I just want my husband back

Tursun Gul, symbol of Uighur defiance: I just want my husband back
An elderly woman belonging to the Chinese Uyghur Moslem minority stands defiantly in front of a riot police vehicle and soldiers during a protest in Urumqi, China

(Oliver Weiken/EPA)

Tursun Gul confronts Chinese riot police in Urumqi
Jane Macartney in Urumqi

As she stood alone shaking her fist at serried ranks of armed police, Tursun Gul was not afraid. Her only thoughts were of her husband.

The Muslim Uighur woman has no idea that images of that moment when she stood alone in front of a line of armoured personnel carriers to vent her rage at Chinese police have been seen around the world.

Tursun Gul, 30, has only one concern: to recover her husband and four brothers who were arrested by the police a day after Uighurs rampaged through Urumqi, capital of the westernmost region of Xinjiang on Sunday. The violence left 156 people dead and more than 1,000 injured.

In her tiny basement home in a crowded tenement, the mother of a six-year-old daughter and two-year-old son wipes away a tear with the brown and cream headscarf she was wearing a day earlier when she confronted the security forces.
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“I told them that we wanted freedom and a peaceful life. Just let my five men go.” She was not afraid, she said. “I thought that if they beat me or they killed me there were more people behind me who would take my place.”

Early in the morning she had gone to the police to beg for the return of her husband, Maimaiti, 33. They ignored her and she fainted from rage. An hour later she joined a group of about 300 other women who rushed into the street to plead their cause when they saw foreign journalists arriving on a government-organised tour to areas damaged in Sunday’s riots.

Police pushed back the women as they screamed for the release of their menfolk, who were taken away on Monday evening. “The others were all surrounded by police but somehow I slipped through. I found myself alone and just walked towards the lines of police," she said.

She limped painfully forward, leaning on a crutch and dragging her left leg – crippled in a school sports accident when she was 12. She pushes her two index fingers together. “I was as close to them as that.” She remembers shouting: “I don’t want to live. I just want to be free and to have my husband.”

In a breathtaking moment, instead of advancing, the armoured personnel carriers started to back away from their solitary challenger as she shouted and gesticulated. “Do we have law in the country? Do you want to give us a peaceful life or not?”

She said the fact that she was a woman probably determined the response by the paramilitary People’s Armed Police. “I think they felt sympathy for me.”

A senior Uighur officer approached her and tried to calm her, giving her his telephone number and telling her to go home. “He told me to trust them, to trust the Communist Party and everything would be all right.” She left and tried to call him later, but there was no answer. She said that she had now lost his phone number but remembered his name as Bik.

As for her husband’s detention, she said: “I just hope that he will behave well. He has a heart problem and I worry about him.”

Tursun Gul feels no bitterness. “The Han don’t hate the Uighurs and the Uighurs don’t hate the Han. I have sympathy for the Han people who were killed. We need to have ethnic unity.”

She recounts the moment her husband was taken. She said police came early on Monday evening and ordered everyone into their homes. They then entered the crowded, slum-like courtyards and ordered all the men to come out. They checked their identity cards. They were then taken out on to the main road, ordered to strip to their underpants and told to lie face down on the ground with their hands on the back of their heads. Finally, they were loaded into trucks and driven off.