BEIJING — Kayrat Samarkand says his only “crime” was being a Muslim who had visited neighboring Kazakhstan. On that basis alone, he was detained by police, aggressively interrogated for three days, then dispatched in November to a “reeducation camp” in China’s western province of Xinjiang for three months. There, he faced endless brainwashing and humiliation, he…
DetailsMr. Thum, a historian, has been conducting research in Xinjiang, China, for nearly two decades. What does it take to intern half a million members of one ethnic group in just a year? Enormous resources and elaborate organization, but the Chinese authorities aren’t stingy. Vast swathes of the Uighur population in China’s western region of…
DetailsThe mass incarceration of a minority people In the April 30 issue of this magazine, we published a piece about Jerome A. Cohen, a veteran American scholar of China. He told me that he was consumed, at present, by one thing above all: the mass incarceration of the Uyghur people, with no due process whatsoever.…
DetailsThousands of Uyghur people rallied outside the European Commission in Brussels on April 27, calling on foreign governments to take a stand against the hundreds of thousands of their people being detained in re-education camps by the Chinese government. Up to one million Uyghurs are or have been detained in “political education centres” in the central Asian…
DetailsNostalgia for the boyishly-brutal Wang Zhen flooded across Han Xinjiang in the days, weeks, and months following the intra-communal violence of early July 2009 in Urumqi. Many Han invoked Wang Zhen’s notorious approach to management of Xinjiang’s non-Han (and in particular, Uyghur) population as the solution to what they termed the ‘ethnic problem’ (minzu wenti).…
DetailsHigh school sweethearts – both originally from China’s Xinjiang Uighur region – dreamed of living together in Australia The last time Almas Nizamidin saw his wife was on Valentine’s Day last year, when he flew from Australia to China to surprise her. Now she’s in prison. A month after his visit to China, his newly pregnant wife,…
DetailsOne member of the Uyghur diaspora explains why Uyghurs abroad raise their banners outside Chinese embassies. A question I am often asked is why I participate in protests and demonstrations. What impact do our blue and white placards and hoarse voices have against a stoic Canberran building that hoists the Chinese flag? Perhaps my questioners see…
DetailsTO THE BRINK In the early hours of New Year’s Day in 2017, a heavily armed gunmanstormed Reina, an exclusive Istanbul nightclub on the Bosphorus coast, murdering 39. ISIS claimed responsibility for the massacre, but the Turkish deputy prime minister swiftly made an incendiary claim: the perpetrators, he said, were “probably” Uyghur—the ethnically Turkic Muslims indigenous to the region…
DetailsBEIJING: A court in China’s mainly Muslim East Turkistan (Xinjiang) region has sentenced a man to six years in prison for “provoking trouble” and growing a beard, a practise discouraged by local authorities, a newspaper reported on Sunday. The court in the desert oasis city of Kashgar sentenced the 38-year-old Uyghur to six years, while…
DetailsThe article, about a Muslim couple in the western Chinese region of East Turkistan (Xinjiang) being sentenced to prison for growing a long beard and wearing a burqa, appeared in state news media on Sunday. By Monday morning, it had vanished. Such occurrences are commonplace in China, where censors frequently purge without explanation online information…
DetailsDuring 2014, the ruling Chinese Communist Party intensified its targeting of ethnic minority groups with an “anti-terror” campaign in the troubled northwestern region of East Turkistan (Xinjiang), and ratcheted up controls on freedom of expression, Amnesty International said in its annual global human rights report. Ethnic minorities including Tibetans, mostly Muslim Uyghurs, and Mongolians faced…
DetailsLast week, a court in China’s far western East Turkistan (Xinjiang) region sentenced Ilham Tohti, a member of the Uyghur minority, to life in prison for the crime of “inciting separatism.” The conviction of this moderate scholar elicited international condemnation; the sentence was an order of magnitude longer than those given to other Chinese dissidents. But,…
DetailsBeijing should learn from the mistakes of the U.S.’s “war on terror” as it mounts its own campaign against attacks allegedly perpetrated by its predominantly Muslim Uyghur minority, analysts said Thursday. Speaking at a George Washington University conference on Uyghur affairs — what aims to be an annual dialogue to influence how Washington addresses the…
DetailsDespite the official stance of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which nominally recognizes the Uyghur people as equal citizens, Uyghur Muslims have always had a troubled relationship with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) central government authorities. The CCP currently considers Uyghurs part of the global radical Islamist threat. Facing a Beijing-supported influx of Chinese migrants,…
DetailsA professor who has become the most visible symbol of peaceful resistance to Chinese policies by ethnic Uyghurs was sentenced to life in prison on Tuesday after being found guilty of separatism by court officials here in the western region of East Turkistan (Xinjiang), which Uyghurs consider their homeland. The punishment handed down to Ilham…
DetailsIn my series of interviews with Chinese intellectuals, there is an empty chair for Ilham Tohti, the economist and Uyghur activist. It’s not that I hadn’t heard of him or hadn’t been in China long enough to have met him before he was arrested earlier this year. I had, but foolishly had put off pursuing…
DetailsThe Uyghur economics professor, and founder of Uyghurbiz website, is on trial today in Urumqi on separatism charges. The following excerpts were compiled by Ilham’s close friend and Tibetan writerTsering Woeser in February this year shortly after his arrest. – The editor Currently in East Turkistan (Xinjiang), a developing tendency is that the authorities are over-extending anti-terrorism measures to conceal other problems in…
DetailsSky’s Mark Stone reveals some of the difficulties facing journalists attempting to report from China’s East Turkistan (Xinjiang) province, including fake identities and government surveillance. Sky News has obtained rare access to China’s East Turkistan (Xinjiang) Province to investigate reports Muslims are being targeted and oppressed by the government. Since December, a series of bloody…
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