Two separate but compelling narratives, one a set of paintings, the other an interview to the Voice of America provide a graphic insight of the lives of ordinary Uyghur people living in Xinjiang today. Jamal, a Uyghur man, who recently spoke with VOA explained that “the first priority of the Chinese policy on passports in Xinjiang is to not let anyone cross borders and to keep everyone intact inside the region.

Last August, the release of a damning report on Chinaby the UN rights office brought to the forefront once again the plight of Uyghur and other Muslim ethnic minorities, residing in the Xinjiang province. For years now, China has been accused of arbitrarily detaining Uyghur and its treatment of the Uyghurs has been termed as genocide.The interview given by the Uyghur named ‘Jamal ’echoes many of these aspects.

For instance, he makes it clear that the China as a matter of policy does not issue new passports to the Uyghur. Additionally, he convey show the fear of retaliation by Chinese authorities, prevented the Uyghur from speaking to the media even after leaving the country. Jamal claimed to the VOA that Chinese authorities were pressurised into returning his passport since his spouse was a foreigner.


He added that any Uyghur passport holder needed to be able to present a consent document from the provincial authorities at any customs post in China.”If a Uyghur pers on has a valid Chinese passport and a visa to go to a certain country but doesn’t have that government consent document, customs won’t let them cross the border,” he told VOA.

“When a Uyghur presents his Chinese ID, passport and consent document to the customs officers, they would take that person to a special designated place for Uyghurs and then call the police authorities in Xinjiang to authenticate the document,” he added. Pertinently, Jamal told VOA China’s national security division had started confisticating passports of Uyghur from 2016 onwards.

He said: “For Uyghurs, they had started confiscating passports … in 2016; we had to hand in our passports to the police bureau’s national security division. They said they would keep our passports for safekeeping and would give [them back to us if we needed to go abroad.”More importantly Jamal sheds light on the situation of Uyghur in Xinjiang,

He recalls that last year,some Uyghur released from the re-education camps were transferred to work in factories either in Xinjiang or China’s interior. Those who remained couldn’t easily find jobs because of government discrimination.

Many were never released from re-education and were instead sentenced to prison.Notably, the Chinese government never really stopped arbitrary arrests of Uyghur and even re-arrested Uyghur who had gone through re-education in the past.

Uyghur not only face a problem with overseas travel, but also face a lot of hurdles if they want to go to other parts of the region or China. They have to get special permission from the authorities first. Han Chinese people can move freely compared to Uyghurs, Kazakhs or other local populations. Their movement is not restricted. Recently under the “zero-COVID” policy, some

Han Chinese started to feel and say that their freedom of movement had begun to be restricted.Another aspect of Chinese curbs on the Uyghur becomes clear from Jamal’s description of Michelle Bachelet then the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights visit to the region.Jamal witnessed that the government sealed and closed the majority Uyghur district in Urumqi during her visit under the pretext that there were some asymptomatic COVID cases.

They opened the district after Bachelet left China. A far more graphic and illustrative insight into the lives of Uyghur comes from Tomomi Shimizu, a famous writer and illustrator in Japan.She has produced a new manga booklet depicting the experiences of an ethnic Uzbek woman forced to teach Mandarin to Uyghur detainees in ‘re-education’ camps in China’s Xinjiang.

Radio Free Asia (RFA) reports that Shimizu has portrayed the experiences of female survivors of Xinjiang’s detention camps and her latest work focuses on Qelbinur Sidiq, 53, also known as Kalbinur Sidik, who taught Mandarin Chinese at an elementary school in Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi for nearly three decades. Sidiq was in 2017, forced by Chinese authorities to teach Mandarin in Xinjiang’s “re-education” camp system.

As a result of the government campaign to suppress the birth rates of Muslim women in Xinjiang, Sidiq also underwent forced abortion and sterilization, according to RFA. Shimizu released her latest work in December 2022 based on the testimony given by Sidiq at an Independent People’s Tribunal in London in June 2021.

Shimizu told RFA that she was “shocked”when she learnt of the Uyghurs’ situation and “thought it was important to let many people know of their situation to rescue the people in the internment] camps. I also thought that if I illustrated their harsh experiences with easy-to-understand manga, the world would understand it better”.Sidiq experienced torture and rape at the two detention camps in Xinjiang.

Her statements before the Tribunal contradicted Beijing’s claims that the facilities were voluntary “vocational centres” where “students” were treated humanely. RFA further informs that some 55 Uyghur organizations, had called on world leaders to recognize 9 December as Uyghur Genocide Recognition Day.

Uyghur organizations from 20 countries also asked global leaders to take action to end the Chinese government’s human rights atrocities against the predominantly Muslim Uyghur. The two different but compelling narratives of the plight of the Uyghur need to be retold manifold times to make people aware.

This is an essential step towards putting pressure on China with the objective of changing its attitude on ethnic minorities. Undoubtedly, this is a long-drawn task, but the need to persist cannot be over emphasised.

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