‘Silence Is Not an Option’: The Quest to Bear Witness to China’s Uyghur Camps

“When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out ‘stop!’ When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible.”

German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s observation on the political apathy that engulfed Germany in the 1930s resonates with 21st century survivors of the Chinese state’s war against Uyghurs in its northwestern heartland, known by exiles as East Turkestan. 

Germany’s slide into fascism brought book burnings and arrests of “undesirables.” It lead step by step to antisemitism, concentration camps, torture, and death. That brutal history echoes today in Beijing’s campaign against the Turkic peoples of its western regions – and in the silence of a deaf world. Only those who have experienced the terror first-hand and survived to tell the tale can hope to describe its full horrors.

Kalbinur Sidik (formerly Romanized as Qelbinur Sidik) is one such rare eyewitness to what many nations have termed a genocide. Her ordeal as a teacher inside the camps drove her to the brink of collapse. She escaped in 2019 ostensibly for medical treatment, hoping to reunite with her daughter in the Netherlands and seek asylum. Speaking out became her path to healing. 

She told The Diplomat that “silence is not an option.” The faces of captives in her class have haunted her to this day. Since leaving, her mission has been to give voice to their silent cries.

Her memoir, “Heart Full of Light” – a title reflecting the meaning of her name, Kalbinur – is full of horror and sadness but also memory, dignity and resistance. It is a cry against erasure and a wake-up call to a world that has not been listening.

The book begins with a child immersed in Uyghur culture and belonging, but there was darkness from the start. Sidik grew up cowed by the humiliation of her parents during the Cultural Revolution, a stigma that her family never shook off. Teaching offered hope but the glass ceiling separating her and her colleagues from the dominant Han Chinese was impenetrable.

Fast forward to 2016 as Beijing’s drive to sinicize everything Uyghur intensified. Sidik watched culture, language, and religion dismantled. Neighborhoods were bulldozed for “progress.” Academics, writers, and artists vanished. Eventually, more than 1 million Uyghurs were corralled into a vast network of “re-education” camps. 

Many women aged 18-50, including Sidik, were summoned for forced sterilization. Uyghur children were taken to boarding schools, and 1 million Han cadres were dispersed to “pair up and become family” with Uyghur households; to eat, study and sleep with them to further ethnic harmony. Her husband’s boss volunteered to billet with them, but his sexual advances made daily life intolerable.

2017 sealed the fate of Uyghur language education. Uyghur teachers were demoted, and replaced by Chinese counterparts. Disappearances escalated. Trust broke down. Spies were everywhere.

On February 28, 2017, Sidik was given a “top secret” assignment outside the city. Failure to report for duty or breach secrecy, would have consequences for her daughter in the Netherlands. “We know where she lives,” Sidik was told.

She arrived at gates bristling with soldiers, watchtowers, and cameras. A corridor of locked doors led to her “classroom,” filled with 100 child-sized stools.

Her “students,” young and old, shuffled in, shackled at the wrists and ankles connected by a chain. Sidik remembered shaved heads, lice, and the smell of squalor. Some wept quietly as they began rudimentary Mandarin. Finishing textbooks might earn freedom, they thought.

“Somehow, by the grace of God I stopped myself from curling up in a ball and weeping like a baby,” Sidik wrote. “Why me? Who are these people? Why are they locked up? What is this place?” Two cameras bore down on the classroom, and she dared not speak.

The reward for a morning’s study: a single steamed bun and watery gruel. That pattern would be repeated every day.

She called it the “most difficult day in 27 years of teaching.” She went home and wept uncontrollably.

Worse followed. House to house raids were relentless. Thousands poured into her camp. Cells for 10 held 50. Prisoners slept in shifts. Doors were chained above knee height, forcing men to crawl out. “The stench of urine and excretion was overwhelming.”

“Uyghurs are strong but their lice are stronger!” the guards mocked while boiling prisoner clothes as vermin floated to the surface.

Every week there were mysterious injections and blood tests. Inmates were pulled from class for interrogation and torture. Screams echoed until they stopped.

Every inch of the compound was monitored. If someone moved, a screen flashed red and zoomed in. “It was impossible not to compare them to animals in cages,” Sidik wrote of her students. “There was nowhere to hide. For them, or for me.”

The specter of organ harvesting hung over everything. Healthy young prisoners disappeared. Across Xinjiang authorities collected biodata from everyone aged 16-65. Mandatory DNA tests, bloods, iris scans, voice and gait recordings filled vast data banks, many believed for organ matching. Research later identified Saudis and Gulf Arabs traveling to eastern China for halal organs.

“Alive we were worthless, dead, and cut up, our organs were worth a ransom,” Sidik wrote.

There was no one to confide in. Sidik took refuge in prayer, though it was banned. She planned suicide but thought of her daughter. Still, she stockpiled pills to take in case security forces knocked on the door one night.

“I was not going to die being tortured,” she wrote.

When her six month contract ended, it was cause for relief – but heartbreak too. She was forbidden to say goodbye.

“I can still picture each face. I was their hope in that dark place,” Sidik wrote.

Her good behavior earned her no respite. She was posted again, this time to a former nursing home crammed with thousands of women and girls. 

There were no showers. Clothing crawled with parasites. Women slept in turns on wooden boards in cells  holding 40-plus people.

“They had lost all hope,” Sidik remembered. “On autopilot with no desire left.”

Many were in pain, clutching their stomachs, some unable to sit down or stand up. They found ways to tell their stories while practicing Mandarin sentences.

“Before I came here I was engaged. The day I was taken I was planning our wedding. I don’t know where my future husband is now. I am grateful to the Chinese Communist Party for being here,” said one.

“I have a baby; I miss him so much. I have stopped breastfeeding now. I am grateful to the Chinese Communist Party to be here,” said another.

The stories broke Sidik.

By late October 2017 she collapsed – hospitalized for exhaustion. She was pushed into retirement and forced to frame it as her choice. Sidik saw no other option: “One teacher who protested was imprisoned for 15 years.”

Her city had become an open prison. Checkpoints, cameras, arrests. She sank into melancholy. A badly fitting IUD caused constant pain, but removal would question her loyalty to the system. The prisoners’ faces haunted her. She dreamed of her upcoming daughter’s wedding in the Netherlands and began the year-long, 25-step passport process. 

Despite having an Uzbek mother, her first application was denied. Too many guests at the wedding, they said. She might talk to them about the camps.

She resorted to a bribe. The “back door” worked.

Sidik told no one she was leaving for good, not even her estranged husband. At the airport, strip searches and double luggage checks brought heart-stopping moments. She left Urumqi for the last time on September 14, 2019 for Beijing. After three weeks her Dutch visa was granted.

As dawn broke over Schiphol Airport on October 9, 2019 she landed in Europe. Finally she could unburden herself. But no one was listening. 

The camp felt more real than liberty.

“It was louder than safety, louder even than freedom,” she wrote. “I couldn’t stop myself talking about the camps, about sterilization and what I had seen.” But listeners switched off.

Eventually her daughter snapped. “Can we just eat without you mentioning the camps?”

PTSD set in. Normal life was impossible. She obsessed over the camps and their victims. They consumed her. Depression and trauma paralyzed her. 

Chinese officials started to threaten and coerce her to return. Neighbors attacked her on WeChat. Relatives were forced to denounce her and siblings, once close, cut her off. Five years, no contact.

“I miss them deeply,” she wrote.

Her husband was forced to record a video for China’s Foreign Ministry branding her a liar and a traitor. Later he texted, “I’m sorry Kalbinur, I couldn’t protect you, they tortured me a lot.” That was the last she heard from him.

But she has refused to be cowed. Resolving to channel her pain into action, she set out to testify – for herself and for her “students” who were silenced.

“I determined to be a witness against the monstrous crimes committed by the Chinese communist Party,” she wrote.

Sidik knows she could have settled down in the Netherlands and sat back to enjoy grandmotherhood, her small apartment beside the sea, and her new life of freedom. But she carries the eyes of her students with her; they will not let her forget. Speaking to The Diplomat in advance of her memoir’s publication date in October, Sidik said she is compelled to devote her life to this cause.

“God chose me for this task,” she said. “He has given me this chance to speak.”

In her 4-year-old grandchild, she sees the children of Xinjiang, separated from their parents. In every walk beside the endless sea, the captives are seared in her memory, confined to a world that refuses to let them breathe. In the scent and beauty of a flower, the stench, the humiliation, and the ugliness of those cells still lingers.

Seven years have passed since Sidik left. They have not been easy. She started by putting her troubled, scrambled thoughts on paper. They tumbled out randomly. People came alongside her and helped her make sense of them. Then she started to speak.

She has crisscrossed the world several times to testify. She has addressed world leaders, parliaments, community representatives, and anyone who will listen. She has won awards, which she accepted on behalf of her suffering people, and told her story as part of a documentary film to expose the genocide. 

Her testimony has been hailed but also castigated. Accusations by some Uyghurs of being a traitor and a spy for the Chinese government have hit hard.

“The pain of this is sometimes unbearable,” she said. Their attacks and those too of the Chinese state are relentless.

“Sometimes I just cry and cry again, but then tell myself to stop. I know I have to keep going for the sake of those I left behind.”

She remembers her father, who told her never to get on a horse: “But if you decide you’re going to, he told me, don’t complain when it runs away with you.”

“No one has forced me to do this. I started because those in the camps wouldn’t let me rest,” she said. “Now I’m on the revolutionary train, there’s no going back.”