纽约时报中文网 - 中英对照版-中英失踪六年的知名维吾尔学者被判无期徒刑

She was a trailblazing professor and ethnographer from the Uyghur ethnic group in far-western China who documented the religious and cultural traditions of her people. She was at the height of a career that the Chinese government had once recognized with awards and research grants. But it was not enough to keep her safe.

她是来自中国西部偏远地区维吾尔族的开创性教授和民族志学家，记录了维吾尔族的宗教和文化传统。当她的事业处于巅峰期时，中国政府曾给予她奖励和研究资助。但这不足以保证她的安全。

Rahile Dawut, who nurtured a generation of academics and scholars, disappeared in 2017, along with other prominent intellectuals and academics targeted by the Chinese government in its campaign to crush the Uyghur cultural identity. Details about her case were shrouded in secrecy for years, leaving her family and friends to wonder about her fate.

培养了一代研究人员和学者的热依拉·达吾提于2017年失踪，同时失踪的还有中国政府在打击维吾尔文化身份运动中针对的其他著名知识分子和学者。多年来，她的案件细节一直被保密，她的家人和朋友都不知道她命运几何。

On Thursday, the Dui Hua Foundation, a group that campaigns on behalf of political prisoners held in China, said that it had seen a document written by a senior Chinese official stating that Dr. Rahile Dawut had been sentenced to life in prison on charges of endangering national security.

周四，为被关押在中国的政治犯争取权益的组织对话基金会表示，它看到了一份中国高级官员撰写的文件，称热依拉·达吾提博士因危害国家安全罪被判处终身监禁。

“For the Chinese government to strike her is really to strike at the heart of Uyghur culture,” John Kamm, the group’s founder and chairman, said in a phone interview. “It’s appalling.”

“对中国政府来说，打击她实际上是在打击维吾尔文化的核心，”该组织的创始人兼主席康原(John Kamm)在接受电话采访时说。“这是令人震惊的。”

Mr. Kamm added that the official also wrote that Dr. Rahile Dawut had attempted to appeal her sentence after she was first tried in 2018, but that her appeal was rejected. The Chinese government has applied a sweeping definition of “endangering national security” to detain and often imprison Uyghurs deemed to oppose or even question official policies.

康原说，这名官员还写道，热依拉·达吾提在2018年第一次受审后曾试图上诉，但被驳回。中国政府对“危害国家安全”的定义非常宽泛，用于拘留被视为反对甚至质疑官方政策的维吾尔人，并且往往将他们投入监狱。

Her daughter, Akeda Pulati, who lives in Seattle, said that the prospect of never again seeing her mother was deeply painful.

她的女儿阿克达·普拉提住在西雅图，她说，想到可能再也见不到母亲，她非常痛苦。

“I felt very angry and devastated,” at learning of the sentence, she said in a phone interview, “even though I was already devastated for several years.” She added, “I couldn’t accept the news when I heard it.”

她在电话采访中说，得知这一判决后，“我感到非常愤怒和沮丧，尽管我已经沮丧了好几年。”她还说，“听到这个消息时，我无法接受。”

Born in 1966 to a family of intellectuals in Urumqi, Dr. Rahile Dawut studied folklore at Beijing Normal University and was one of the first Uyghur women to earn a Ph.D. A version of her thesis mapped out Uyghur shrines, known as mazars, down to their coordinates, bringing her renown among academics and travelers alike.

热依拉·达吾提于1966年出生于乌鲁木齐的一个知识分子家庭，在北京师范大学学习民俗学，是首批获得博士学位的维吾尔女性之一。她的一篇论文描绘了维吾尔圣地（被称为麻扎）的地图，精确到具体坐标，使她在学者和旅行者中享有声誉。

She then became a professor at Xinjiang University, the premier college of the region, and founded a folklore institute. Throughout her career, she took meticulous records of Uyghur religious traditions and oral epic poetry, with a special focus on women’s roles in cultural rites.

之后，她成为新疆大学（该地区首屈一指的高等学府）的教授，并成立了民俗研究所。在职业生涯中，她细致地记录了维吾尔的宗教传统和口头史诗，特别关注女性在文化仪式中的作用。

“She recognized how precarious, how fragile these traditions were and how they were always at risk of being stamped out politically,” said Rachel Harris, a professor of ethnomusicology at the SOAS University of London, who has known Dr. Rahile Dawut for two decades. “So she was driven to document, and she was driven to disseminate and transmit the understanding of these traditions as well.”

“她意识到这些传统是多么岌岌可危、多么脆弱，总是有被政治消灭的危险，”与热依拉·达吾提相识20年的伦敦大学SOAS学院民族音乐学教授蕾切尔·哈里斯说。“所以她有动力去记录，她也有动力去传播和传递对这些传统的理解。”

At Xinjiang University, Dr. Rahile Dawut was a fulcrum of intellectual and social exchange, reaching out to anthropology departments in the United States and Britain to broaden her knowledge of interview techniques.

在新疆大学，热依拉·达吾提是知识和社会交流的支点，与英美大学的人类学系建立联系，拓宽了自己在走访技巧方面的知识。

Her university office was the first place many foreign scholars went when they arrived to study the region, colleagues said. Her house in Urumqi was at the heart of many gatherings among local and visiting scholars. She was known for cooking polo, a Uyghur rice pilaf, and even delivering soup to the dormitories of students who were sick.

同事们说，她的大学办公室是许多外国学者来到该地区进行研究时首先去的地方。她在乌鲁木齐的家是许多当地学者和访问学者聚会的中心。她擅长做坡罗——一种维吾尔的抓饭，甚至会为生病的学生送汤到宿舍。

In the field, she taught students to not only take from people they interviewed, but to give back where possible, printing photographs that she shared when she returned to the region. She was guided by an urgency to document customs before they were targeted by political or religious ideologies, including strains of Islam that rejected local traditions.

在实地工作中，她教导学生不仅要从走访对象那里获取信息，而且要尽可能地给予回馈，她回到当地后，还将照片打印出来与大家分享。她迫切感到，在习俗成为政治或宗教意识形态（包括拒绝地方传统的伊斯兰教派）的目标之前，需要将其记录下来。

Many of her subjects treated her with reverence, calling her “the teacher” and allowing her to document rituals that traditionally only men could attend. She was best known for her work on shrine pilgrimages, which was translated to English. Her database on dastan, Uyghur oral epics, was almost complete, a former colleague said.

她的许多研究对象都很尊敬她，称她为“老师”，并允许她记录传统上只有男性才能参加的仪式。她最出名的作品是关于圣地朝圣的研究，已被译成英文。她的一位前同事说，她关于维吾尔族口头史诗“达斯坦”的数据库几乎已经完成。。

Over the years, the Chinese had funded her research. She had met President Jiang Zemin in 2000 at a conference where she represented Uyghur scholars. And one of the last projects she worked on before she disappeared had received funding from the National Social Science Foundation of China. But it appeared to be precisely the breadth and significance of her work that ensnared her.

多年来，中国一直资助她的研究。2000年，她曾代表维吾尔学者在一次会议上与江泽民主席会面。她失踪前的最后一个项目获得了中国国家社会科学基金的资助。但似乎正是她工作的广度和意义让她陷入困境。

In 2017, when China erected internment camps to stamp out what it described as religious extremism in Xinjiang, the authorities also began erasing signs of Uyghur heritage, destroying mosques and the rural religious sites Dr. Rahile Dawut studied. Religious practitioners like those she had interviewed in the countryside were rounded up.

2017年，当中国在新疆建立拘禁营，以消灭其所称的宗教极端主义时，当局也开始抹去维吾尔族遗产的痕迹，摧毁清真寺和热依拉·达吾提所研究的农村宗教场所。像她在农村采访过的那些宗教信仰者遭到围捕。

They came for her, too, that December. More than 100 Uyghur academics, intellectuals and writers disappeared into detention during that time.

那年12月，他们也找上了她。在此期间，有100多名维吾尔学者、知识分子和作家在拘禁期间失踪。

Dr. Rahile Dawut is not the only Uyghur intellectual known to have received a life sentence on charges of endangering national security. Ilham Tohti, an economist and professor who had critiqued China’s policy on ethnic minorities, was sentenced to life in a 2014 trial that was largely viewed as a public warning against challenging the Chinese government.

热依拉·达吾提并不是已知的唯一一位因危害国家安全罪被判处无期徒刑的维吾尔知识分子。曾批评中国少数民族政策的经济学家兼教授伊力哈木·土赫提在2014年的一场审判中被判处无期徒刑，这场审判在很大程度上被视为对挑战中国政府的公开警告。

From 2017 to last September, over half a million people in Xinjiang were prosecuted in a vast expansion of the numbers of Uyghurs held in prisons, according to statistics collected by Human Rights Watch.

根据人权观察收集的统计数据，从2017年到去年9月，新疆有50多万人被起诉，监狱中关押的维吾尔人数量大幅增加。

“By the time the current crisis started a few years later, in 2017, it seems that the party state made the determination no longer to punish a few to frighten the many, but rather to simply punish the many,” said Joshua L. Freeman, a cultural historian who has known Dr. Rahile Dawut for two decades and translated her work.

“到几年后，也就是2017年，当前的危机开始时，这个党国似乎已经下定决心，不再以惩罚少数人来吓唬多数人，而是干脆惩罚多数人，”文化历史学家约书亚·弗里曼说，他认识热依拉·达吾提已有20年，并翻译了她的著作。

He added that the secrecy surrounding the entire repression campaign spoke to the authorities’ unwillingness to admit culpability. “Those perpetrating this injustice are fully aware of the degree of the injustice,” he said. “Why else would this need to be kept secret?”

他补充说，整个镇压行动的秘密性表明当局不愿承认自己的罪责。“那些实施这种不公正行为的人充分意识到这种不公正的程度。否则为什么要保密呢？”他说。

China’s State Council Information Office did not respond to a request for comment, and faxes to the Xinjiang government’s propaganda department did not go through.

中国国务院新闻办公室没有回应置评请求，记者向新疆省政府宣传部发送的传真也未能送达。