Goher Memet, a 35-year-old factory worker from northwestern China, has been fighting discriminatory practices against Uyghurs since being insulted by a Han Chinese storeowner months after ethnic violence in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region left some 200 people dead in July 2009. The employee of the Xinjiang Bayi Iron and Steel Co. traveled to Beijing for the second time in December last year to bring the case to the United Nations’ human rights office, but was ushered home to the regional capital of Urumqi by local authorities who pledged to resolve her dispute. After nearly a year of continued petitioning, local officials have still not addressed her case.
On Sept. 16, the former amateur songwriter was blocked by security personnel from attending the 60-year anniversary of her factory when she tried to bring a photo illustrating the grief of the Uyghur people under Chinese rule to the attention of Xinjiang Party Chairman Nur Bekri, who is also of Uyghur ethnicity. Goher Memet’s company took disciplinary action against her following the incident, fining her 1,000 yuan (U.S. $150) for "disrupting the public order." But she has vowed to continue the struggle to resolve her own case and to fight what she calls the “injustices” perpetrated against Uyghurs by Han Chinese.
"I had planned to display this picture to our chairman and to the public while delivering him flowers as a representative of the workers. I gathered the flowers from the park inside the factory and asked permission from my manager to attend the ceremony and to say thanks to the chairman. My manager agreed after consulting the relevant departments of the factory.
If I had been allowed to enter, I would have stepped up on the stage and given him the picture saying, “These are your people, the Uyghurs.” I also had planned to turn to the public to show them the picture saying, “What has been said in this ceremony is all a fiction, but this is the reality.”
I knew that such speech is unacceptable at any meeting across China and what would be the cost of my actions, but I had physically prepared myself for any fate that might follow.
I met and spoke with [the subjects of the photo] in front of the Tianshan Detention Center when I was there to visit one of my relatives who had been detained for participating in the July 5 ethnic unrest.
The father in the picture was unable to get any information on the whereabouts of his elder son after the night of July 6. The boy in the picture is his younger son.
They were originally from Maralbeshi county in Kashgar prefecture. His elder son was working as a laborer at a construction site in Urumqi when the July 5 event occurred.
The father and younger son spent their last money traveling to the capital in hopes of finding him five months after he went missing, but their last hope was shattered when they were told at the detention center that “No such persons have been recorded in this center.”
It was my first experience watching a man break down and cry because of such a desperate situation. Since then, I promised myself that I would raise this picture whenever I have a chance to speak to public.
I know that it is likely that I will be put into the Urumqi No. 4 Hospital [where petitioners are detained for “mental illness”] by the authorities after this interview is published, but I don’t mind if that happens—as long as I can publicize this picture in the media—because this is a picture worth a thousand words which describes what is happening to Uyghurs today."
Interview and translation by Shohret Hoshur of RFA's Uyghur service. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.