![]() Why did that man want me to go back to Karamay? Was it a ploy so the police could interrogate me? Nothing like this had happened to any of the other Uighurs I knew in France. So instead, I’d applied for a residence permit that was renewable every 10 years.Īfter the phone call, my head was buzzing with questions as I looked around the quiet living room of our apartment in Boulogne. Giving up my Chinese nationality meant giving up on her, too. How could I ever say goodbye to my roots, to the loved ones I’d left behind – my parents, my brothers and sisters, their children? I imagined my mother, getting on in years, dying alone in her village in the northern mountains. For me, the prospect of turning in my passport held a terrible implication: I would never be able to return to Xinjiang. Obtaining a French passport in effect stripped him of his Chinese nationality. In seeking asylum, my husband had made a clean break with the past. My daughters, 13 and 8 at the time, were given refugee status, as was their father. My daughters and I fled to France to join my husband in May 2006, just before Xinjiang entered an unprecedented period of repression. In short, Xinjiang without Uighurs.Ī pro-Uighur rally in Hong Kong in 2019. Xinjiang is essential to President Xi Jinping’s great plan – that is, a peaceful Xinjiang, open for business, cleansed of its separatist tendencies and its ethnic tensions. The party has invested too much in the “new silk road”, the infrastructure project designed to link China to Europe via central Asia, of which our region is an important axis. Xinjiang is a strategic corridor and far too valuable for China’s ruling Communist party to risk losing control of it. ![]() Since 1955, when communist China annexed Xinjiang as an “autonomous region”, we Uighurs have been seen as a thorn in the side of the Middle Kingdom. What my husband was experiencing was all too familiar. One night in 2000, Kerim came home and announced that he had quit. But the post went to an employee who belonged to a Han worker who didn’t even have an engineering degree. There was no reason he shouldn’t get the position. He had the right qualifications and the seniority. A few months later, when a senior position came up, Kerim applied. A small group objected, but I didn’t dare. Soon after, all the Uighurs were transferred out of the central office and moved to the outskirts of town. At lunar new year, when the boss handed out the annual bonuses, the red envelopes given to Uighur workers contained less than those given to our colleagues who belonged to China’s dominant ethnic group, the Han. But then there was the red envelope episode. While I tried to overlook the evidence of discrimination that followed us everywhere, with Kerim, it became an obsession.Īfter graduation, we were offered jobs as engineers at the oil company in Karamay. In the job ads in the newspapers, there was often a little phrase in small print: No Uighurs. We had met as students in Urumqi, the largest city in Xinjiang province, and, as new graduates, had begun looking for work. The idea had taken root even before we were hired by the oil company. ![]() Kerim had always known he would leave Xinjiang. Once he was settled there, our two girls and I would join him. Then France, where he had applied for asylum. He tried first in Kazakhstan, but came back disillusioned after a year. My husband, Kerim, had left Xinjiang in 2002 to look for work. ![]() He simply said he would call me back in two days after looking into the possibility of letting my friend act on my behalf. Why should I come back for some paperwork? Why go all that way for such a trifle? Why now?” “A friend of mine in Karamay takes care of my administrative affairs. “In that case, I’d like to grant power of attorney,” I said. ![]()
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