More than 1 million Oralmans, mainly from China and Uzbekistan, have seized the opportunity to resettle in Kazakhstan. The joy that Tursynzhan Yesenalyuly felt in moving to his ethnic homeland of Kazakhstan from China four years ago wore off pretty quickly. Yesenalyuly, 44, lives with his three-year-old daughter in a cramped rented house in the…
Four hundred thousand to one million people in concentration camps. If these estimates are true, that means that at least one—and perhaps far more—of every ten Uyghur men lives in a re-education camp right now. Those numbers come from an article published by the Associated Press two weeks ago. [1] This week’s Economist lists a similar tally. It goes on to…
Kazakhstan’s Foreign Ministry has finally raised the issue of its missing new citizens with Chinese authorities. For many months, some ethnic Kazakhs who took advantage of offers of “repatriation” from Kazakhstan’s government and are now Kazakh citizens have crossed back into China, usually to the neighboring Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, as part of their business,…
International attention on the question of Xinjiang, the autonomous province in the northwestern corner of China, and the oppression of its native Uyghur population by the Chinese state still lags behind the well-publicized case of Tibet. Yet in the mind of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Xinjiang, which many Uyghurs call East Turkistan, now outweighs Tibet as a…
Nurbiye Nurtay, an ethnic Uyghur Muslim from northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), has been living in Malaysia practicing traditional Uyghur medicine for the last three years. She lost contact with her family in Ghulja (Yining) county, in the XUAR’s Ili Kazakh (in Chinese, Yili Hasake) Autonomous Prefecture, nearly a year ago, and only recently discovered…
Totalitarian determination and modern technology have produced a massive abuse of human rights “THE prophet Sulayman approached his son and said to him, ‘I have received a message from God. I want you to circle the Earth and see if there are more people who are alive in spirit or more people who are dead…
Hundreds of thousands, and potentially more than one million, people have been caught up in China’s “re-education camps” over the last year. The camps, which operate outside the courts, are designed to indoctrinate ethnic minority Uighurs and force them to reject their religious beliefs. Bids for constructing or renovating these centers, as well as staff…
Two Uyghur civil servants in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) have been jailed for failing to send members of their ethnic group to “political re-education camps,” according to sources, as part of a crackdown by authorities on so-called “two-faced” officials. Omerjan Hesen, 34, director of archives for the Hotan (in Chinese, Hetian) prefectural…
BEIJING (Reuters) – It can crack your smartphone password in seconds, rip personal data from call and messaging apps, and peruse your contact book. The Chinese-made XDH-CF-5600 scanner – or “mobile phone sleuth”, as sales staff described it when touting its claimed features – was one of hundreds of surveillance gadgets on display at a…
A video clip of a gloomy bride, believed to be a young Uyghur woman, appearing to begrudge marrying her groom, a member of China’s predominant Han race, has been circulating online, with observers and Uyghur human-rights advocacy groups calling it more proof of Beijing’s callous bid to “attenuate” the Uyghur identity in Xinjiang. The video…
