Xämit Hämraev: The Uyghur Tragedy (in German)

A part of today´s Uyghurs´ ancestors were settling in the Sino-Russian borderlands, where they were drawn into the tragic developments of the Russian Civil War (1917-1922). In 1918, the "Reds" perpetrated massacres of the Muslim civil population in what is today Southeastern Kazakhstan, killing between several hundred and several thousand people. These massacres came to be known as the "Atu Tragedy" (from atu, the Kazakh word for "to shoot").

The Uyghur writer Xämit Hämraev lives in Kazakhstan, which hosts the world´s largest Uyghur community outside the People´s Republic of China, totalling approximately 300,000 people. His 1997 novel "The Ghulja Trail", which first came out in Russian, is set aroud the Atu Tragedy. By publishing it, Hämraev helped to break the silence that Soviet authories had imposed on anybody who wanted unearth the truth about this Bolshevik crime. The stage play "The Uyghur Tragedy", which was originally published in Hämraev´s mother tongue Uyghur, contains a condensed and dramatized version of the novel.

Historically, the "Ghulja Trail" was a trade route that ran between Kazakhstan´s cultural metropolis Verniy (Alma-Ata, today known as Almaty) and the town of Ghulja (today´s 伊宁 Yīníng in the People´s Republic of China). Some of the victims tried to escape the Bolshevik terror on this route towards China.

The book "The Uyghur Tragedy" contains a full translation of Hämraev´s stage play into German, which has been made from the Uyghur original text, as well as an explanatory chapter on the historical background and the author. It also contains annotations to the text, and a list of references.

The book is the first title in Gulandot´s "Minima Turcologica" series, which presents shorter scholarly contributions and translations from the world of the Turkic peoples.