately, the exact opposite occurred. Some of the students I taught relinquished their hidden books and tapes. However, the government still maintained that their camp incarceration action was justified. That was when I experienced the most distress. I believed that through training, they would find liberation and no longer injure that treatment, but their numbers grew to a thousand.

And as the detention camps were filling up with Uyghurs, The economy tanked. With their owners or employees in detention, small businesses around Xinjiang began to fail. Chinese investors started pulling out because of the political instability, and A, who could no longer stand teaching at these camps, tried to find another stable source of income. One of the only jobs left, however, was in the police force. And so in 2019, he says he reluctantly became a police officer in Khorla.

.

If I don't work, someone else will take my place. If someone worse than me or less educated than me were hired, they might enforce police work more harshly, leading to further oppression of Uyghur people.

When we met, A showed me his police badge to verify his identity and former occupation. He says his hardest assignment as a police officer when he's asked to really prove his loyalty, came later in 2019. It was June, the Eid al-Fitr Festival, an important holiday on the Muslim calendar. And A is told to go to Cashgar, a city in the south of Xinjiang that's the heart of Uyghur culture. These Chinese state media videos from that day in Cashgar and around Shinżang show beautiful scenes of Uyghur life in the lead up to the holiday... There are video diaries of young Uyghur men and women preparing for Ramadan.

.

. And shots of these long rows of men bowing to prayer outside mosques. A is at one of those mosques, too, with about 30 children he's been asked to look after.

At the time of Eid, they tell us, This day is Eid. You should assign Uyghur police, three or four of them from one police station. Go to the mosques on the Eid mornings. We'll tell you what your assignments are when you get there. We bring with us 15 or 20 Uyghur officers to a station and another 15 are Chinese. Half Chinese, half Uyghur. They assigned three or four of us, mostly young officers, the ones without family. I was also assigned. We gathered in a hall of a big building in front of the mosque together on the day of Eid.

Eid tells the children he's brought to dance, to put on a show for reporters who are watching. To create this fiction of ethnic unity and that Uyghurs are free to celebrate religious holidays. Chinese state media broadcast videos of the dancing.

It seems that there were reporters everywhere. They took pictures and filmed the scene to show that we are living normally.

E says it was all staged by the government.

.

Later, we found out that those who came out of the mosque were retired Communist Party cadre who to organize some pro-government party members to pray at the mosque.

A laughs in disbelief as he recalls this event for us.

We witnessed with our own eyes that the government This document was propagandizing to the international community that religious rights were being protected here.

We requested comment from China's foreign Ministry, and in response Once, it sent a statement saying, Western media is, slandering China's governance policies in Xinjiang. It also said, the legal rights of the Uyghur ethnic group have been fully protected. We're still waiting for comment from the public security Ministry. But for A, what he saw at the mosque that day, it was his breaking point. He does not want to do this work anymore, and he started to look for ways out of Xinjiang. He It turns out if you can get a job outside of Shinjiang and you can register your identification card elsewhere, you might be able to apply for a passport and leave China. So he came up with a plan. He had a friend running a school trading to use computers in the southwestern Chinese city of Cheungdu, and his friend agreed to hire him as a teacher in 2020. Once he was outside of Shinzhan, A says he began to realize what a mental cage it had been working and living there, one he had helped to create. Since A's time in the camps, the security measures in the Xinjiang region appeared to have eased a bit, and China claims the camps have been closed.

But recent reports out of the region suggest many of the sites remain and detentions continue. When he reflects on his time teaching in the detention camps, A says he's struck by how easy it was to get people to turn on one another through fear alone.

We would gather a large number of people and tell them, If you confess, we'll give leniency and let you go..

If you don't confess, we will start arresting you in two or three days.

Then people would start coming to the station in droves to confess out of fear.

And that's all it took for people to panic.

. There was a feeling that the government knew everything they did.

So when a policeman arrested someone and asked them if he had done this or that, We knew he would confess everything he did since birth and give up four, five, or even seven or eight people to save himself.

In 2023, A managed to leave China using his new identity documents. For now, he's in Istanbul but hopes to settle elsewhere and start a new life. During our interview with A, I kept wondering what Abdueli thought of A's story. After all, Abdueli was jailed by people not unlike A. So I asked Abduweli, after we returned from our trip to Turkey, what it was like to hear from someone who had been on the other side in the camps.

He told me the story just like happened to somewhere else, not our hometown. Somebody else, not us.

With detachment, Abdueli means. A had described what had happened to him, but what bothered Abdueli is he had not taken any responsibility for what he had done.

I asked him one question that, How can you become a police after you stayed in the camp As a teacher, you have experienced those torture, those humiliations, those indoctrination. How can you become a police? He told me very naturally that, What can I do? That's the job I can found. I have to feed myself. I have to support my family. It reminded me this indoctrination work it really well. How people accepted the reality that easily.

Abduweli thought A, should repent.

Just confess what you have done. Just tell Tell me, it's wrong.

I think he does feel bad.

Yeah, of course. Of course, he does feel bad. But he told part of the truth, but not all of the truth.

Do you see this man as a victim himself?

Yes. He's a victim himself because he didn't realize what he has done is wrong. That's the biggest victimhood. How can you do this? How can you arrest your brothers and sisters? Yes, I can understand as a scholar, but I can't understand the victim. The Uyghur, he can't. No.

But this policeman did come forward. He did tell us his story, finally. I hope that in some way is a way for him to repent.

Yeah, he did. He did.

Abduweli says that's one step towards telling Uyghur stories to the world.

We have enough evidence, but we don't have enough people to tell the truth.

That was NPR correspondent Emily Fange, who reported this episode with translation help from Abduweli Ayyup. If you'd like to hear our first two stories about the Kutra family or a detailed history of the Uyghur people from our friends at the Thru-L Line podcast, we've linked to those episodes in our episode description. Adelina Lanceaniz produces episode. It was edited by Jenny Schmidt. Liana Semstrom is our supervising producer. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Dede Skanky and Vincent Nee of NPR's International Desk. Uyghur translations by Akita Juma. Uyghur Abdulah, Arselen Hidayet, special thanks to recorded the voiceovers you heard in this episode. Fact-checking by Will Chase, Mastering by Quaisi Lee. Thanks to our Managing Editor of Standards and Practices, Tony Caven, and to Micah Ratner for legal support, we appreciate We appreciate hearing from you, so feel free to reach out to us at theunday story@mpr. Org. Up First is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, enjoy the rest of your weekend. Want to hear this podcast without sponsor breaks? Amazon Prime members can listen to Up First, sponsor-free through Amazon on music. Or you can also support NPR's vital journalism and get Up First Plus at plus.

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