The Daily - A Woman’s Journey Through China’s Detention Camps

Episode Date: December 9, 2019

A last-minute booking, a furtive cab ride and a spy in the window. For the past year, Paul Mozur has been investigating the story of a son determined to free his mother from a repressive system of detention and surveillance in western China. In doing so, he found a crack in China’s surveillance state — and a mother on her deathbed in Xinjiang.Today, we hear from the man’s mother for the first time. Guest: Paul Mozur, a technology reporter for The New York Times based in Shanghai, spoke with Ferkat Jawdat, a Uighur who is an American citizen and lives in Virginia, and his mother in Xinjiang, China. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading:The Chinese authorities are using a vast secret system of facial recognition technology to control the Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority in western China. The government may also be taking citizens’ DNA without consent to enhance the system.“We must be as harsh as them, and show absolutely no mercy.” Leaked documents reveal how the Chinese authorities orchestrated the crackdown on one million or more ethnic Uighurs.If you missed our previous interviews with Mr. Jawdat, here are Part 1 and Part 2.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is The Daily. For the past year, my colleague Paul Moser has been investigating the story of a son determined to free his mother from a repressive system of detention and surveillance in western China. Today, we hear from the mother herself for the first time. It's Monday, December 9th. So Paul, we have been checking in with you about your reporting on the Uyghurs in China for about a year, and we have been talking to you about your reporting on the Uyghurs in China for about a year. And we have been talking to you about one family in particular. Remind us who Ferkat Jodat is and what we know about his family. So Ferkat Jodat is from a Uyghur family who live in western China in a place called Xinjiang.

And the Uyghurs are a Muslim minority that the Chinese government views as a threat in part because of their Islam. They see them as an extremist presence in the country, and they have built this extensive system of repression that includes electronic surveillance and also a massive system of camps where more than a million people have been locked up. Many have fled the country to other places like the United States. Faircat is one of those. And Faircat has kind of emerged as an important voice in the United States, trying to raise awareness and talk about what happened because he and his family got out around 2011, but his mother was not able to follow them. And about two years ago, Faircat's mother goes missing.

And it turns out she falls into the system of repression and is pulled into the re-education camps there. And it's been quite a ride because when we first talked to him, he had no idea where his mother was. He hadn't seen her for more than a year. And then after we talked to him, you know, we put out a show earlier this year, and a week later, his mother all of a sudden appears. Right, I remember. And he's able to talk to her for the first time in more than a year and a half.

He can talk to her over the phone. Right, I remember after we published that first episode about Fair Cat's mother, the Chinese government made a show of releasing her from the camp and letting her go to her house. But really, she's not actually free. Right.

So she's in her house, but she's being monitored at all times. There's cameras and checkpoints just outside. You have local government officials and police checking in on her on a daily basis. When she talks to her family, they're monitoring what she says. So she has to parrot this sort of propaganda. And meanwhile, her health deteriorated severely in the camps. When she came home, Faircat actually thought she might be on her deathbed. So that's the world she's living in at this moment.

Hello? Hey, Faircat, it's Paul calling. How you doing? Good. Now okay? Yes. Give me a couple minutes. Let me find a quieter place. Okay, sure. And I called him again last week because I wanted to talk to him about the decision he made to do something extremely risky in order to save his mother.

So yeah, how are you holding up? I know it was kind of a hard week last week. Yeah, too many things happened, but, you know, still here. Over the last few months, Ferkad's been growing increasingly anxious about how his mother is doing. Even though, like, I can talk to my mom, like, almost every single day right now, I don't know, like, if I was able to get

any news about my mom's condition. They talk on the phone nearly every day, but it's clear that she's not being honest with him, and he can't really be fully honest with her. He doesn't really know how she actually is. He doesn't know her state of mind. He doesn't know how bad her health is. actually is. You know, he doesn't know her state of mind. He doesn't know how bad her health is. And I think most importantly, he doesn't understand what happened to her because there's just no ability to speak honestly about the past couple of years.

I really want to know, like, what really happened because seeing that people are being tortured, it made me think that my mom is facing those kind of situations. It made me think that my mom is facing those kind of situations. And so I was talking to him and he asked if I could go try to see her, see how she is, and also, you know, potentially find out what happened to her. So he wants you to go there and physically check in on her. Yeah, exactly. And what's important to understand is that we have some stories from people who were in the camps, but very few people who have gotten out recently have been able to talk about it. So this is also a chance to really shine light on what's happened in the past few years from somebody who was inside. But there's real risk. It's really important to understand that by me going there, I put his family under risk.

I put him under risk. Just for me to show up at that door and knock is incredibly dangerous. So with all that in mind, what do you decide to do? So I told him it would be really, really hard, but I would try to get there and see her. And because it would be so dangerous, Faircat had to tell his mother. And he can't just tell her over the phone directly like, hey, the New York Times is coming, right? I mean, that would set off alarm bells like crazy. So what he does is very clever. He's on a video call with her. I wrote on a white piece of paper saying that, mom, like, I'm sending

someone to you to talk to you. And then she looked at the paper I was holding, and then the next second, she just, like, kind of just kind of put her finger on her mouth. And she puts her finger up to her lips kind of to shush him as if like, yeah, I got it. And then she understood, and then she agreed. And shakes her head that it's okay, and then he takes the sign away. So she now knows you're on your way. Yes. And Paul, you've told me several times just how hard it is to go to this part of Western China

where Uyghurs are. So how likely is it that you could actually get to Faircat's mom? A real part of me thought it was almost pointless. I felt like I was kind of going to get her into trouble and do it without accomplishing anything. Because you have to understand the moment you land in a city in Xinjiang, they check the flight manifests.

So they know if a foreign journalist's name is on there, they meet you at the airport, they meet you at the baggage claim. And if they don't do that, the moment you get in a cab, they have three cars following you away from the airport to see whatever you're doing. And I've never had that not be the case in Xinjiang and multiple trips there. So given all that, no, I'm not thinking that it's going to be possible to get there without being noticed and just stride right into the house of somebody who's under close surveillance. But I also thought it was worth a try because he was so desperate that, you know, we had to try. worth a try because he was so desperate that, you know, we had to try.

So how do you plan to get around the authorities in this case? So the longer you deal with this, the more you develop your own little tricks. I take the earliest flight possible, buy it at the last minute so that they don't have time to kind of screen the flight. So I arrive in Faircats' mom's town around 7 a.m. and it's always kind of tentative when I come out of the plane because I'm looking around saying, okay, who are the thugs? Who are the guys who are gonna follow me this time? And I get out and I look around and there's nobody obvious. You know, it's dumping rain so I I go and I get an umbrella and I'm kind of lingering in the store trying to see

that there's nobody. I walk across the street and I get in a cab and the cab goes and I'm looking behind and there's no cars there. Somehow I've gotten through the airport part without anybody picking me up. So all your tricks are working here? Yeah, for the first time since I've been going there, all of a sudden I'm alone. Okay, I think we've found it. Okay, and I think we found it. We pull up to the address that Faircat gave me, the house of his grandmother.

And Faircat's aunt answers. And there is Cat's friend. Oh, I know, I know. And there is his aunt, his uncle, and his grandmother. And so they show me into a room. Thank you. And inside, on a raised platform are a bunch of rugs. And there, laying prostrate, is Fair Cat's mother. Hello. Hello.

She's in a lot of pain because she's had a fall recently. She was so weak coming out of the camps that just a few days before, she fell and they think she fractured a vertebrae. But she insists on sitting up for the interview. And, you know, there I am next to her, you know, this person that Ferkat hasn't been able to see in a decade. And I can see her face and she looks a lot like Faircat, you know. They have the same sort of cheekbones and the same eyes.

Assalamu alaikum. She sort of holds my hand and she says that, you know, I have the smell of Faircat on me and that her son is with her. Because I'm there and I've been sent by him. And she says, thank you for coming. And all the while, you're thinking, how long do we have? Because you know there's surveillance. You know the police are going to come and check in on her.

So what do you do? Hey, Faircat. Hey. How are you? Let me, um... Well, I get Faircat on the phone because he's going to help me translate and talk to her. And here's your grandmother. And here's your mother. Here's your mother.

And we start asking her questions. Ferkay, can we now ask her and just tell her that she can speak honestly to me and that I will protect this recording and get it out to the world, but can she talk about what's happened over the past two years to her, and can you see if she can maybe talk about that a little bit? Okay. And she starts telling us what happened three years ago.

Telling the story of the camps. Yes, she said that on the first time in 2017, October 16th, she was sent to the pre-education camp. In the beginning, in 2017, for a little while, she was taken to a camp to study and study sort of the euphemism for being locked away. And then she said that the government said those camps are for the terrorists, but she never believed that she was a terrorist. And then she only knew that she was there because of her family in the U.S. But she gets spit back out because she's quite sick. And then 2018, February, she was sent back to the camp again. But then in early 2018, they come for her again. And this time she doesn't come out.

All of a sudden she's effectively in what looks like a concentration camp. And she says conditions are much, much worse there. There's way too many people, you know, 10 or 20 people in a cell sometimes. Oftentimes people have to use buckets for toilets. She says the guards are much rougher with the people who are there, so there's more violence. And then on January 7, 2019, she was sent to the prison. The interrogation is much harder than the camps. The interrogation is much harder than the camps.

But things get even worse for her because Faircat is continuing to speak out about her in the United States. And it gets to the point that he becomes almost so well known that in late 2018, he actually gets a meeting with the United States Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo. And that's a big deal. It becomes news. And partially because of that, she's punished. And that means she gets sent to a much more extreme facility. It's either a prison or a detention center. And there she says she was interrogated and tortured, and the guards were extremely rough with her. And we've heard reports from other people in these facilities, and they are much, much harsher than other types of camps. During questioning, people can be locked to chairs or chained to walls. And there's even darker stories of women being sexually assaulted or raped,

ghastly stories of isolation chambers, people's fingernails ripped out. And there are also reports of forced injections. People report that they emerge from the camp system sterile. So there have been accusations that potentially there's forced sterilizations going on as well. And in particular, very important for her, she's no longer allowed her medications. So she starts having a lot of health problems. The blood pressure is really out of control. Her face swells. She stops being able to talk because her tongue is swollen. And nobody's trying to fix this unique this moment is. She can't fully sit up because she's in too much pain.

So we're lying next to each other and I'm passing a phone back and forth with her. And she's telling the story of what has happened to her for the first time. And halfway across the world on the other end of the phone is Ferkat. And what he's hearing for the first time is the truth. He's finally actually hearing what happened to his mother. And I'm sitting there next to her and part of me is totally overwhelmed with emotions about this, but a part of me is absolutely terrified of what this could bring for her. So it's like the worse the details are that she's telling you,

the more afraid you'll be coming for her, for anyone in that room who is hearing the conversation. Exactly. But all the while, it feels safe in a way. It's weird because you're inside this room and it's a beautiful room. The doors are painted with turquoise, rich red rugs hanging from the walls. You hear the rain on the outside. It almost feels like you're in this cocoon. And, you know, for a second, you can kind of trick yourself into believing you're back in history and the way things used to be.

And, you know, everything was calm and pleasant. And you could kind of spend your days whiling away time on these carpets. But then... I hear voices outside and... Faircat says, I think you have some company.

And I look to the front door and there's a curtain covering it. And it kind of gets pulled back by a man I haven't seen before. And then as soon as he sees me, he disappears. And what I'm worried at that point about is that the game is up, that we've been caught. And so we all go into panic mode. So, OK, if they're agents, then maybe we should stop right now. Yeah. And I need to save these recordings because if they're officials, they're going to want to delete them. Yeah. Why don't you hang up? I need to I need to

preserve these videos as best I can. These these audios. So I'm going to do that first. OK, bye. We'll be right back. So, Paul, what happens once you turn off the recording? Well, you know, everybody's freaked out. Fair cat. So I have some clarity. It's two local, like, party members who, I guess, help with old people's homes sometimes. So the roof was leaking a little bit at your

grandmother's house. So they'd come over to have a look. But now that they've seen me, we're worried that they're going to call the police. So the man who poked his head in, he is a local government official and Communist Party member checking up on her. And he's ostensibly claiming that he was looking into a leaky roof because it was raining out. But in reality, he's a part of the surveillance apparatus. And so he quickly leaves. And we know he's probably going to go report the whole thing. And it's just a matter of time before the police show up.

OK, sure. We'll see how long it takes. Yeah, you have her right now. And so the family is discussing what to do. They have to decide. And it really is informative about the different ways Faircat and his family see this. So I can I can get out of here now if you want me to just leave, because if I leave, maybe they won't find me here and they won't know. So Faircat says stay.

I don't I don't know. Maybe you should stay to see what they're going to do or they're going to say it'll help to have a foreign journalist there. No matter what they do, it will be good for you to be there and watch and report on it. But his family thinks the exact opposite. They want me to get the hell out of there because they think that my presence is the threat and the danger. And the longer I'm there, the more they're in danger. And so in the kind of last few minutes, we try to get in a last question. Can we see if your mother can answer one or two more questions? Faircat, can you ask her, tell her that you told me that that she taught you to speak out and to speak your mind, to say the truth.

And that that's what you've been doing in America. And I just want you to ask her whether she thinks you've done right by doing that, whether she believes, you know, truly that that is the right thing to do. So I asked Ferkat's mother what she makes of what he's been doing. She said that I know that you did what a son should do to save his mother and then to get the family reunited again. And then I'm proud of you, what you did. And then I still think that you did the right thing and I believe in you. And she tells him that she's incredibly proud of him

and that she raised him to be this way and that she understands why he's doing this and that it's out of love for her that he's doing this how does that feel to hear that it's it's awesome i'm scared i think you can feel yeah i know but like i'm still i'm still got a problem yeah i think it's just an incredibly important moment because Ferkad is doing this crusade and he doesn't have support from many people in his community

in the United States because Uyghurs there are afraid. But at this moment, she tells him, no, you know, what you're doing, I know that this comes from the right place and that we're trying something here, and I'm proud of you. But while that's happening, the mood has changed. Okay, so several different party members and local officials came. We don't have the police yet, but her family is quite worried. So I have downloaded recordings to different places so that it'll be hard for

them to find them I'm trying to send them off though the internet is slow here so it won't work and now I'm packing up and I am going to leave because they've decided that it's better for me to go than to stay probably but I'm gonna so I told Faircat I had to respect their wishes and I took off I was trying to kind of do the formalities of leaving and they sort of pushed me away and just said, get out. So now I've walked away. Luckily, it's raining, which is helpful because you can keep an umbrella low over your head and not draw too much attention. I'm trying to figure out if I'm being followed or not. And when I walk out that door, the usual suspects are there, a couple of sketchy-looking guys who start following me down the street.

And, you know, I kind of led them around the rest of the day across the city. And I went to the airport, got on a plane, and flew out. And then a week later, Faircat calls me and he tells me that the Chinese government, the Chinese police got really mad because of the way I sent a reporter to talk to my mom.

The police in the area have told him that if he releases the recordings that we took, they will kill her. Oh, my God. In Chinese, they say that Long Si has killed my mom. And so Faircat's saying, you know, please don't release the recordings. I'm saying, of course, you know, we won't release them at all if you don't think it's right. And over the next, you know, few weeks, there's sort of more negotiations and they kind of back off that threat. And eventually he says, you know what, let's do this. Let's do what? Let's release these recordings. Let's talk about this. Let's share it with the world.

And so I guess what made you kind of say, all right, well, we should go ahead and do it? Because it's really hard. So I know that it's the way that they are scaring me, but they got me wrong. They understood me many times that I'm not the person who will get scared that easily my mom is already on the international media her picture her name is around the world and especially after you went there to talk to my mom and if anything happens to her i think that's going to cause more trouble to the

chinese government than make me silent but i I mean, you know, they effectively threatened to kill your mother if we continued with this project. And I guess I'm curious about how you kind of went through the mental process to eventually go forward with all of this anyway. It's scary. But hearing that, I told my mom, like, mom, some people are saying that they can do some bad stuff to you.

And then she said, I've been through everything. I have seen everything. I don't worry about anything anymore. That's what she said. Because instead of being forced to see that people are suffering in front of you and then seeing girls are being raped, it's easier to die than live in that place, in that situation. So if you have lost everything, there is no fear anymore, I guess. Yeah. This is the kind of paradox of speaking out. On the one hand,

you have the government saying, if you do this, we will kill your mother. But on the other hand, you know that if you don't speak out, then maybe nothing will change. And maybe you'll never see her again. There are a couple of times that I already gave up from being able to see my mom alive. So don't get me wrong if I say this. The killing, it doesn't really scare me anymore. And Faircat, he told me this story that I think really shows how fearless she's become in some ways.

So yesterday, the Global Times released a full article about my family. He told me right after my visit, state media ran an article basically citing family members of him, calling him the scum of the family. Wow. And he told his mother this. I said, like, mom, they just said that I became a scum of the family. And then you all feel ashamed by my actions. And she was like, no, that's not the case. I didn't tell them that. And she got really upset. And she said that I just couldn't take it. And, you know, she said, you know, the next day, some party members came by my house. And then I got really mad with them. And then I cried them. And I told them that, like, why are you guys looking to call my son as a scum? Because he was just doing what a son should do to

save his mom, because he lost me. And he waited, hoping you guys will release me. But you guys didn't. So he's not the scum of the family. I'm proud of my son. And I yelled at them and I told them, you know, how dare you say that my son is the scum of the family. I'm incredibly proud of him. I've been proud of him since I gave birth to him and he will always be my son.

Don't you dare call him that and make people think that I think that about him. That's a pretty remarkable scene of a woman in her condition screaming at the local Chinese officials. Yeah, and somebody who has just no power in comparison to them. I can't imagine the courage that my mom had that she's able to tell them on their face that they did wrong. And it just shows the power of this moment and the way

each of them make the other more brave and strong. And then it just makes me think that like mom, like son, like my mom is such a courageous person. She was able to question them on their face directly of the way that they call me a scumbag of the family. And it's just, you know, incredible to kind of see that happening in the face of such overwhelming state power and ultimately violence towards their entire people. And then after all that, like she's been through from her own mouth, that like she's still proud of me and that she supports what I did. And then she agrees with what I do,

what I speak out, it gives me the courage. And then that's the exact same reason that I didn't back down. Yeah. Well, Ferkad, thank you again and good luck with your mother and we'll be in touch as the story continues.

Cool, babe. Thank you so much. All right, story continues. Cool, babe. Thank you so much. All right. Take care. Bye. Bye. Really, so much of what we know about what's going on in Xinjiang comes from these sort of brief moments of courage and these individuals who are willing to testify and speak out.

You can't subpoena the Chinese government. You can't go in demanding documents. You can't get interviews with top officials where they're going to speak honestly. And so everything is this, you know, incredible game of investigation. And a lot of the reporting is just trying to figure out kind of tiny trace things, whatever you can. And so we had no documentation of what was going on on the inside until we did. documentation of what was going on on the inside. Until we did. The New York Times got its hands on hundreds of pages of internal Chinese government documents that really gave us the most detailed picture we could have possibly asked for, for where the camp

system came from, how it developed, how Beijing tried to hide it. The story is darker and more detailed and nuanced than we ever could have imagined. On tomorrow's Daily, the story that emerges from those secret documents. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Let's start with that terrible shooting in Pensacola. We know at least one of the people that the Saudi officer killed was a recent graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. Did he target Americans? Well, first of all, it's a very tragic incident. Our condolences go out to the families.

On Sunday, federal investigators said they were operating on the assumption that Friday's deadly shooting at a U.S. military base in Florida, which was carried out by a member of the Royal Saudi Air Force, was an act of terrorism. The gunman, who was at the base as part of a U.S. training program for foreign officers, killed three Americans and injured eight others. But overall, these types of programs, exchanges, are very important to our national security. The ability to bring foreign students here to train with us, to understand American culture, is very important to us. In an interview on Fox News Sunday, the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper,

defended the training programs and said there were no plans to shut them down. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.