Hello, everyone.
My name is Olsi Jazexhi. I'm a historian and a scholar of Islam.
In 2019 I wanted to understand the situation of the Muslims in Xinjiang. For this reason, I visited Xinjiang from August 16 to 25. We were a group of journalists invited by the State Council Information Office of China and Xinjiang.
During our visit, which lasted almost nine days, we had the chance to get a number of lectures delivered to us by Communist Party officials, and also to visit the situation on the ground. We visited three cities: Urumqi, Aksu and Kashgar.
We stayed for around three days in Urumqi, which is the capital of Xinjiang. We were presented with a number of white papers produced by the Chinese government about the situation in Xinjiang or East Turkestan. The people who delivered these white papers were Communist Party officials, people like Xu Guixiang and Ma Pinyan.
In the historical presentations that we had, for me at least as a professional historian, the narrative the Chinese Communist Party officials were giving us was that Xinjiang had historically been Han Chinese. It had belonged to the Buddhist culture, but the native Turkic people of Xinjiang, the Uighurs, who are the majority, the Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tatars and other ethnic groups were latecomers.
The official narrative of the Communist Party officials for us was that Islam was a foreign religion, a religion that was imposed by force on the Uighurs. The duty of the Communist Party of China, in a few words, was to remove any connection with the Islamic culture of these people and turn them back into their so-called native culture and religion which was connected with Buddhism and Han Chinese.
We visited the museum of Xinjiang in Urumqi, the Aksu museum and the Kashgar museum. In these museums, the Chinese government delivered the same kind of historical narrative, whereby the Uighurs and their religion, Islam, was depicted as foreign and as the source of extremism and terrorism. The whole narrative was that this region had historically belonged to Imperial China.
Apart from visiting these museums, we also visited two vocational training centres, or what we call, in the west, concentration camps.
The first vocational training centre that we visited was in the city of Aksu, the Onsu County Vocational Skills Training Center. The Chinese government wanted to present this first vocational centre to us, as foreign journalists, as being schools and not prisons. They were in fact prisons.
People have seen my videos on YouTube. I uploaded them when I was in Aksu at the time that I visited the concentration camp. I asked our Chinese hosts a number of questions.
Number one, I asked them, “Who are these people you are keeping here in these centres?” The Chinese claim was that these people were students. I then asked them, “Are these people allowed to go to their home?” The answer was no.
Number two, I investigated what they were doing in these concentration camps. These people didn't have access to a phone, Internet, or their families. These people had been taken from their homes two years before.
We entered the concentration camp, which the Chinese authorities had designed as a school. They wanted us to film these people singing and dancing in order to show the outside world that these were not concentration camps but schools. We started to ask these prisoners about their conditions. Number one, we started speaking to them in their Turkish language. We were greeting them in their native language. We said, “As-salaam alaikum” or “Yahshi mu siz,” which mean “peace be with you” and “how are you”. The Uighurs who understood us very well were afraid to respond in their native language. They responded in Chinese.