MEMOIR
Christina Patterson
The Gift of a Radio
My Childhood and Other
Train Wrecks by Justin Webb
Doubleday £16.99 pp256One of Justin Webb’s earliest
memories is of wanting his
stepfather to drown. He had
watched him dive into the
water at Lulworth Cove and
slice through it until he
became a pinprick in the
distance. When Webb spotted
him coming back, he felt a
prickle of disappointment.
That feeling, “like a wet little
crime” against the man his
mother had married when he
was two, lasted for years.It’s a startling opening to
a gripping memoir, and all the
more startling since Webb
is known to millions as an
affable voice on radio and
television. He sounds like a
man who has had an effortless
glide from public school to the
BBC studios where, as the
longest-serving presenter of
Radio 4’s Today programme,
he interviews cabinet
ministers and world leaders.
He sounds, he knows, like the
embodiment of “white
privilege”. His book is a stark
reminder that appearances,
and voices, can deceive.
The voice at least was
carefully nurtured, an
instrument that was meant to
signal a place in society. “My
mother lived in a world of
caste,” he says. “She was at the
top because, she said, she was
born there.” Gloria Crocombe’s
early years were comfortable.
Her father was “a big noise in
magazines”. They had a cook,
a maid, a driver and a sense of
their own importance. When
he left his wife, he took the
money too, but Gloria made itWhy the Uighur
tragedy matters
A bracing memoir of China’s brutal
‘re-education’ and sterilisation regime
CHINA
John Phipps
How I Survived a Chinese
‘Reeducation’ Camp
by Gulbahar Haitiwaji and
Rozenn Morgat
Canbury Press £18.99 pp280
“Let’s be honest, nobody,
nobody cares about what’s
happening to the Uighurs” —
that’s the Canadian billionaire
Chamath Palihapitiya, talking
recently on his popular
podcast All In. Though a small
backlash forced him to issue
an apology, nothing in that
message could match his
earlier statement for honesty.
So it must be explained
again: the Uighurs are Turkic
Muslims who live in the
northwestern Chinese region
of Xinjiang; in the past 50
years this region has been
transformed from their
homeland to one that hosts
equal numbers of Han
Chinese and Uighur; Uighurs
have become second-class
citizens; this state of affairs
led to dissent, violent protest
and may have motivated a
handful of terrorist attacks;
and the Chinese Communist
Party’s response to these
attacks was to initiate an
enormous state project to
destroy the Uighur way of life.
The CCP’s zeal for control
has not been limited to China.
In 2016 Gulbahar Haitiwaji, a
Uighur woman and the author
of this bracing new memoir,
was living peacefully in
Boulogne when she received
a phone call from her former
employer, a Xinjiang-based
oil company. There was a
problem with her pension.
She would have to come back
to sign some papers.
It was the beginning of a
life-shattering ordeal. She
was arrested, interrogated
and left to rot for six months,
whereupon she was sent
to a new facility, a school.
In fact she would be
entering Xinjiang’s gulag
archipelago, a vast network
of purpose-built camps that
at its peak housed roughly
a tenth of the adult Uighur
population. These facilities,
which ostensibly rehabilitate
“extremist” Uighurs, are
designed to force prisoners
into complete submission.
There are two weapons
employed to effect this. The
first is total control, exerted
with unprecedented
granularity and scope. As
Darren Byler makes clear in
another new book on this
mass incarceration, In the
Camps, this is enabled by
cutting-edge surveillance
and facial recognition
technology. Prisoners
swiftly learn that
any resistance is
impossible.“We were,” Gulbahar writes,
“eternal victims bowed under
the weight of threats.”
The second weapon is time.
Internees are forced to stand
motionless for hours, sit on
plastic stools day in, day out
until their intestines prolapse,
and demean themselves by
singing patriotic songs and
giving thanks to Xi Jinping.
Their total obedience to this
“programme of study” is
underwritten by the threat of
unaccountable violence — the
screams that echo beyond
their locked cell doors.
Gulbahar’s memoir is an
indispensable account, which
makes vivid the stench of
fearful sweat in the cells, the
newly built prison’s
permanent reek of white paint.
It closely corresponds with
other witness statements,
giving every indication of
being very reliable. Most
impressive is her psychological
honesty. Her initially derisive
attitude to the rudimentary
propaganda that makes up
her “re-education” is replaced
by a hollow fog of submission.
Re-education works. When she
is finally told she can leave,
after 18 months, she lies
motionless on her bed.
Her memoir attests to a
series of mandatory injections
for female internees, after
which women stopped getting
their periods. This detail,
reported consistently by
survivors, tallies with the
immense, state-backed
sterilisation programme that is
under way. As a result Uighur
birth rates have plummeted,
by as much as 80 per cent in
some places, which validates
the charge of genocide — an
attempt to destroy, in whole or
part, an entire people.
There’s no doubt that
this is a crime on a world-
historical scale. As to why
no one seems to care, I have
several theories. The Uighurs
live far away. Their culture
is unfamiliar, their name
difficult to pronounce. It’s
possible that books such as
these will change that, but
I’m doubtful. The brutal
truth is that the Uighur
cause is unfashionable. Our
attention gravitates towards
controversy, marginal cases
of right and wrong that spark
debate. In the case of the
Uighurs there is no argument
to be had, only the
conspicuous, continuing
disaster, from which the
world turns away. cBOOKS
Webb: my m
The Radio 4 Today
presenter gives a
searingly honestaccount of his
unhappy childhoodDAVID ASHDOWN/ALAMY, PRIVATE COLLECTION, GETTY IMAGESEMMANUELLE MARCHADOUR, THOMAS PETER/REUTERSHarsh treatment
Gulbahar Haitiwaji
and a Uighur
internment camp
22 6 February 2022