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Editor's note: Peter Jan Honigsberg will be appearing at Powell's City of Books on Sunday, January 26, 2020, to discuss A Place Outside the Law. See our events calendar for more details.

I knew very little about the Uighurs — Turkic-speaking Sunni Muslims from East Turkistan in China — and their culture when I founded Witness to Guantánamo in 2008. (I had created Witness to Guantánamo to document rule of law violations and human rights abuses at the American military detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.) However, I received a crash course on the Uighurs a year later when Witness to Guantánamo began filming interviews of former detainees, including the group of Uighurs who had been released to Albania.

China seized East Turkistan in the middle of the 20th century, in the same time period as when China overran Tibet. When China gained control of East Turkistan, it sought to destabilize and destroy the indigenous Uighur culture. East Turkistan was renamed the Xinjiang Autonomous Region in Central Asia. The government in Beijing encouraged and incentivized the Han Chinese to settle in Xinjiang, to start their own businesses and to promote and expand the Han Chinese culture into the Uighur community. Classes were taught in Mandarin. Chinese men were encouraged to marry Uighur women. It was a deliberate effort to forcibly assimilate the minority Uighurs into the majority Han Chinese culture and eradicate the Uighur culture.

China’s oppression of the Uighur people has been in the headlines for the past few years. Since 2018, more than one million Uighurs have been held in Chinese “reeducation” or detention camps. The Uighurs are not allowed to speak their language or to practice their religion. Sophisticated surveillance and facial recognition software keep track of Uighurs living in the cities and countryside, outside the reeducation/detention camps. China requires the Uighurs to install an app on their phones to permit the Chinese government to monitor their communications and to track their locations. Few Uighurs dare to worship at a mosque because the Chinese government has placed surveillance cameras at observation posts.

When Witness to Guantánamo filmed interviews with the Uighurs in Albania, we heard remarkable stories. The Uighurs had gone to Afghanistan for political or economic reasons. Some men were there to arm themselves before returning to China with the goal of retaking their homeland. Others were simply looking for a better life. One young Uighur told us that he arrived in Afghanistan at the age of 16. He wanted to reach Turkey, and from there he hoped to emigrate to the United States. But that never happened. He was captured and ended up in Guantánamo.
A total of 22 Uighurs had been captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They were seized a few months after the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001. Like many of the 780 detainees who were held in Guantánamo, the Uighurs were captured by Afghan and Pakistani soldiers and then sold for bounty to the American military — which purchased the men for an average of $3,000 to $5,000 each. The American military had dropped fliers over Afghanistan offering bounties for “Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters.” Every Muslim stranger was fair game. The Uighurs, being Muslim and having no connections to the local culture, were vulnerable targets for ransom.

In interviewing the Uighur detainees, I learned that they were at first quite elated to have been transferred into American custody. The Uighurs greatly admired America’s commitment to the rule of law and human rights — values that they believed epitomized the United States. They understood that the American military would need to hold them briefly for questioning. But, they also believed that the Americans knew that the American military would release them upon realizing that their enemy was China and not the United States. The Uighurs saw the United States as their great friend.

The Uighurs were wrong. The American military did not release them. At Guantánamo, the Uighurs were physically and psychologically tortured, just like the other Guantánamo detainees. The American military held the Uighurs in Guantánamo for years, some for more than a decade.

Because China considered the Uighurs terrorists, and would execute them if they were returned, the United States had to find countries that would accept them upon their release. Unfortunately, even after the Uighurs were transferred to other countries, they still could not be reunited with their families. China would not permit the families of the detainees to leave China to reunite with their sons, fathers, and husbands who had been held in Guantánamo.

Fast forward to March 2019, when I moderated a panel discussion on China’s detention of more than one million Uighurs in detention camps, and on the destruction of the Uighur culture in China today. The panel included Uighur translator Rushan Abbas. Abbas had been born into a Uighur family in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. In 1989, at age 21, she emigrated to the United States and enrolled at Washington State University. After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the United States government hired her to serve as the official Uighur interpreter. One year later, she quit and began her work with the attorneys representing the 22 Uighurs held in Guantánamo.

I got to know Rushan Abbas quite well over the decade of our Witness to Guantánamo work. She had arranged for Witness to Guantánamo to travel to five countries to interview 13 of the 22 Uighurs who had been detainees in Guantánamo.

The panel discussion was before an overflow crowd at the University of California, Berkeley. During the presentation, people stood up in protest, and demanded that the panel provide “both sides” of the discussion. We tried to encourage the protesters to wait for the question period to begin. However, the protesters would not relent and continued to disrupt the panel presentations. Similar protests and disruptions have been linked to the Chinese government and its supporters at other Uighur events.

Rushan Abbas is a powerful advocate for the Uighurs and often considered the “voice” of the Uighurs. She has worked nonstop, and has traveled around the world, telling the story of the mass detentions of the Uighurs and the destruction of their culture in China. Last year she told me the following story:

In September 2018, she spoke before the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, DC. Six days later, her sister disappeared from her home in China. Rushan Abbas is certain that her sister was taken to a detention camp in retaliation for Abbas’s advocacy on behalf of the Uighurs. More than a year later, in November 2019, Rushan Abbas still has not heard from her sister.

Rushan Abbas told me that despite the torture, abuse, and mistreatment that the Uighurs endured in Guantánamo, there is a silver lining. Before 9/11, the world knew little or nothing about the Uighurs. The capture of these men brought Uighur life and culture into the media spotlight. As Abbas explained, the 22 Uighurs put the Uighur people and culture “on the map” years ago. Today, Rushan Abbas carries their voices with her when she travels to events around the world, representing the Uighur people and condemning the brutal treatment of the Uighurs in China.

Author's Note:
A total of 780 men were held in Guantánamo. Forty men still remain nearly 18 years after the detention center opened on January 11, 2002. They are likely to die in Guantánamo, never charged, never tried, and never convicted of a crime. Nearly all of the people held in Guantánamo were detained without charges. Many were held for more than a decade. No other country in the world has ever detained people for that long without charges.

For a decade, beginning in 2008, Witness to Guantánamo filmed interviews with 158 people across 20 countries. Fifty-two of the people were former detainees. The others were prison guards, interrogators, interpreters, medical personnel, civilian (habeas) and military (JAG) lawyers, prosecutors, members of the intelligence community, human rights advocates, chaplains, reporters, high-level government and military officials, and family members of detainees. Witness to Guantánamo donated the interviews to Duke University in early 2019. They will be posted online in June 2020. Peter Jan Honigsberg is professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, and the founder of Witness to Guantánamo. His book, A Place Outside the Law: Forgotten Voices of Guantánamo, tells the compelling, heartbreaking, and inspiring stories of detainees and other people who lived and worked in the Guantánamo detention center, and how America’s values of the rule of law and human rights were abandoned in the detention center.