KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:
Hey. I'm Kelly McEvers, and this is EMBEDDED from NPR. NPR correspondent Emily Feng started reporting the story of the Kucar family and their separation in 2021. It was during China's crackdown on Uyghurs and other Muslim groups. And since then, Emily has kept following the family. Abdullatif Kucar had been diagnosed with cancer, and his wife, Meryem, was still being held in a Chinese prison. We will hear from Abdullatif later in this episode. But also, Emily still had these nagging questions. Who was the person who tried to dissuade the Kucar family from telling their story to NPR all those years ago? And why?
So Emily called up Uyghur activist and writer Abduweli Ayup. He's the one who introduced her to the Kucar family and helped her with translations in her first two episodes. And then she started digging. And what she found was a kind of metastory about the people who work to silence stories - and some of them have felt silenced themselves - and how they help perpetuate and justify systems they know are wrong. Emily will pick up the story after the break as she and Abduweli work to track down that mysterious ally to the Kucar family.
EMILY FENG, BYLINE: It took two years to convince the Kucars to talk to us for those first couple of episodes.
ABDUWELI AYUP: I kept in contact, but they kept distance.
FENG: Abduweli eventually heard through a family member that a prominent Uyghur businessman had offered his help only if the Kucars did not talk to the media.
AYUP: If he keep silent, he will help to save his wife, too.
FENG: This businessman's name, the relative told Abduweli, was Sabir Bogda.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FENG: He is a man known to make things happen, but he is also rumored to request things in return, like silence. As in, don't speak out against the government, and I'll see what I can do. So I had to wonder - who is this man, and why does he do what he does? Is he a spy for China?
AYUP: Sabir is one of the most famous Uyghurs around the world.
FENG: With, Abduweli says, a huge public presence.
AYUP: I have seen him on the screen. I have read articles, even, about him. And I heard a lot of rumors about him.
FENG: Rumors about his ability to work with Chinese government officials.
AYUP: Because he is the one that easily get visa from Chinese embassy.
FENG: This is apparently one of Sabir's magic powers. He's able to obtain visas for Uyghurs hoping to get back into China. Since China's crackdown, it's been almost impossible for Uyghurs to leave China or to return. But Sabir floats between these worlds, and he promises others the same opportunity.
AYUP: To save their family members and help them because of - he came back and forth between China and Turkey, between Istanbul and Urumqi.
FENG: One Uyghur guy I talked to, who was having trouble getting his Chinese passport renewed, remembers Sabir once whipping out his phone, calling a Chinese diplomat and fixing the problem within the week.
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FENG: So that's what we knew about Sabir, but we never met him in person or had been able to talk to him. Then, last fall, Sabir - out of the blue - reached out. So we headed to Istanbul.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Singing in non-English language).
FENG: Turkey is now home to an estimated 50,000 Uyghurs, including many who have fled the crackdown in China.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Singing in non-English language).
FENG: Abduweli met Sabir first at his office. And later, I met him at an upscale restaurant in Istanbul. Sabir is tall, thin, dapper and very charismatic. Almost immediately after we sat down, he launched into his backstory. He says he first left China in 1998 and came to Turkey as a student.
SABIR BOGDA: (Through interpreter) When I first arrived in Istanbul, Uyghurs were scarce in numbers.
FENG: Now, remember, the 1990s were the beginning of a brief period of relative prosperity for Uyghurs in China. But after 9/11 and after the Islamophobia in the U.S. and China that followed, Uyghurs began to suffer. But not Sabir. While still a student, he also became an entrepreneur.
BOGDA: (Through interpreter) During that period, I juggled business ventures alongside my college studies, frequently traveling between Central Asia and Turkey. Specifically, I was involved in antler and copper trades, which were thriving industries at the time.
FENG: He says he made a ton of money, but his real claim to fame in Istanbul was a Chinese restaurant he opened called the Golden Dragon.
BOGDA: (Through interpreter) Our restaurant has attracted celebrities like Sophia Loren and Jackie Chan, as well as hosted heads of state. If a patron didn't spend at least $50 on food, then we wouldn't even look them in the face (laughter).
FENG: The restaurant also became a hotspot gathering place for Turkish and Chinese government officials. I met several Uyghurs in Turkey who described meeting Sabir there for business and running into Chinese officials. In 2010, Sabir set up a nonprofit organization in Istanbul called The Turkish Uyghur Industrialists' and Entrepreneurs' Association, which promotes Xinjiang, how great it is, and tries to drum up investment in the region.
Just a few weeks after the organization's launch, Sabir, as its president, got to meet with the then-Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, who was in Turkey on a state visit. Sabir says he took the meeting as a chance to press for greater rights for Uyghur people in China. He says he told the premier about the embarrassing interrogations he'd suffered when trying to enter China and emphasized how common this is.
BOGDA: (Through interpreter) All Uyghur people living around the world face the same problem at the Chinese border. It's unfair to treat Uyghurs like this upon entering the country.
FENG: Sabir's continued traveling to China and meeting with officials despite the crackdown in Xinjiang. He maintains that open lines of communication with the Chinese state actually help the Uyghur people.
BOGDA: (Through interpreter) This is a problem - a problem that could be solved through dialogue in a formal manner over many years. It can be addressed through dialogue and negotiation done in the right way.
FENG: Sabir says he does not take sides in this conflict, but he's repeated false claims about Uyghurs on Turkish media. In 2020, he said COVID was the reason Uyghurs were not allowed to leave China or contact their relatives, but he never mentioned the state crackdown.
BOGDA: (Through interpreter) I don't view China as a problematic country. In Turkey, we might see things that are different as normal. China's political structure has its limitations, and it may resort to aggressive actions for certain issues. I consider this normal.
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FENG: The truth is, it's impossible to really know where Sabir stands. Is he trying to help the Uyghur people? Or is he being used as a pawn by the Chinese state? Abduweli says not having those answers creates mistrust.
AYUP: If you do something underlyingly, people feel suspicious and the people will not trust each other. People suspect that - are you working with Chinese government? Are you working for Chinese government?
FENG: This does happen. Some Uyghurs have said they're asked by Chinese police officers to spy on other Uyghurs in Turkey, and suspicion is rife among the Uyghur diaspora about potential spies and informants lurking in their midst. For example, right after Wen Jiabao, that Chinese premier, visited Turkey, a second Uyghur businessman told me he received a phone call. It was from a young, low-level Chinese diplomat who was ethnically Uyghur, and this Chinese diplomat politely asked the businessman to start a second branch of the organization Sabir began in Istanbul. The Chinese diplomat said they wanted eyes on the ground in every Turkish city. China regularly sets up surveillance operations to monitor diaspora and dissonant groups abroad - in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, for example - and Turkey is no exception. This businessman told me, however, that he said no.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FENG: In his interview with us, Sabir hedged when asked about whether he worked with China, whether it spied on Uyghurs, and he even suggested Uyghurs were in part to blame for their predicament.
BOGDA: (Through interpreter) We often place all the blame on China, on various factors, on America, on Turkey. But as Uyghurs, are we completely innocent?
FENG: And Sabir was really skillful in sidestepping every question lobbed at him about whether he's a spy. He does not deny he works with Chinese officials. After all, Chinese state media reports show he's been an official representative at political meetings in Beijing for at least two years and met at least several times with officials from China's United Front. That's the Communist Party body tasked with co-opting dissident groups outside China. But for Uyghurs desperate to connect with family inside China, Sabir is a lifeline, in large part because he has this unusual access.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FENG: So what are Sabir's motivations? To this day, Abduweli and I still don't totally understand.
AYUP: I wanted to believe - I still want to believe he has done something good. I should be fair that he has done nothing harmful to the people. From his description and from my understanding, from my knowledge, people asked him help, and then he helped, but we don't know the motivation. So that secret - the lobbying is harmful to Uyghur society because of you can't tell what you have done to the people. But I don't have evidence to prove this. I don't believe something without evidence.
FENG: I reached out to the Chinese government seeking information on Sabir Bogda and his relationship to China. My questions went unanswered.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FENG: When I met Sabir in Istanbul in October 2023, he was preparing to lead another delegation of Uyghur businessmen from Turkey to China, and dozens of Uyghurs had tried to sign up. Sabir had given the Chinese foreign ministry a list of Uyghur men, and Beijing got to handpick the people they wanted to come. Those who were selected were guaranteed safe passage in and out of China, but there is a cost to going.
M: (Through interpreter) Spying is too big of a word for what these people do.
FENG: This is M, another Uyghur businessman who desperately wanted to be included in Sabir's delegation despite knowing it might mean he'd get approached by Chinese authorities.
M: (Through interpreter) The Chinese public security and state security bureaus contact Uyghur businessmen and threaten them and ask them to pass on information about the Uyghur people around them - where they live and what they do for work.
FENG: M left his hometown of Urumqi - that's Xinjiang's capital - in 2015 after a lot of his friends were detained, which is why M did not want to be named in this story. His family in Xinjiang has come under a lot of state pressure because he now lives abroad. Yet after nearly eight years in Turkey, M still misses China. His life's work was there, including his business.
M: (Through interpreter) Normal logic dictates we shouldn't have any contact with Chinese people, but we only know how to work with Chinese people. We have no other options. Turkey is even worse. We've all gone bankrupt working with people here because we do not know how to work here. We have to keep up contacts with China. Among us Uyghur businessmen, more than 99% of us still have links to China.
FENG: Which is why M wanted to go on Sabir's trip to China, despite the risk of having to pass on information to the state.
M: (Through interpreter) Our tragedy is that we have to live. Survival is our biggest priority. We have families, children. We need to survive. I used to criticize the Uyghur people for not being united against the Chinese, but I learned the hard way that to survive, we have to have contact with China and do bad things.
FENG: But in the end, M was rejected. He was not allowed to enter China. He does not know why, and he's reeling. Chinese business partners he's worked with for years have abandoned him because they think they could get in trouble by associating with him.
M: (Through interpreter) All it takes is one phone call from the local Chinese police. They'll say, don't work with so-and-so person. Otherwise, it'll bring trouble. All it takes is one call, and the other person will immediately cut ties with you. They can't ask why.
FENG: Still, M told me he does not fault Sabir and other Uyghurs who keep up a two-way street with Beijing.
M: (Through interpreter) So many people have fear - fear of losing their families, their businesses being affected. That's the biggest problem right now. In order to survive, they turn their backs on their own people.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FENG: I heard this again and again during my reporting in Turkey. People do what they do to survive, and there are no easy black-and-white moral choices to make. And as for Sabir, he never really explained why he had reached out to us and wanted to talk, but by the end of our meeting with him, it seemed pretty clear he was just trying to justify what he does and how he does it. But justifications like that don't sit well with Abduweli. He's a writer and activist. He's taken a clear stand. Abduweli thinks the Uyghur people are in crisis and engagement with the Chinese state is a betrayal.
AYUP: People feel that they are on the battlefield, at the war. So at the war, we have only two sides - one attack, and the other defend themselves. At that time, it's really clear that who is who. If you commute between two sides, it's really obvious. People feel who you are.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FENG: But one thing that stuck out to me during my years reporting on the ground in Xinjiang was this - there are a lot of Uyghurs in this position. A lot of the low-level staff enforcing China's crackdown are ethnic Uyghurs. I've always wondered how this Chinese police state in Xinjiang endures, how it continues to keep Uyghurs outside China from speaking out, and also how it controls Uyghurs inside China, who comprise just under half of Xinjiang's population. China's success, it turns out, has a lot to do with the help it receives from people like Sabir. In a moment, I'll tell you about one of those low-level enforcers. He's a Uyghur man who worked for the Chinese government in Xinjiang.
A: (Through interpreter) I knew in my heart that the government's policy was wrong.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FENG: We'll be right back.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FENG: So in Turkey, we met Sabir, a powerful businessman with ties to China. He insists he's helping Uyghurs by keeping good relations with the Chinese authorities. He has no regrets about working within the system China has established. I met another man who, at first, sounds a lot like Sabir. He was sympathetic to the Chinese government and thought he was helping in the work he was assigned. But over time, he changed his mind, and his story ends in a very different place from Sabir's. Abduweli Ayup first met this man in Istanbul, where the man now lives. We got to know him at a Uyghur-run restaurant in the city. The owners pulled some curtains around us to give us privacy and then served us steaming plates of polo, a kind of rice pilaf beloved by Uyghurs.
A: We can order.
FENG: But also with dumplings, OK?
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FENG: We're calling this man by his first initial only, A, because he also has family left in China, whose safety he worries about. A tells us it's been a long journey to Turkey. Back in China, he says he trained as a teacher, then got a job in his hometown in the local government. Most of his work was administrative. He registered marriages and divorces, maintained land records and registrations, and things like that. But in 2014, A started to notice something different happening. He began to get a lot of new assignments at work and requests to do overtime.
A: (Through interpreter) Since mid-2014, working groups were formed. We don't get breaks anymore at work. We can't even ask for one.
FENG: And part of A's new role was to report Uyghurs who appeared to be practicing Muslims.
A: (Through interpreter) We were sent out to surveil the Uyghur farmers, for example, to see if there were abnormal situations, such as if they had a beard or not. At the beginning, actually, the government didn't say that they had to get rid of their beards altogether, nor did they tell Uyghurs to take off their long religious robes. They were very soft in their tone, and they said that they should change their long clothes to shorter ones.
FENG: In 2016, it fell on A to notify working adults that it was their turn to go to school and bring them from their home or workplace directly to what are essentially detention camps. Abdullatif Kucar's young children, Aysu and Lutfullah, were taken to similar facilities when they were detained by the Chinese state. It's where they said they were beaten, punished for speaking the Uyghur language and occasionally kept in solitary confinement. Although China euphemistically calls these schools, state procurement documents and satellite images of these camps show that some of them have come to resemble correctional facilities - with barbed wire, high walls and guard towers - and people cannot leave. But at first, A was not too concerned about them.
A: (Through interpreter) I didn't pay close attention to it, such as who was taken there and how it was done. When I attended the training, there weren't that many people.
FENG: A thought this was just another round of ideological campaigning. He'd experienced numerous ebbs and flows in how China controls Xinjiang. And he saw it as his duty to his fellow Uyghurs to implement state policy - basically, to get whatever this is over with more quickly. And soon, A told us, he got assigned a new job teaching at one of the detention camps. The school, as he calls it, was in the chilly northern mountain ranges of Xinjiang, and it had been built quickly out of once-empty land. It was also run very strictly. Here's how A remembers the routine.
A: (Through interpreter) Every morning - summertime, around 5 o'clock; wintertime is 5:30 - a bell is rung, like bells strung in military camps. After the bell rings, we all stand up, make our beds. You have 20 minutes to brush your teeth and wash your face and get on the field, where we did military-style drills, such as running in the field. Then we'd shout political slogans. There are a lot of them to be read. We'd do drills of turning left and right and push-ups - very hard military training.
FENG: A says he was assigned to help with the studying bit, teaching classes in Mandarin Chinese language, in Xi Jinping speeches and in lessons against religious extremism. At first, he said he did his job with gusto.
A: (Through interpreter) During the session, I exerted my utmost effort because, in my opinion, terrorism is morally unjustifiable. It is fundamentally wrong to take the lives of others. I was passionate about training them, encouraging them to pay attention to modern science and technology, democracy and human rights. I emphasized how the bombings and terror attacks in Afghanistan were wrong and harmful to others. When I spoke of democracy and human rights, their hearts were deeply moved.
FENG: His students were forced to be there, though, remember? They were under pressure to show they'd reformed in some way in order to leave. A few months later, A was reassigned to a second detention camp near the city of Korla, in Xinjiang's north, this one built on the grounds of an actual middle school.
A: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: I wanted to know exactly where both camps were. So we took a break from the interview, and I pulled up Google Maps on my phone. A pointed to where he'd worked.
A: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: And both camps match exactly to two camps identified and confirmed by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, an Australian think tank. And it was at the second camp that he was assigned to that A says he started doubting the work when he questioned the treatment of the detainees and whether he was complicit in all of it.
A: (Through interpreter) There was a man in the class who was 60 years old. Unfortunately, his responses were not as quick as the others. This elderly man struggled to write a reflection essay, and when he couldn't keep up, he was subjected to beatings with sticks and slaps by the teachers. It pained me to see an elder treated this way. There were seven or eight others like him who endured similar punishment. While some of them deliberately resisted the system and reacted poorly, he remained a well-behaved man. He would listen attentively, but his slow reactions left him behind. He was subject to harsh beatings several times, and my heart ached for him. On the contrary, he deserved respect. In society or any community, everyone should have shown him respect and greeted him warmly.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FENG: A says he started trying to help the detainees out, helping the older residents remember their Chinese and sneaking the younger ones extra eggs from his own breakfast because he knew they weren't getting as much food. But he also started to fear for his own safety. He realized the teachers and not just the students were being watched closely.
A: (Through interpreter) At that time, I had a sad feeling in my heart. But despite that, even if we knew what was happening was wrong in our hearts, I couldn't let the government know that I felt that way. We had a boss that watched out every move. If they found out that we had emotions about what was going on, they would file a report on us.
FENG: As A told his story, Abduweli and I found it hard to understand how he could justify his work, given what he was seeing. So I asked him why he kept teaching despite his doubts.
A: (Through interpreter) I thought that by working diligently, the number of students would decrease, and there would be no need for further training in the future. Unfortunately, the exact opposite occurred. Some of the students I taught relinquished their hidden books and tapes. However, the government still maintained that their camp incarceration action was justified. That was when I experienced the most distress. I believed that through training, they would find liberation and no longer endure such treatment, but their numbers grew to a thousand.
FENG: And as the detention camps were filling up with Uyghurs, the economy tanked. With their owners or employees in detention, small businesses around Xinjiang began to fail. Chinese investors started pulling out because of the political instability. And A, who could no longer stand teaching at these camps, tried to find another stable source of income. One of the only jobs left, however, was in the police force. And so in 2019, he says he reluctantly became a police officer in Korla.
A: (Through interpreter) If I don't work, someone else will take my place. If someone worse than me or less educated than me were hired, they might enforce police work more harshly, leading to further oppression of Uyghur people.
FENG: When we met, A showed me his police badge to verify his identity and former occupation. He says his hardest assignment as a police officer, when he's asked to really prove his loyalty, came later in 2019. It was June, the Eid al-Fitr festival - an important holiday on the Muslim calendar - and A is told to go to Kashgar, a city in the south of Xinjiang that's the heart of Uyghur culture.
These Chinese state media videos from that day in Kashgar and around Xinjiang show beautiful scenes of Uyghur life in the lead-up to the holiday.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Non-English language spoken).
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: There are video diaries of young Uyghur men and women preparing for Ramadan...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: (Non-English language spoken).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: (Non-English language spoken).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: (Non-English language spoken).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: (Non-English language spoken).
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: (Chanting) Allahu akbar.
FENG: ...And shots of these long rows of men bowing to prayer outside mosques.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: (Chanting) Allahu akbar.
FENG: A is at one of those mosques, too, with about 30 children he's been asked to look after.
A: (Through interpreter) At the time of Eid, they tell us, this day is Eid. You should assign Uyghur police, three or four of them from one police station. Go to the mosques on the Eid mornings. We'll tell you what your assignments are when you get there. We bring with us 15 or 20 Uyghur officers to a station, and another 15 are Chinese - half Chinese, half Uyghur. They assign three or four of us, mostly young officers, the ones without family. I was also assigned. We gathered in a hall of a big building in front of the mosque together on the day of Eid.
FENG: A tells the children he's brought to dance to put on a show for reporters who are watching...
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: ...To create this fiction of ethnic unity and that Uyghurs are free to celebrate religious holidays.
(SOUNDBITE OF DRUM BEATING)
FENG: Chinese state media broadcast videos of the dancing.
A: (Through interpreter) It seems that there were reporters everywhere. They took pictures and filmed the scene to show that we're living normally.
FENG: A says it was all staged by the government.
A: (Through interpreter) Later, we found out that those who came out of the mosque were retired Communist Party cadres who organized some pro-government party members to pray at the mosque.
FENG: A sort of laughs in disbelief as he recalls this event for us.
A: (Through interpreter) We witnessed with our own eyes that the government was propagandizing to the international community that religious rights were being protected here.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FENG: We requested comment from China's Foreign Ministry, and in response, it sent a statement saying Western media is, quote, "slandering China's governance policies in Xinjiang." It also said, quote, "the legal rights of the Uyghur ethnic group have been fully protected." We're still waiting for comment from the Public Security Ministry.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FENG: But for A, what he saw at the mosque that day - it was his breaking point. He does not want to do this work anymore, and he started to look for ways out of Xinjiang. He finds out if you can get a job outside of Xinjiang and you can register your identification card elsewhere, you might be able to apply for a passport and leave China. So he came up with a plan. He had a friend running a school training kids to use computers in the southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu, and his friend agreed to hire him as a teacher in 2020. Once he was outside of Xinjiang, A says he began to realize what a mental cage it had been working and living there - one he had helped to create.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FENG: Since A's time in the camps, the security measures in the Xinjiang region appear to have eased a bit, and China claims the camps have been closed. But recent reports out of the region suggest many of the sites remain and detentions continue.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FENG: When he reflects on his time teaching in the detention camps, A says he's struck by how easy it was to get people to turn on one another through fear alone.
A: (Through interpreter) We would gather a large number of people and tell them, if you confess, we'll give leniency and let you go. If you don't confess, we will start arresting you in two or three days. Then, people would start coming to the station in droves to confess out of fear.
FENG: And that's all it took for people to panic.
A: (Through interpreter) There was a feeling that the government knew everything they did. So when a policeman arrested someone and asked him if he had done this or that, we knew he would confess everything he did since birth and give up four, five or even seven or eight people to save himself.
FENG: In 2023, A managed to leave China using his new identity documents. For now, he's in Istanbul but hopes to settle elsewhere and start a new life. During our interview with A, I kept wondering what Abduweli thought of A's story. After all, Abduweli was jailed by people not unlike A. So I asked Abduweli, after we returned from our trip to Turkey, what it was like to hear from someone who had been on the other side in the camps.
AYUP: He told me the story just like happened to somewhere else, not our hometown, somebody else, not us.
FENG: With detachment, Abduweli means. A had described what had happened to him, but what bothered Abduweli is he had not taken any responsibility for what he had done.
AYUP: Like, I asked him one question that, how can you become a police? After you stayed in the camp as a teacher, you have experienced those torture, those humiliation, those indoctrination. And how can you become a police? And he told me very naturally that, what can I do? That's the job I can find. I have to feed myself. I have to support my family. It reminded me this indoctrination worked really well, how people accepted the reality that easily.
FENG: Abduweli thought A should repent.
AYUP: Just confess what you have done. Just tell me it's wrong.
FENG: I think he does feel bad.
AYUP: Yeah, of course. Of course, he does feel bad. But, like, he told part of the truth but not all of the truth.
FENG: Do you see this man as a victim himself?
AYUP: Yes. He's a victim himself because of - he didn't realize what he has done is wrong. That's the biggest victimhood. How can you do this? How can you arrest your brothers and sisters? Yes, I can understand as a scholar (crying) but I can't understand as a victim, as a Uyghur. I can't. No.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FENG: But this policeman did come forward. He did tell us his story, finally. I hope that, in some way, is a way for him to repent.
AYUP: Yeah, yeah, he did. Yeah, like, he did.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FENG: Abduweli says that's one step towards telling Uyghur stories to the world.
AYUP: We have enough evidence, but we don't have enough people to tell the truth.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FENG: The Kucar family - the family we profiled, whose kids were separated from them in China - is the reason why Abduweli and I set off on this journey. We wanted to understand the victims and the victimizers, but also the people in between who enable China's crackdown on Uyghurs. The Kucars' initial hesitancy and the complicated relationship that people we met along the way have with China made me realize how hard it is to do what you think is the right thing. There's immense moral inertia and, frankly, confusion about what should be done. Ultimately, the Kucars did speak out, sharing their story with NPR first, but they haven't gotten their fairy tale ending. Abdullatif Kucar was finally able to find his kids and get them out of China. But his wife, Meryem, remains in a Chinese prison. He's now battling cancer.
ABDULLATIF KUCAR: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: When I last saw Abdullatif at his Istanbul home in October 2023, he was recovering from major surgery. His health was poor, but he wanted to leave a message with us. Abduweli asked Abdullatif what he'd say if he had a chance to see his wife, Meryem, again.
KUCAR: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: Abdullatif says it's impossible to express everything he wants to.
AYUP: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: He says if he could go back to Xinjiang again, he'd tell her...
KUCAR: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: ...Don't lose hope.
KUCAR: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: That, God willing, they will meet again.
KUCAR: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: And with his health failing, his big dreams are for his children.
KUCAR: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: He hopes they grow up without losing their sense of identity.
KUCAR: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: For them to know who they are, where they come from...
KUCAR: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: ...And where they are headed.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MCEVERS: This is the final episode of The Black Gate, a collaboration with NPR's international desk. The series was reported by correspondent Emily Feng, with translation help from Abduweli Ayup. Adelina Lancianese produced this episode. It was edited by Jenny Schmidt. Katie Simon is our supervising editor. Liana Simstrom is our supervising producer. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi.
Special thanks to Didi Schanche and Vincent Ni of NPR's international desk. Uyghur translations by Akeda Juma. Uighur Abdulla, Arslan Hidayat and Babur Ilchi recorded the voiceovers you hear in this episode. Fact-checking by William Chase. Mastering by Kwesi Lee and Gilly Moon. Music by Ramtin Arablouei. Thanks to our managing editor of standards and practices, Tony Cavin, and to Micah Ratner for legal support.
And a big thanks to our EMBEDDED+ supporters. EMBEDDED is where we do ambitious, long-form journalism at NPR, and EMBEDDED+ helps us do that work. Supporters also get to listen to every EMBEDDED series sponsor-free, including the next one that's coming up in this feed. Find out more at plus.npr.org/embedded, or find the EMBEDDED channel in Apple. And thanks for listening.
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