In all the stories about Ukraine and the genocide/war happening there, it’s easy to forget the other genocide going on in western China.
A number of weeks ago, Axios.com published a short about China’s “crime’s about humanity” there, particularly against the more than 1 million Muslims who are imprisoned in this 21st century gulag.
Lost in the details of this story is a second angle that would be of great interest to lots of readers in the United States and elsewhere — that Christians too have been caught up in the dragnet.
A Christian Chinese national who spent 10 months in a Xinjiang detention camp has arrived in the United States after months of behind-the-scenes lobbying by U.S. lawmakers, human rights activists and international lawyers.
Why it matters: The man, Ovalbek Turdakun, will provide evidence that international human rights lawyers say is vital to the case they have submitted to the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor arguing that China has committed crimes against humanity in Xinjiang.
Here are several crucial details in this overlooked story:
* Ovalbek and his wife and child were authorized to enter the U.S. on significant public benefit parole, which permits entry for special purposes such as testifying in a proceeding, but does not grant immigration status, because of the value of the testimony they are expected to give. Ovalbek crossed the borders of several Asian countries to get out, finally landing at Dulles Inernational Airport on April 8. Thus:
The big picture: Ovalbek Turdakun is a unique witness to Chinese government repression in Xinjiang, according to international lawyers, U.S. officials and others with knowledge of the case.
* He is an ethnic Kyrgyz. Though Uyghurs are the most populous ethnic group targeted for detention, several other groups — including Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tajiks and Hui — who live in Xinjiang have also faced detention and other forms of repression.
* Ovalbek is the first Christian detained in the camps to come forward publicly about his experience. The Chinese government has claimed the camps in Xinjiang are intended to deradicalize Islamic extremists, but people without religious affiliation and a small number of Christians are known to have been detained as well.
Keep reading, because it was evidently quite the cloak-and-dagger affair to get Ovalbek here.
Looking around, I didn’t see a ton of coverage in U.S. media. One welcome exception was the Wall Street Journal, which provided many more details on how this man escaped China.
This story also reveals the involvement of Bob Fu — founder of China Aid, which rescues Chinese dissidents — in raising the funds and getting the help of the US State Department in spiriting this family out. It also notes that Turdakun was given the tortures ordinarily reserved for supposed radical Muslims.
What happened, and why, at Turdakun’s prison? What did they think they were going to get from a Christian detainee?
Anyway, he escaped as follows:
To help Mr. Turdakun, Mr. Gutmann teamed up with Conor Healy, a Canadian surveillance analyst who works for IPVM, a security-industry publication. The pair brought the family’s case to the State Department, which agreed to consider it.
With Mr. Turdakun’s permission to remain in Kyrgyzstan set to expire in December, the group settled on a plan to have the family pose as tourists and fly to Turkey, where they could wait for the State Department to make its decision, according to Messrs. Gutmann and Healy.
They enlisted a family of American Christians working in Bishkek and an American friend of Mr. Healy’s who worked as a consultant for McKinsey Group to travel with them.
“My theory was that if we could get some Americans and Canadians to go with the family, exit customs would be far less likely to stop them,” said Mr. Healy.
I’d love to know who this Christian family was and how they attached themselves to the Ovalbek family to whisk through customs. That would be quite the scoop.
Outlets like Techcrunch also picked up the story because of the dissident’s knowledge of the use of technology (video surveillance cameras, facial recognition) to track every citizen in his part of western China. Apparently, the Chinese video company Hikvision is immensely involved in the government’s brutal tactics and human rights violations.
Allow me a small tangent, at this point. Although not about religion, the angle of who is manufacturing the video cameras used in such prisons really has legs. Check ipvm.com for how Hikvision cameras made life a living hell for detainees.
The Guardian also covered the matter, which had this factoid:
The Kyrgyz were under great threat in China, said Ethan Gutmann, an author and researcher on China studies who first encountered Turdakun and his family as part of his own research. “They’re not a huge ethnic minority in China, but they’re under great threat,” he said. “They’re also Christian. That shows that this is not just an attack on Islam – it’s an attack on anybody with deeply held religious beliefs.”
Other than that, mostly small Christian outlets picked up Turdakan’s story.
In other words, this is a “Christian,” or maybe a “conservative” news story. Why is that?
Journalists should know that this man will be testifying before Congress at some point, no doubt giving meaty details about life in China’s detention camps — so this story isn’t over yet. As for the scriptures that Turdakun would whisper to himself and the few times he got to talk about his faith with other inmates, turn to China Aid’s report.
While unimaginable horrors persisted in the camp, Joseph testified about how God worked in the hearts of the inmates around them. They had no privacy in any part of the complex, with cameras in their rooms and microphones for monitoring. Thus, 50 to 60 inmates filled the shower room every day and it was the only place where Joseph could share his faith. The water from the shower heads made enough noise to mask their conversations.
In the first few months, there was hardly anyone who would talk to him about God. Then the question began. “How could God let us be here in this place?” they would ask. “How could God allow our children to be abandoned?”
These kinds of objections and arguments persisted for three months until they became more willing to listen. "Without God, we would have no life," he explained. Joseph then started to share scriptures with them in the shower, passages Zhil shared with him on her visits. “God did many miraculous things,” Joseph said, “He was with us.”
Obviously, Ukraine is the big story at the moment and events there certainly deserve intense coverage. However, I’m hoping Turdakun’s testimony is well covered because his very presence kills the Chinese argument that their internment camps are all about crushing radical Islam.
No, the camps appear to be a sample of what the rest of the country will eventually undergo. That’s a major news story.
FIRST IMAGE: Screen grab from a video of Turdakun on IVPM.com