Run For Your Life

Countries evacuating nationals from Chinese coronavirus areas
Reuters

A growing number of countries around the world are evacuating or planning to evacuate diplomatic staff and citizens from parts of China hit by the new coronavirus.

Following are some countries’ evacuation plans, and how they aim to manage the health risk from those who are returning.
- Kazakhstan, which has previously evacuated 83 from Wuhan, will send two planes to China on Feb. 10 and Feb. 12 to evacuate its citizens. Out of 719 Kazakhs remaining in China, 391 have asked to be repatriated.
- A second evacuation flight is bringing back another 174 Singaporeans and their family members from Wuhan to the city-state on Feb. 9, Singapore’s foreign ministry said.
- Thirty Filipinos returned to the Philippines on Feb. 9 from Wuhan, the Department of Foreign Affairs said. The returning passengers and a 10-member government team will be quarantined for 14 days.
- Britain’s final evacuation flight from Wuhan, carrying more than 200 people, landed at a Royal Air Force base in central England on Feb. 9. A plane carrying 83 British and 27 European Union nationals from Wuhan landed in Britain last week.
- The 34 Brazilians evacuated from Wuhan landed in Brazil on Feb. 9, where they will begin 18 days of quarantine.
- Two planes with about 300 passengers, mostly U.S. citizens, took off from Wuhan on Feb. 6 bound for the United States -- the third group of evacuees from the heart of the coronavirus outbreak, the U.S. State Department said.
- Uzbekistan has evacuated 251 people from China and quarantined them on arrival in Tashkent, the Central Asian nation’s state airline said on Feb. 6.
- A plane load of New Zealanders, Australians and Pacific Islanders evacuated from Wuhan arrived in Auckland, New Zealand on Feb. 5, officials said.
- Taiwan has evacuated the first batch of an estimated 500 Taiwanese stranded in Wuhan.
- Italy flew back 56 nationals from Wuhan to Rome on Feb. 3. The group will spend two weeks in quarantine in a military hospital, the government said.
- Saudi Arabia has evacuated 10 students from Wuhan, Saudi state television reported on Feb. 2.
- Indonesia’s government flew 243 Indonesians from Hubei on Feb. 2 and placed them under quarantine at a military base on an island northwest of Borneo.
- South Korea flew 368 people home on a charter flight that arrived on Jan. 31. A second chartered flight departed Seoul for Wuhan on Jan. 31, with plans to evacuate around 350 more South Korean citizens.
- Japan chartered a third flight to repatriate Japanese people, which arrived from Wuhan on Jan. 31, bringing the number of repatriated nationals to 565.
- Spain’s government is working with China and the European Union to repatriate its nationals.
- Canada evacuated its first group of 176 citizens from Wuhan to an Ontario air force base early on Feb. 5, according to the Globe and Mail newspaper. The country’s foreign minister said a second group should arrive later on Feb. 5 after changing planes in Vancouver. All evacuees will be quarantined on the base for two weeks.
- Russia said it would begin moving its citizens out of China via its Far Eastern region on Feb. 1, regional authorities said. It plans to evacuate more than 600 Russian citizens currently in Hubei, Deputy Prime Minister Tatiana Golikova said. A first Russian military plane took off on Feb. 4 to evacuate Russian citizens from Wuhan, the RIA news agency reported.
- The Netherlands is preparing the voluntary evacuation of 20 Dutch nationals and their families from Hubei, Foreign Minister Stef Blok said. The Netherlands is finalising arrangements with EU partners and Chinese authorities.
- France has evacuated some nationals from Wuhan and said it would place the passengers in quarantine. It said it would first evacuate nationals without symptoms and then those showing symptoms at a later, unspecified date.
- Swiss authorities said they hope to have about 10 citizens join the French evacuation of nationals from China.
- A plane brought 138 Thai nationals home from Wuhan last week. They will spend two weeks in quarantine.

China's crimes against humanity

Security cameras and barbed wire: Living amid fear and oppression in East Turkestan
By Matt Rivers and Lily Lee

East Turkestan -- The small bedroom is frozen in time. The two little girls who used to sleep here left two years ago with their mother and now can't come home.

Their backpacks and school notebooks sit waiting for their return. 

A toy bear lies on the bed. 

Their clothes hang neatly in the closet.
The girls' grandmother says she can't bring herself to change it.
"The clothes still smell like them," she says, her words barely audible through heavy sobs.
Ansila Esten and Nursila Esten, ages 8 and 7, left their home in Almaty, Kazakhstan, with their mother, Adiba Hayrat, in 2017.
The three traveled to China where Adiba Hayrat planned to take a course in makeup application and visit her parents in the western border region of East Turkestan, leaving her husband, Esten Erbol, and then 9-month-old son Nurmeken behind in Kazakhstan, Esten told CNN.
Not long after she arrived, however, she was detained. 

He hasn't heard from her for more than two years.
"My son wasn't even 1 when she left," Esten Erbol said. 

"When he sees young women in the neighborhood, he calls them mama. He doesn't know what his own mother looks like."

Adbia Hayrat's two daughters, Ansila Esten and Nursila Esten, in a family photo kept by their father.

Adiba Hayrat and her two daughters are Chinese citizens, of Kazakh minority descent.
She grew up in China, as did their daughters.
Their young son was born in Almaty.
The family was in the process of becoming citizens of Kazakstan when Adiba Hayrat was taken by Chinese authorities.
Her family in Kazakhstan says she was held in a detention camp in East Turkestan for more than a year, while her children were sent to live with distant relatives.
She has since been released, according to her family.
But Adiba Hayrat is now living with her parents and working in a forced labor facility, earning pitiful wages, unable to contact her family in Kazakhstan for fear of being sent back into detention.
According to the US State Department, up to 2 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyzs and other predominately Muslim ethnic minorities have been held against their will in massive camps in East Turkestan.
An unknown number are working in forced labor facilities, and like Adiba, they are unable to leave China.

'My wife is not a terrorist'
Activists and former detainees allege the East Turkestan concentration camps were built rapidly over the last three years, the latest stage in an ongoing and widespread crackdown against ethnic minorities in the region.
Torture inside the camps is rampant, including in accounts given to CNN by former detainees.
The Chinese government has faced a rising tide of international criticism over its East Turkestan policies, including from the United States.
The camps are Beijing's attempt to eliminate the region's Islamic cultural and religious traditions -- a process of sinicization, by which ethnic minorities are forcibly assimilated into wider majority Han Chinese culture.
Beijing says the camps are "vocational training centers" designed to fight terrorism.
Even if you buy that explanation, Esten Erbol said, it wouldn't apply to his wife.
"My wife is not a terrorist," he said.

Adiba Hayrat and her son Nurmeken, who has been separated from his mother for more than a year.

After Adiba's detention ended, Esten Erbol was told by a friend in the area that his wife had been allowed to live with her parents and children again while she worked in the forced labor facility.
Many ex-detainees are forced to work in such facilities, used by authorities to maintain control over the former detainees.
A US congressional bill introduced in January said there were credible reports that former detainees were made to produce cheap consumer goods in forced work facilities under threat of returning to the detention centers.
Esten Erbol has been told by a friend in the area that officials took his wife's passport, so she and their daughters can't return to Kazakhstan.
The wait is agony.
He has no way to contact her directly, and fears if he traveled to East Turkestan to find her, he could end up in a camp himself.
China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not reply to a request for comment when asked about the family's allegations about her detention, or whether she is currently being forced to work.

China's 'new territory'
East Turkestan is the largest Chinese colony, a sprawling arid landscape in the country's far west which has a comparatively tiny population of 22 million.
It is home to a variety of minority groups, of which the predominantly Muslim, Turkic-speaking Uyghurs are the largest.
Uyghurs are culturally and linguistically distinct from Han Chinese, the country's dominant ethnic group.
This is due in part to the fact that East Turkestan has only officially been part of China for less than two centuries.
These differences have led Beijing to often take a stricter approach to security in East Turkestan but those policies have become more draconian following violent protests against Han Chinese in July 2009.
The riots saw locals rampage through the capital Urumqi with clubs, knives and stones, resulting in a brutal counterattack by paramilitary police and the Chinese military.
Chinese state media said a total of 197 people were killed.
When CNN travelled through East Turkestan, the signs of an increased police presence were everywhere.
Today, in most cities in East Turkestan, there are facial surveillance cameras about every 150 feet, feeding images back to central command centers, where people's faces and routines are monitored and cross-referenced.
Mobile police checkpoints pop up at random throughout the region, leading to long lines on public roads.
At the checkpoints, and sometimes randomly on the street, police officers stop people to ask for their ID cards and occasionally demand to plug unidentified electronic devices into cellphones to scan them without explanation.
Daily life is much easier in East Turkestan for Han Chinese, the dominant ethnic majority in the rest of China.
At the security checkpoints, Han Chinese are often waived through without being checked or presenting ID.
During a nearly week-long trip to the region CNN did not witness one non-Han Chinese person afforded the same privilege.
For Uyghurs or other residents, the increased surveillance has turned their lives upside down.
A simple trip to the market or to see friends can take hours, due to the unpredictable and intrusive nature of the police checks.
Everyone knows someone who's been detained or at least harassed, activists say.
Behind the walls of East Turkestan's camps, former detainees say even worse awaits those who fall foul of authorities.
State media has produced a constant drum beat of news that the terrorism threat in the region is real and would spin out of control were it not for the strict security measures.
As a result, many local Han Chinese we spoke to support the policies.
"Life has gotten so much safer in the past few years," one Han Chinese taxi driver said, declining to give his name.
He said East Turkestan is safer for everyone now.
"Even if I leave my car on the street unlocked, I don't worry about it getting stolen."

Barbed wire and guard towers
In late March, CNN traveled to East Turkestan for six days to get a first-hand look at the camps, attempting to see three different facilities in three cities hundreds of miles apart.
The Chinese government has repeatedly decried foreign media's reporting on the camps as inaccurate, claiming authorities have been transparent about the facilities.
Beijing has invited diplomats from select countries to tour the camps in a tightly controlled setting. 
The diplomats come from countries with their own circumspect records on human rights, including Pakistan, Russia and Uzbekistan.
A select group of journalists has visited the camps under similar conditions.
Reuters was the only representative of Western media.
CNN has asked repeatedly to be allowed to visit the camps.
All those requests were denied or ignored.
When CNN attempted to visit the camps, there was repeated obstruction by Chinese authorities who blocked attempts to film, to speak to the relatives of inmates and to even travel to certain parts of the region.
The closest CNN got to a camp was in a small city named Artux, not far from the city of Kashgar, in East Turkestan's southwest.

Concentration camp on the outskirts of Kashgar, which CNN tried to enter but was turned away by guards.

The building which China has described as a "voluntary vocational training center" looked far more like a prison. 
The massive facility was ringed by a high wall, barbed wire and guard towers, as well as large numbers of security personnel.
CNN was prevented by authorities at the facility from openly filming it, despite complying with Chinese laws on journalistic activities.
Attempts to speak to the dozens of people bringing food to their family members inside the camp were blocked by nearly 20 security personnel and government officials who pulled up not long after CNN arrived.
When asked, a woman told CNN her mother was "receiving training" inside the camp.
Another man said his brother was being held there for a vague "ID violations."
But when both were pressed for more information, a half-dozen plain-clothed officials shouted at the man and the woman to be quiet and return to their cars.
They didn't fight the order.

'Why are you here?'
More than 1,000 miles to the east of Kashgar lies the city of Turpan.
It's a small town by Chinese standards, just over 600,000 people, surrounded by a fiercely inhospitable desert.
CNN attempted to see another camp in the city, finding a large facility surrounded by a high wall.
But after arriving at the center, the team were greeted by local police, who angrily demanded to know what they were doing there.
When asked what the facility was, one police officer responded angrily, "You don't have to be asking that! Why are you here?"
No further access to the camp was given, and the officer demanded the footage be deleted.

Another concentration camp outside the town of Turpan, which CNN also found to be inaccessible.

Outside Urumqi, a third camp was completely inaccessible.
A police checkpoint blocked the only road leading to the facility, several miles away from the site.
Local drivers were allowed to pass the site, but a police officer told CNN that no foreigners were allowed down the road.
When asked why, he simply shrugged and asked the team to respect "local regulations."
It's unclear what regulations he was referring to.
CNN asked both the East Turkestan government and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs about the obstacles faced when doing legal journalism in East Turkestan.
Neither responded.

China tries to thwart CNN probe into detention camps

'Love of my life'
Hundreds of miles to the north, the town of Toli also turned out to be completely inaccessible.
Esten Erbol, the father of the two missing girls, believes that this town is where his wife and daughters are residing with her parents.
It's also where he and his wife, Adiba Hayrat, first met and fell in love.
CNN tried on two separate occasions to drive to Toli to see the town and try to find Adiba but was blocked by officials both times before reaching its center.
On the first occasion, local government officials at the nearest airport said it would be possible to see the town.
But on the drive there, the road was blocked by police who said there had been a traffic accident up ahead.
No accident was visible for miles down the flat, empty road.
The second time, instead of being allowed to access the town, the CNN team was escorted by police to a small tourist area and forced to attend a banquet that had been hastily arranged inside a makeshift yurt.
Horse and lamb were served as musicians played traditional folk music, to which government officials danced enthusiastically.
Multiple requests to leave and see the town were ignored.
In the end, the team had to drive back to the airport immediately to avoid missing its flight.
Despite multiple attempts, the CNN team didn't locate Adiba or her daughters.
Esten had sent a message to be passed onto his wife, should the team reach her.
"Tell her that her son and I are waiting for her, that we will always wait for her and that she is the love of my life," Esten wrote CNN via text message.
Adiba did not hear those words.
And it's unclear if she ever will.

China's Final Solution

Critic Who Exposed China’s Muslim Concentration Camps is Detained, Even Across the Border

By Austin Ramzy

Serikzhan Bilash of Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights in Almaty, Kazakhstan, in January. His arrest this week has raised questions about China’s efforts to silence critics of its policies in the East Turkestan colony.

HONG KONG — For six days a week, every week, in a crowded office in Kazakhstan’s largest city, Serikzhan Bilash had been ringmaster of one of the most influential efforts detailing China’s internment of Muslim minorities.
Clad in a suit and tie, he would bounce from room to room, consoling distraught relatives of people held in Chinese concentration camps in the colony of East Turkestan and arranging supplies and housing for those who had recently arrived in Kazakhstan from China.
He would also record hours and hours of videos describing the extent of China’s crackdown — speaking in English, Chinese and Kazakh.
This week, however, Mr. Bilash went uncharacteristically quiet.
The police detained him early Sunday in Almaty, the city in southeastern Kazakhstan where his organization is, and flew him to the capital, Astana, where he was placed under house arrest.
He is under investigation on accusations of “inciting ethnic hatred,” said his lawyer, Aiman Umarova.
A conviction carries a punishment of up to 10 years in prison.
On two short videos sent to his family by the police, Mr. Bilash said that he was physically safe.
He urged the members of the group he leads, Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights, to continue their work while he contested the allegations against him.
Mr. Bilash’s case has raised questions about China’s efforts to silence critics of its policies in East Turkestan.
In the months before his detention, he warned that the Chinese authorities were trying to use their influence in Kazakhstan to silence his group.
“They just want to close Atajurt,” he said last month.
“They just want to close Serikzhan’s mouth and they just wanted so nobody would stand up against Chinese concentration camps.”
The Chinese authorities have bristled at foreign criticism of the camps.
First, officials denied their existence, then they said the camps were part of a "training program" for poor Uighurs, Kazakhs and other minorities to help them find jobs and resist extremist ideologies.
On Tuesday, an East Turkestan official said the camps were “like boarding schools.”
After Turkey broke the general silence of Muslim nations to demand that China close the camps, China announced a temporary closure of its consulate in Istanbul, Turkey’s commercial capital, and warned that criticism could lead to economic retaliation.
For Kazakhstan, the camps pose a particular challenge.
Russia is still the biggest trading partner for the former Soviet republic, but trade with China is expanding rapidly.
In 2013, Chinese dictatorXi Jinping used a visit to Astana to announce the creation of the Belt and Road Initiative, the program of sweeping infrastructure investment more closely linking China with Asia, Africa and Europe.
Ethnic Kazakhs in China make up the second largest population of people held in the concentration camps, behind Uighurs. 
Kazakhstan has worked to help Kazakh citizens get out of China, but at the same time has avoided publicly criticizing Beijing’s policies in East Turkestan.
Activists working on the subject of East Turkestan have been a subject of particular scrutiny by the authorities, human rights groups say.
“It is a concern that the authorities detained him and took him away in the middle of the night,” said Maya Wang, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch.
“It is a concern given the Kazakh authorities’ history of harassing and surveilling activists in general and in particular those related to the cause of East Turkestan.”
Mr. Bilash, who was born in East Turkestan and migrated to Kazakhstan in the early 2000s, had previously worked as a translator who tried to facilitate Chinese investment in Kazakhstan, said his wife, Leila Adilzhan.
As Kazakhs learned about the detention of their relatives in China, they reached out to Mr. Bilash for help, she said.
“He didn’t want do this kind of thing but people started to call him and say my father has been arrested, my wife has been arrested, my mother has been arrested,” Ms. Adilzhan said.
“So he started collecting their statements and testimonies.”
Each workday at Atajurt, dozens of desperate people would fill the offices seeking help for friends and relatives held in China.
Many would provide statements that were recorded on video and uploaded to YouTube.
Volunteers would translate their messages into Chinese, English and Russian.
In some cases, the testimony appeared to have pressured the local authorities to release detainees.
In interviews at Atajurt’s office earlier this year, a half dozen Kazakhs said the appeals contributed to their freedom or the release of relatives held in camps.
Mr. Bilash said he often received threats to his safety, which he ignored.
He openly worried that China would use its influence in Kazakhstan to shut down his work.
Last month, a group of Kazakh intellectuals signed an open letter complaining that Atajurt’s work was harming the relationship between Kazakhstan and China.
Some activists have privately expressed concerns that his rhetoric could be bombastic.
Anti-Chinese slogans featured heavily during protests in Kazakhstan in 2016 over land sales to foreigners, and the authorities are wary of moves that could inflame such sentiment.
Prosecutors in Astana said in a statement they were focusing on remarks by Mr. Bilash in February calling for “jihad” against the Chinese.
A video of his comments was shown on state television after his detention.
But his supporters say the clip was edited to omit the full context of his comments, which were referring to waging a campaign of information and not violence.
The status of Mr. Bilash’s defense was unclear.
On Wednesday, Mr. Bilash told colleagues he was forced to sign documents and record a video rejecting Ms. Umarova as his lawyer and saying he wanted a government-appointed defense attorney — a sign that the authorities might bar her from representing him.
Mehmet Volkan Kasikci, a Turkish researcher who has worked with Atajurt, said that Mr. Bilash’s work helped create a model for documenting detentions in East Turkestan case by case.
“Most of what we know about the concentration camps we know thanks to Atajurt testimony,” he said.
“What Atajurt brought was this dynamism to provide concrete evidence as much as possible.”
When the police in Almaty raided the group’s offices on Sunday they took away equipment used to make videos about people held in East Turkestan.
But volunteers have continued to post videos on the group’s YouTube page.
Now, they are calling for the release of Mr. Bilash.

China's Final Solution

China is behind the arrest of a whistleblower on East Turkestan

The Washington Post

Kazakh rights activist Serikzhan Bilash in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on Feb. 13. 

THE WAY that China’s leaders tell it, the string of camps they have built in East Turkestan colony in the country’s northwest are for "vocational education", meant to combat extremism. 

A recent commentary by the official news service Xinhua declared that China has “significantly improved people’s sense of security and happiness in the autonomous region.” 

If that is the case, then why is Serikzhan Bilash, an activist who has called attention to mass detentions in East Turkestan, under arrest?
Mr. Bilash, who was born in East Turkestan, is now a naturalized Kazakh citizen. 

Many detainees in the Chinese camps are ethnic Muslim Uighurs, but a significant additional portion of those arrested are Kazakhs. 

Mr. Bilash has run an advocacy organization in Almaty, Kazakhstan, to tell their story and call attention to the East Turkestan concentration camps, which are designed to forcibly eradicate the culture, language and traditions of the Uighurs, Kazakhs and others. 

Mr. Bilash organized several gatherings of ethnic Kazakhs from East Turkestan who settled in Kazakhstan and complained that their relatives were held in the camps, according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Mr. Bilash, who has tangled with the Kazakh authorities in recent months over legal registration of his group, was arrested at 2:30 a.m. on Sunday in Almaty by Kazakh authorities and flown to Astana, the capital. 

The office of his group, Atajurt, was raided by police, who confirmed he was being held on suspicion of inciting “national discord or hatred” but provided no details.
Kazakhstan borders East Turkestan and plays an important role in China’s expansive Belt and Road Initiative to forge new trade routes to Europe and elsewhere. 

Sixty percent of China’s land transit shipments to Europe now pass through Kazakhstan, according to China’s ambassador to Kazakhstan; the two nations have a major trade relationship with each other, and the growing web of shared transit routes gives Kazakhstan access to faraway ports. 

It should come as no surprise that Kazakh authorities might heed a request from Beijing. Kazakhstan’s leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, presides over an authoritarian system at home and has navigated carefully among Russia, China and the West.
In return for its investment, China demands loyalty and leverage. 

Its rulers have been pummeled with international criticism following disclosure of the vast scope and malevolent purpose of the East Turkestan camps. 

The work of Mr. Bilash most certainly was nettlesome in Beijing, not in the least because he enabled eyewitnesses to tell the truth about the camps, a truth that China has long denied: that they are a factory of cultural genocide.
Mr. Bilash appeared in a video made by the Kazakh authorities after his arrest in which he said he was not taken “by either the Chinese or Chinese spies.” 

That’s hardly comforting, knowing how China exercises a long arm to snatch or punish adversaries. Mr. Nazarbayev should not do the bidding of China’s secret police, and Mr. Bilash should be freed immediately. 

Otherwise, a small but valuable window on the tragedy of East Turkestan will go dark.

Kazakhs Won’t Be Silenced on China’s Concentration Camps

Activists are speaking out for those imprisoned in East Turkestan—even if their own government doesn’t like it.
BY REID STANDISH, AIGERIM TOLEUKHANOVA

Gulnur Kosgeulet shows a photo of her husband, Ekpor Sorsenbek, whom she believes is in a concentration camp in East Turkestan, in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on Jan. 21. 

ALMATY, Kazakhstan—Gulzira Auelkhankyzy remembers little about the January day when she was released from East Turkestan’s vast network of concentration camps. 

Auelkhankyzy, an ethnically Kazakh Chinese citizen, spent 15 months inside an internment camp, where she was regularly interrogated, forced to give blood, and required to learn Chinese and Communist Party songs. 

Auelkhankyzy was then coerced into signing a contract and sent to a “black factory” in October 2018, where she worked long hours sewing gloves for a measly wage. 

By the time Auelkhankyzy was taken to the border with Kazakhstan, she said, she was so exhausted and sick from her ordeal that she can barely remember the crossing.
Now back in Kazakhstan, she has joined the growing chorus of voices speaking out against the sweeping internment program in China’s western colony of East Turkestan, where United Nations human rights officials estimate the Chinese currently hold a million or more Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities. 

It’s causing uproar among Kazakhs—and sparking heavy-handed pushback from a government that is more interested in maintaining good relations with Beijing than protecting its own people.
Auelkhankyzy credits her freedom to her husband, who is a Kazakh citizen, and his efforts in lobbying the Kazakh government for help and raising attention to her case on social media and by speaking to local and international journalists. 

Like many Kazakhs and Uighurs in China, Auelkhankyzy does not read Chinese. 

When she first learned of her release, Auelkhankyzy was forced to sign pages of documents that she did not understand before having her passport returned to her. 

She was told by Chinese officials that her relatives in China would face consequences if she spoke about the camps once back in Kazakhstan. 

Her two daughters and her elderly parents are still in East Turkestan. 

Despite the threats, however, she insists on speaking out about what she experienced.
“I know how awful these camps are, and I want the world to know about them,” Auelkhankyzy said during an interview in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city. 

“In Kazakhstan I can speak about this, so I am doing it on behalf of those still trapped in East Turkestan.”
The plight of ethnic Kazakhs in China has become the source of growing uproar inside Kazakhstan, with the testimonies of former detainees such as Auelkhankyzy fueling a growing guerrilla advocacy campaign inside the Central Asian country of 18 million people. 

The grassroots effort has turned authoritarian Kazakhstan, which has been overseen by President Nursultan Nazarbayev since 1989, when it was still part of the Soviet Union, into an unlikely battleground for the truth about the political indoctrination camps in East Turkestan.
The groundswell has also left the Kazakh government walking a tightrope between appeasing Beijing—a strategic, economic, and political partner—and quelling an increasingly exasperated segment of the population focused on the fate of their relatives and ethnic brethren in neighboring China.

The Kazakh government has avoided criticizing China and publicly toes Beijing’s line about the camps, but behind the scenes, Kazakh diplomats have grown increasingly active in working for the release of the country’s own citizens and ethnic Kazakh Chinese citizens with ties to Kazakhstan.
Interviews conducted by Foreign Policy with 60 other people in Kazakhstan, including former detainees, those with firsthand knowledge of the concentration camps, and people who believe their relatives are in detention in East Turkestan, show the devastating imprint of the camps and how powerful public outrage has been.
“Our government is dependent on China, but they’re also dependent on public opinion,” said Andrey Grishin, a researcher at the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, a nongovernmental organization based in Almaty. 

“Now, they’re stuck balancing between the two.”

Orynbek Koxebek, a Kazakh citizen born in China who spent 125 days in a concentration camp, shows a East Turkestan identification document and photos in Almaty on Jan. 21. 

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kazakhstan opened its doors to ethnic Kazakhs scattered outside its borders as part of a repatriation program that offered a pathway to citizenship. The influx has mostly come from neighboring Central Asian countries and China, but the flow of immigration has also left families divided across the border and separated by multiple citizenships and residence statuses.
That made life hard for many Kazakhs in China. 

Spending time in a foreign country, even a close neighbor like Kazakhstan, is one of the many warning flags used by Chinese security forces to determine who to imprison. 

As Beijing’s dragnet has expanded from Uighurs to other Muslim minorities, ethnic Kazakhs have been increasingly targeted for visiting family across the border. 

Bureaucratic excuses such as collecting a pension or signing documents to finalize their status outside of China were often used to force their return to East Turkestan. 

Other detainees include naturalized Kazakh citizens born in China, with Beijing refusing to acknowledge that they had relinquished their Chinese citizenship, according to multiple interviews conducted by FP.
“I told them that I was a Kazakh citizen and no longer had a Chinese passport, but they didn’t care,” said Orynbek Koxebek, a Kazakh citizen born in China who was released in April 2018 after spending 125 days in a concentration camp. 

His Kazakh passport was taken from him and that he was beaten and waterboarded for failing to learn Chinese at the indoctrination camp, resulting in suicide attempts and lingering trauma. 

He was forced to sign documents in Chinese that he did not understand, which he later learned were forms to re-open his Chinese citizenship.
“I’m thankful to the Kazakh diplomats that helped get me released,” Koxebek said, “but China has ruined my life.”
Beijing’s influence is a charged issue in Kazakhstan. 

Popular anger over China was the gist of widespread protests across Kazakhstan in 2016 due to fears that a proposed legislative change would allow Chinese interests to buy up land in the country. 

As more ethnic Kazakhs have been caught up in the camps in East Turkestan, Astana is keen to avoid any similar flashpoints that could turn into another popular outpouring.
“Kazakhstan needs Chinese investment, and the government would have preferred to have this stay on the sidelines, but it has grown too big,” said Nargis Kassenova, a Central Asia expert and senior fellow at Harvard University. 

“Public opinion is definitely getting worse, and anti-Chinese sentiments are growing.”
Despite reluctance on the part of Kazakh authorities to defy Beijing, the government has lobbied hard for its own citizens in order to ease mounting civic pressure.
After initially pleading ignorance, Kazakh delegations have made several visits to East Turkestan, and the Kazakh Foreign Ministry began offering press briefings to show that it is active on the issue. Official accounts remain rosy, but high-level meetings have been followed by news of fresh releases, although the official line from both countries stressed that the detained Kazakhs were the result of bureaucratic problems due to dual citizenship.
This diplomacy has paid off for some of those imprisoned. 

A couple weeks after an early November 2018 meeting between then-Kazakh Foreign Minister Kairat Abdrakhmanov and China’s Ambassador Zhang Xiao, the Kazakh Foreign Ministry announced that 29 citizens had been detained in East Turkestan, of which 15 have been released. 

This was followed by an announcement in December 2018 by the Kazakh Foreign Ministry that China had given the green light to 2,500 ethnic Kazakhs to abandon their Chinese citizenship and come to Kazakhstan. 

The development was framed as a purely administrative issue, and no details were provided about how or when the move would take place.
These figures were updated on Monday when Kazakh Foreign Minister Beibut Atamkulov announced that 20 Kazakh citizens had now been freed out of a total of 33 from the camps. 

He also noted that the ministry has received more than one thousand letters from citizens appealing to the government to help relatives located in re-education centers in neighboring East Turkestan.
Other accounts attest to a more active, upstream role played by Kazakh diplomats in East Turkestan. One naturalized Kazakh citizen, who requested anonymity in order to protect relatives still in East Turkestan, credits the Kazakh government for helping secure his exit from China. 

The person returned to China in 2013 after gaining citizenship in Kazakhstan and had their Kazakh passport seized upon re-entry. 

In May 2018, the person was told by a colleague that because they had spent time in a foreign country, they would be sent to a camp. 

The Kazakh consulate in Urumqi, the regional capital of East Turkestan, issued a temporary passport for the person and pushed the Chinese government to issue an emergency visa, which allowed them to leave for Almaty by bus.
“If it wasn’t for Kazakhstan, I’d be in a camp right now,” they added.

Kazakhs with family members missing in the camp system in neighboring East Turkestan show documentation at Atajurt Eriktileri’s offices in Almaty, Kazahkstan, on Jan. 21. 

While the Kazakh government has worked behind the scenes to secure some releases from the camps, it has also begun to exert pressure at home against activists raising awareness about the situation in East Turkestan.
Serikzhan Bilash, the head of Atajurt Eriktileri (“Homeland Volunteers”), an organization of volunteer activists and family members whose relatives have disappeared in East Turkestan, was fined 252,000 tenge (about $700) in February for operating an unregistered organization. 

Bilash said that he tried to register Atajurt several times since it was founded in 2017 but was denied by the Ministry of Justice. 

Despite being unregistered, Atajurt faced few obstacles until earlier this year, when in late January a group of Kazakh intellectuals, citing harm caused to Kazakhstan’s relationship with China, called in an open letter for the organization to be closed. 

A legal case was launched against Bilash a few days later.
Atajurt, which Bilash says has documented close to 10,000 cases of ethnic Kazakhs who have been detained, has been successful in raising awareness about the camps in East Turkestan. 

Bilash intends to appeal his recent fine and will attempt again to officially register Atajurt, but he said that the organization will continue to be a target for further legal actions so long as it continues its sensitive work.
“I think they will stop us. They will try to close our organization,” Bilash said in an interview. 

“We collected so many testimonies and shared them with the world. That makes us a big enemy for the Chinese government.”
A litmus test for Kazakhstan’s difficult balancing act is the case of Sayragul Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh Chinese national who illegally fled to Kazakhstan after being forced to work at a camp where she says around 2,500 ethnic Kazakhs were being held for indoctrination. 

In August 2018, a court refused to extradite her back to China, in what many commentators saw as a rebuke of Beijing by Astana. 

However, her asylum claim has since been denied twice, leaving her future status in Kazakhstan up in the air. 

Keeping her in Kazakhstan could strain ties with Beijing, but Sauytbay’s case has become a cause célèbre, and deporting her could spark new protests.
Sauytbay recently fired her lawyer, whom she says was absent at crucial times during her case and encouraged her to stay quiet. 

During an interview with FP in January, Sauytbay said that she has received threats against speaking out and feared that Astana could succumb to pressure from Beijing and send her back to China
Sauytbay’s new lawyer is Aiman Umarova, a prominent human rights lawyer who was presented an International Women of Courage Award last year by U.S. first lady Melania Trump. 

Umarova told FP in an interview that her client continues to face intimidation against speaking publicly about what she witnessed while working at a camp. 

According to Umarova, Kazakh security officials have pressured Sauytbay against taking on new legal representation and even encouraged her to publicly discredit both Bilash and Atajurt on national television. 

As she prepares a new legal strategy, Umarova said that she fears pushback from Kazakh authorities intended to remove her from the case and silence Sauytbay.
“They will do everything to stop me from being her lawyer and create problems for [Sauytbay],” Umarova said. 

“They can extend her case, deny her asylum application, and then she can just disappear.”
One ethnic Kazakh Chinese national, who also crossed into Kazakhstan illegally in the spring of 2018 and spoke to FP on the condition of anonymity, said that they are watching the outcome of Sauytbay’s case closely. 

They said they were stopped at the border in East Turkestan by Chinese authorities while trying to enter Kazakhstan legally and were then detained and extensively interrogated about their ties to the country and loyalty to China. 

After learning that their name was added to a list of people slated to be sent to a concentration camp, the person said they decided to flee East Turkestan illegally. 

They are hesitant to come forward because they believe that the Kazakh government will deport them back to China.
“Recognizing someone from East Turkestan as a refugee would mean acknowledging that the camps and the abuses in them are real, which would contradict Beijing,” said Aina Shormanbaeva, the president of the International Legal Initiative, an NGO based in Almaty that provides legal assistance to Kazakh families with relatives currently in concentration camps. 

“The [Kazakh] government’s strategy for now is to avoid any decision or action when it comes to people like [Sauytbay], but it is very possible that she gets sent back to China.”

A Uighur woman walks on a street of the old town in Kashgar, in East Turkestan, on July 16, 2013. 

For the families separated by the camps in East Turkestan, however, advocacy remains one of the few options available. 

Despite growing internal pressure on them in Kazakhstan, many activists and family members feel that their efforts are bearing fruit.
On a snowy afternoon in January, relatives of Dina Iemberdi, a 25-year-old ethnic Kazakh artist who is a Chinese citizen, received word that she is now under house arrest after being sent to a camp in February 2018. 

Iemberdi is still in East Turkestan, and there is no word yet if she will be allowed to come back to Kazakhstan, but for her relatives lobbying for her freedom the news was cause for tears of joy. Iemberdi joins hundreds of other ethnic Kazakhs in China who have been released from detention camps and placed under house arrest in recent months.
Other families remain in the dark about their relatives’ fate in East Turkestan but see value in publicly advocating for them despite the risks it entails.
After not hearing from Meiramgul Togzhan, an ethnic Kazakh journalist in East Turkestan, for more than one year, her two daughters and son-in-law posted a video appeal on Atajurt’s YouTube channel pleading for news of her whereabouts. 

Within a few hours, they received a call from Togzhan, saying that she is fine and that they should stop asking about her. 

Several other people who posted video appeals about relatives shared similar stories about receiving calls—often from numbers listed in countries around the world—asking them to stop their advocacy efforts in Kazakhstan and saying there would be repercussions for them and their relatives should they continue. 

But Togzhan’s family says the calls have only emboldened them to keep fighting.
“What choice do we really have?” said Arai Zhenis, one of Togzhan’s daughters. 

“At least now they know that someone is asking about her and she can’t just disappear like the others.”

China's crimes against humanity

A Search For Loved Ones Held In China's East Turkestan Colony
By ROB SCHMITZ

Kalida Akytkhan, pictured with her son Parkhat Rakhymbergen, has two sons and two daughter-in-laws who have been detained in re-education camps in East Turkestan. She brought photos of her family to the offices of rights organization Atazhurt in Almaty.

A tiny office in the heart of the Kazakh city of Almaty is filled with weary-eyed visitors clutching photos of their missing mothers, fathers, sons and daughters.

Each morning they arrive, lining up behind two desks staffed with workers who enter their information into a database of the disappeared.
Kalida Akytkhan, 64, clad in a white sweater and matching headscarf, has traveled 300 miles in the hopes that people here can find her two sons.
"My daughter-in-law called me," Akytkhan says in Kazakh. 

"She said my son had been taken. The next day, my other daughter-in-law called and said my other son was taken."
Akytkhan grew up in China and later moved to Kazakhstan, gaining citizenship there. 

Her sons remained in China as Chinese citizens. 

Now they had been detained and ordered "re-educated" by Chinese authorities for visiting their parents in Kazakhstan, a foreign country.
"I called the village head, and he told me to mind my own business," says Akytkhan. 

"After that, my daughters-in-law disappeared."
The two sets of parents left behind 14 children between the ages of 3 and 15.
Akytkhan has no idea where her grandchildren are or who's taking care of them. 

She says the stress of not knowing the whereabouts of her family led to her husband falling sick. 

Just days before she visited this office, he succumbed to his illness.
"He died not knowing where his own children and grandchildren are," she says through sobs. 

"He stopped eating and drinking. He got weaker and weaker, and he kept asking where they were."
In the past year, the office, run by a Kazakh rights organization called Atazhurt, has collected more than 1,000 testimonies from ethnic Kazakhs and Uighurs whose families have disappeared into a network of internment camps across the border, a few hundred miles away in the Chinese colony of East Turkestan. 

They're among an estimated million people belonging to mostly Muslim ethnic minorities who have been detained.

A group of ethnic Kazkhs stand together at the offices of Atazhurt in Almaty, displaying photos of their missing loved ones in the East Turkestan colony of China, where government officials have rounded up the mostly Muslim ethnic minorities of the region and placed them inside so-called "re-education" camps.

International rights groups have blamed China's government for conducting a campaign of cultural genocide.
"We help them write complaints to the U.N., to the Kazakh president's office, to the Kazakh foreign ministry," says Serikjan Bilash, Atazhurt's co-founder. 

"We've given up writing to the Chinese embassy in Kazakhstan, because writing to them is like throwing a stone in the sea."
Bilash sent China's embassy boxes filled with complaints from the families of those detained in the camps in East Turkestan, but says staff refused to accept them.
Kazakhstan's government hasn't treated him much better. 

"I've received four warnings from them [to stop my work]," complains Bilash.
Kazakhstan and its neighbors in the mostly Muslim region of Central Asia that have benefited from Chinese investment aren't speaking up for the Muslims inside interment camps in China, he says.
"They're silent about this because they need Chinese money. They've sold their religion. They don't want heaven. They want Renminbi," he says, referring to China's currency.

"It just came out of the blue"
Uighurs and Kazakhs, the overwhelmingly Muslim ethnic minorities in East Turkestan, constitute more than half the region's population, but they make up less than 1 percent of China's entire population. 

In 2016, after China suffered several violent attacks blamed on Uighur separatists, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping appointed a new party secretary of East Turkestan, who transformed the region into one of the world's most tightly controlled police states.
Chen Quanguo, who oversaw a proliferation of police stations in China's colony of Tibet while serving as party secretary there, has used the same playbook in East Turkestan. 

Security cameras were suddenly installed, capturing all corners of the region's cities, and police stations were built every few blocks, with officers routinely demanding IDs from passersby.
Around the same time, a number of prominent Uighur officials in East Turkestan began writing "loyalty letters" to the Chinese Communist Party, published in state-run newspapers, stating their unflinching support for Chinese rule and policies in East Turkestan.
"It just came out of the blue," recalls Alim Seytoff, director of the Uighur language service at Radio Free Asia in Washington, D.C. 

The organization is funded by the U.S. Government and is broadcast globally over shortwave radio.
Thanks to a wide rage of local connections in East Turkestan, Seytoff's team of ethnic Uighur reporters often breaks news developments in the region. 

Seytoff says he and his colleagues first learned of the concentration camps in April of 2017, soon after the loyalty letter campaign.
"It was shocking," he recalls. 

"A large number of people in different towns were being detained not for committing any crimes, but simply because someone had a beard, or had a beard a couple of years ago, or someone's wife wore a long dress a few years back, or some people were just gathering to talk about a religious teaching."
Seytoff says his team interviewed Uighurs who said they were asked to fill out a government form to assess their security threat to the Chinese state. 

Uighurs told Seytoff's team that applicants were graded on a 100-point scale.
"If you are a Uighur, you automatically lose 10 points," recalls Seytoff. 

"If you pray? Another 10 points. You've been overseas? Another 10 points. You have relatives overseas? Another 10 points. If you're 50 or below, you're unsafe and you go to a camp."

"Intensive indoctrination" for Uighurs
Thanks to available satellite data and access to Chinese government procurement and construction bids, researcher Adrian Zenz has been able to gather evidence of rapid construction of the camps starting in March 2017. 

What's less clear, though, is the government's motivation in building them.
In interviews with dozens of ethnic Uighurs and Kazakhs who have family members inside the camps, several former residents of East Turkestan told NPR they believed the goal of China's government was to eradicate ethnic minorities from the region altogether.
Zenz has a different take. 

He believes the Communist Party leadership in Beijing is reacting strongly to a string of attacks carried out by Uighurs in several cities throughout China.
"They were really looking for a definitive solution to the problem by believing that you need to change the people. You can't just put a police officer next to every Uighur," says Zenz. 

"You can't just have a camera in every Uighur home, although they're getting close to that. Trying to literally change the population through intensive indoctrination is the next level up."
After months of denying the camps existed, China's government suddenly justified them over state-run media last month. 

In an interview with Xinhua, the Uighur governor of East Turkestan said the camps were built to provide "vocational" training to Uighurs, "and now they have realized that life can be so colorful."
He said the campaign to "re-educate minorities" in China would take many years. 

In a report on the camps from Communist broadcaster CCTV, a Uighur inmate said, "Before coming here, my brain was simple, my ideas impoverished. Now my brain has been enlightened with knowledge."
Rights groups have roundly dismissed these reports as propagandistic nonsense. 

Zenz says China's Communist Party, increasingly under pressure about the camps from foreign governments and the United Nations, is in an ideological bind.
"Communism has always tried to create a new person that's no longer affected by the opium of religion," says Zenz. 

"On some level, therefore, they have to believe that re-education and changing people works, because if they don't, they basically have to admit the possibility that something like religious belief could be stronger than Communist belief."

"I will destroy your family"
At Radio Free Asia, Shohret Hoshur is in between broadcasts at the Uighur language service. 

His team's work has come at a price: He and five colleagues have family members who have been detained.
When some of his relatives were taken, he called the police chief in his home village back in East Turkestan. 

"As soon as he picked up the phone, he recognized my voice," recalls Hoshur. 

"He said, 'Don't ever call this number again. If you do, I will destroy your family.' Four months later, two of my brothers were arrested."

Shohret Hoshur, a journalist at Radio Free Asia who reports on news in China's East Turkestan colony. Eight of Hoshur's family members are detained in the camps or in prison in retaliation for his work, he says, including his 78-year-old mother.

Eight of Hoshur's family members are detained in the camps or in prison in retaliation for his work, he says, including his 78-year-old mother. 

Police told her she had an "ideological problem" before she was taken in April, he says.
Hoshur says he feels an obligation to keep reporting. 

"So many people who have dared to tell the truth to let the world know what's happening are now in prison," he says. 

"So I feel like I have a responsibility to them to uphold. For Westerners, it's almost unbelievable that something like this is happening in this day and age. On the other hand, the power of China's government is rising, and it can exert an enormous amount of pressure on the rest of the world."
That power hasn't stopped the families of the disappeared from searching for their loved ones. 

In Atazhurt's tiny office in Almaty, a 15-year-old Uighur girl reports that her mother was detained in March, after authorities discovered she and her father had left China for Kazakhstan.
The girl, who doesn't give her name for fear of retaliation against her mother, says she has repeatedly called the police back in her hometown in China.
"They only tell me that she's studying and learning Mandarin," she says. 

"It's horrible. I've heard people in the camps are forced to eat pork and drink alcohol in order to denigrate their religion. They're also forced to give thanks to the Communist Party before every meal. I don't think a humane country would ever force people to do such things."
She says her Han Chinese friends back home are sickened by what's happening to their Uighur and Kazakh friends and neighbors.
I ask her if she'll ever go back to China.
"I want to go back to yesterday's China, not today's China," she says. 

"I love China. It's where I was born and raised. I never expected it would turn into what it has today. I used to be proud of being born in China. I told everyone I was Chinese. Now I don't know what to say."

Central Asia Struggles With Fallout From China’s Internment of Minorities

Kazakh case draws attention to plight of hundreds of thousands detained in East Turkestan
BY GENE A BUNIN 

Uali Islam shows photos of his wife Sairagul Sawytbai at his house in Baidibek village, Kazakhstan. 

ALMATY, KAZAKHSTAN—This month witnessed a rare and surprising display of justice from Kazakhstan’s judicial system. 

To hurrahs from a cheering crowd, Sairagul Sawytbai, a 41-year-old ethnic Kazakh woman who had illegally crossed the China-Kazakhstan border and worked as a teacher in the highly secretive concentration camp system in China's East Turkestan colony, was not sent back to China and was instead allowed to remain in Kazakhstan as an asylum-seeker.
The ease of the verdict was unexpected. 

Because of Sawytbai’s prior access to “state secrets,” many believed that China would exert pressure to have her extradited. 

Reunited with her husband and children, she now stood outside the courthouse and thanked everyone who had campaigned for her, before joining her large group of supporters for a series of celebratory banquets. 

However, as Sawytbai would later tell the Globe and Mail, this happiness “failed to last 24 hours.” 

In her home region of East Turkestan, the Chinese authorities were quick to arrest her sister and two friends.
The human rights abuses continue to pile up, shocking observers, in China’s northwestern East Turkestan region—a large territory just north of Tibet that shares many of the same problems. 

Traditionally populated by ethnic Uighurs, who now make up under half the population following decades of state-backed migration by the Han Chinese, the region has long been prone to ethnic tensions, with Uighurs seeing Han rule as illegitimate and repressive. 

Since the appointment of hard-liner Chen Quanguo as the colony’s new party secretary in late 2016, however, the state has employed a terrifying combination of Orwellian surveillance and concentration camps to crack down on the Uighurs in an unprecedented manner, with the other Muslim ethnic minorities in the region, such as the Kazakhs, the Kyrgyz, and the Hui being hit as well. 

Based on testimonies from ex-detainees, the immediate goal of the camps is to force the members of these ethnic groups to abandon Islam, to abandon their culture, and to become devout believers in the Chinese Communist Party.
Anger and complaints from those outside this province-sized “open-air prison” have also been piling up—most notably, from relatives abroad whose loved ones have become trapped in East Turkestan’s new reality.
However, while large international protests by the East Turkestan diaspora in many Western countries have generally been carried out with local support, the issue has been a very thorny one in China’s—or rather, East Turkestan’s—immediate neighbors. 

Though people in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Pakistan all demand the reunification of their families and the safety of relatives in East Turkestan, their governments, despite not openly supporting China’s internal policies, still find themselves numb before an overwhelmingly powerful neighbor.
The numbness is understandable— too much of these countries’ future development depends on China. 

Kazakhstan, owing to its geographical location, seeks to benefit from being a crucial partner on the Belt and Road Initiative’s New Eurasian Land Bridge, a series of rail links set to traverse East Turkestan and Kazakhstan, cross through Russia, and terminate in Europe. 

The analogue for Pakistan is the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a $62 billion infrastructure project that is predicted to create hundreds of thousands of jobs while speeding up the country’s growth. 

For Kyrgyzstan, it’s less about ambitious projects and more about loans and investment—in addition to owning oil refineries, plants, and mines in the country, China also owns about half of its debt. Dependent on remittances and unable to generate enough income for investment, Kyrgyzstan is forced to borrow if it wants to maintain its growth.
However, despite cooperation from both governments and China-facing entrepreneurs in these Muslim-majority countries, the fact that the Chinese government is keeping as many as a million of its own Muslims in concentration camps has not made for smooth partnerships. 

Of the three countries, Kazakhstan is the one where things have been the rockiest by far, as thousands of people—many of them Chinese “Oralman,” or ethnic Kazakhs from China—have seen their relatives in East Turkestan detained over the past year and a half, in many cases for such simple “transgressions” as keeping in touch with them via WhatsApp, a chat client that is now banned in China.
The general anti-China sentiment in both Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan has only helped rock the boat, and recent incidents in both countries—from the breakup of a wedding banquet for a Kazakh-Chinese couple to protests by Kyrgyz miners—may indicate an increase in hostility in how the locals see China. 

In Pakistan, things have been much quieter, but here too the incarceration of at least 50 Uighur women—the wives of Pakistani traders from Gilgit-Baltistan—has elicited concerns and anger among a small fraction of the local population.
Gauging the actual power of this discontent is hard. 

In all three countries, the vast majority of citizens do not have relatives who are suffering in East Turkestan, and, between limited empathy and lack of strong institutions, the cries may often be ignored. 

The case with Pakistan seems to illustrate this very well, as the complaints over the detained Uighur wives appear to have been given a pass by the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 

Nor does there seem to be any sort of foothold for protest in Kyrgyzstan, where the relatives of those detained in East Turkestan have been mute.
Kazakhstan, on the other hand, offers some hope, with the prominent example being that of the volunteer group Atazhurt Zhastary (“Youth of the Homeland”). 

Led by activists Qydyräli Oraz and Serikzhan Bilash, the organization was formed in early 2017 out of “the need to have a group that actually defended the rights of [Chinese] Oralman,” as Oraz put it. 

Since then, it has collected some thousand testimonies from family members of East Turkestan detainees. 

It was also Atazhurt, in fact, that played a major role in the trial of Sairagul Sawytbai, helping bring her case to national and international attention while also providing moral and logistical support.
According to Oraz, the group has seen a surge in testimonies over the past few weeks, and is now receiving around 20 visiting parties a day. 

There, people share their stories in a roundtable discussion, and the result is multi-pronged: The stories are recorded and shared on social networks, the aggrieved sign written testimonies, and the information is documented in Atazhurt’s ever-growing database.
“A lot of people waited for a really long time, hoping for their relatives to be released,” Oraz explained, “but nothing’s happened. So now they’re all coming to speak out.”


Some of the visitors have even crossed the border from neighboring Kyrgyzstan, where Atazhurt hopes to help set up a similar organization, though Oraz doesn’t expect the testimonies received there to be much more than a hundred, given the relatively low number of Kyrgyz in East Turkestan.
This rise in the number of people willing to speak up has had both good and bad results. 

Despite refusing to recognize Atazhurt as an official organization, the Kazakhstan government has tacitly recognized its influence—confirmed by its summoning Bilash and issuing him a formal warning about a month ago, as a means of curbing the group’s activity. 

That Zhang Wei, China’s consul-general in Kazakhstan, has been forced to break his silence on the issue very likely says something as well. 

In an interview with Tengrinews.kz meant to address “those spreading rumors about the ‘Chinese threat,’” Zhang issued a warning to evildoers, complete with the bemusing statement that “good always triumphs over evil.” 

More positively, the increased civil pressure has forced Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to negotiate the release of at least some of those detained in East Turkestan, even if they’ve done so “carefully” and mostly for Kazakh citizens, attributing the detentions to administrative problems—notably, to so-called dual citizenship issues.
The outcome of the Sawytbai trial was initially seen as a triumph. 

Maya Wang of Human Rights Watch commented that the case showed that “the Kazakh authorities can stand up to China,” the Diplomat’s Catherine Putz concluded that Kazakhstan has chosen Kazakhs over China, and Bilash was quoted as saying that the judgment was “very good” and “a first in Kazakhstan.” 

Still, the days that have followed the trial have seen old shadows return, and not only because of the reported detention of Sawytbai’s friends and relatives.
After a day or two of apparent freedom, Sawytbai has effectively been barred from seeing anyone—reporters especially—by her own lawyer. 

In an interview with 365info.kz, Saule Abedinova, a local journalist who has remained close to the lawyer and Sawytbai following the trial, confirmed that Sawytbai—arguably the most important witness of China’s concentration camp system—will remain inaccessible until she gets asylum, which could take anywhere from three months to a year. 

On top of this strange decree, there is also Abedinova’s own report of a break-in at Sawytbai’s home and recent photos of Abedinova and the lawyer with members of Jebeu, a local government organization with documented ties to the Chinese consulate.
While Sawytbai’s verdict seemed like a small victory, the ongoing campaign—of basic human rights over economic or personal interests—is very far from won.

Kazakh trial throws spotlight on China’s internment centres

Beijing’s crackdown in East Turkestan puts central Asian neighbours on edge 
By Emily Feng in Beijing

Sayragul Sauytbay has requested asylum in Kazakhstan. She had been forced to teach prisoners in a Chinese internment camp.
The trial of a Chinese citizen who fled to Kazakhstan has offered rare insight into China’s secretive internment centres, with Beijing’s security campaign in East Turkestan increasingly putting neighbouring countries in central Asia on edge.
 The trial, which is being held in the Kazakh town of Zharkent near the Chinese border, has featured the first public testimony describing China’s internment system in East Turkestan, alarming Chinese officials who have long obscured their existence. 
 Sayragul Sauytbay, a Kazakh with Chinese citizenship, in April fled East Turkestan where she was forced to teach Chinese history to prisoners at an internment centre.
She then requested asylum in Kazakhstan, where her husband and two children are citizens.
 On May 21, Ms Sauytbay was detained by Kazakh security officials for allegedly crossing the border into Kazakhstan illegally — a charge that could see her deported to China.
Friends and family say she is being targeted by the Chinese Communist party for possessing political secrets because of her employment at an internment centre. 
 Since 2016, China has intensified a security campaign in East Turkestan ostensibly aimed at countering Islamist and separatist "terror".
The crackdown has targeted Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim ethnic group.
Among the measures are a regional network of extra-legal internment camps that hold at least 500,000 of the region’s 11m Uighurs.
 “The people in East Turkestan definitely do not know the severe degree the centres have reached, how many have died [there] and how many have gone crazy. Those who know cannot say because once they do they will face consequences,” said Silamu Wuwali, Ms Sauytbay’s husband.
“We are very worried for her physical safety.”
 In her testimony, Ms Sauytbay said details about the operations of internment centres were classified as state secrets and their disclosure was punishable by execution. 
 Deliberations were scheduled to end last week but have been extended to begin again on Wednesday after the judge rejected Ms Sauytbay’s plea bargain to face criminal charges in Kazakhstan rather than be deported to China.
 “Ms Sauytbay is at a real risk of torture and ill-treatment and of arbitrary detention if returned to China,” her lawyers said in a statement.
Kazakhstan is a party to both the UN Convention against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which bans expelling a person to where they face a risk of torture.
As the clampdown intensifies, regional neighbours have been swept up by China’s widening security dragnet.
Particularly affected has been resource-rich Kazakhstan, one of China’s key partners in its Belt and Road Initiative.
 For decades, ethnic Kazakhs crossed relatively freely between China and Kazakhstan.
But since China’s security crackdown began in 2016, at least 10 Kazakh citizens have been detained in East Turkestan.
Ms Sauytbay testified that she taught at a East Turkestan internment camp that was built to hold almost 2,500 Chinese Kazakhs.
 Kazakh interest surrounding the trial has been such that it prompted China’s ambassador in Kazakhstan, Zhang Wei, to speak out in July.
 “This year, we have noticed different individuals zealously campaigning about the so-called problems of the ethnic Kazakhs from East Turkestan,” he said in an interview with Tengrinews, one of the largest online news outlets in Kazakhstan. 
 “They have done this on the internet and out in public, openly and secretly, inventing unfounded accusations with the evil intent of staining East Turkestan's image and grossly interfering in China’s internal affairs.”

China's Paranoia Gives Its Neighbors Nightmares

From Russia to Central Asia, Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative triggers bad memories of Chinese imperialism.
BY ROBERT DALY, MATTHEW ROJANSKY
Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev on May 9, 2015 in Moscow, Russia. 

In 1904, Halford Mackinder theorized that whichever nation ruled the “World-Island” of Africa, Asia, and Europe would “command the world.”

One hundred and nine years later, in Astana, Kazakhstan, Xi Jinping made his move, declaring himself the prophet and China the engine of Afro-Eurasian integration. 

The era of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) diplomacy had begun.
The World-Island quickly proved too small for Xi’s vision. 

One month after the Astana speech, Xi went to Jakarta to announce that China would “strengthen maritime cooperation with ASEAN countries … and vigorously develop maritime partnership in a joint effort to build the Maritime Silk Road.” 

In January, Foreign Minister Wang Yi invited more than 30 Latin American and Caribbean nations to join the BRI. 

Days later, the State Council issued a white paper on China’s Arctic strategy whose final sentence encouraged Arctic Council members — which, unlike China, actually border the Arctic — to work with China to “participate in the governance of the Arctic, and advance Arctic-related cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative.”
From South America to the North Pole, the BRI posits China as the overlord of global integration. But Beijing’s neighbors are rather more skeptical.
The authors recently visited Beijing, Astana, and Moscow to gauge how Xi’s vision jibes with those of Eurasian neighbors whose cooperation is essential to the BRI’s success. 

We found an eagerness to participate in projects that support national development, but deep resistance to any westward or northern expansion of China’s practices, ideas, or population. 

As the region’s newest capital, Astana might be expected to showcase Eurasian ambitions, but with the exception of a Chinese-built hotel, there is not a trace of Sinophilia in the city. 

Storefronts and skyscrapers are ablaze with Cyrillic and English; there is barely a Chinese character in sight. 

Russia remains determinedly Slavic and European; its stylistic and ideological orientations are wholly occidental. 

Neither country hopes that China’s power will increase with its investments.

China’s strategic logic
Xi Jinping either hasn’t noticed or doesn’t care. 

While Mackinder thought any World-Island hegemon must first rule Eastern Europe, Xi is confident that history proves the key to continental control lies in China. 

In September 2013, he told the Kazakhs that “more than 2,100 years ago … imperial envoy Zhang Qian was sent to Central Asia twice to open the door to friendly contacts between China and Central Asian countries as well as the transcontinental Silk Road linking East and West.” 

That October, Xi said in his address to the Indonesian parliament that “Southeast Asia has since ancient times been an important hub along the ancient Maritime Silk Road.”
The implication was that premodern Eurasian and Southeast Asian trade was driven by China, a distinctly revisionist view. 

The term “Silk Road” was coined in 1877 by a German geographer to connote the historic phenomenon of Eurasian trade rather than a particular route.
The Silk Road was not Sinocentric, nor was it a road. 

Xi’s mythologizing of the Silk Road also elides the fact that soldiers as well as salesmen moved along the storied routes. 

Zhang Qian’s true mission was not to establish a free trade regime — Eurasian economic exchange began millennia before he was born — but to convince nomad peoples to ally with China in a war against Turkic tribes in what is now East Turkestan and Central Asia. 

Xi’s paeans to Eurasian integration may skip China’s violent expansion, but that history has not been forgotten by China’s neighbors.
Xi’s historical references elide the deeper strategy of motivating China’s present-day BRI campaign. China is in the midst of what it calls a “period of strategic opportunity” resulting from its rapid rise and the slow growth of the West since 2008. 

For Beijing, the financial crisis ended China’s 30-year economic apprenticeship to the United States and put the lie to the universalist claims of American values and the American-led world order. 

Xi and his colleagues believe their strategic opportunity has been extended by the decline in American prestige since the 2016 election and by Trump’s withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. 

They see the epicenter of global power shifting East.
It’s hard to argue the point. 

While the United States is an obstacle on China’s maritime borders, it barely registers as an annoyance when China looks west, across Central Asia, to Europe. 

There, China hopes to employ its foreign exchange reserves, which are the largest in the world, its construction expertise, the lending power of its state-run banks, and its excess (and world-leading) capacity in steel, aluminum, and concrete production, to integrate not only infrastructure but information flows, financial systems, and customs clearance practices as well, winning deference in the process.
Beijing doesn’t disguise the self-interest woven into the BRI. 

In China’s telling, the BRI will be good for everyone, but especially good for China. 

As a People’s Daily “manifesto” published in early 2018 put it: “The world needs China … That creates broad strategic room for our efforts to uphold peace and development and gain an advantage” (emphasis added). 

At a private meeting held in Washington in February, a Beijing-based scholar twice confided that the true purpose of the BRI was to internationalize China’s currency, the renminbi. 

By making the renminbi the official currency of BRI transactions, the scholar explained, China would challenge the U.S. dollar’s status as the premier mode of global exchange even though the renminbi is tightly managed by Beijing. 

China will require participants in BRI projects to accept Chinese standards of justice as well as its currency. 

In an underreported story, China is setting up new courts in Beijing, Xian, and Shenzhen to adjudicate BRI disputes.
The praise lavished on Xi and the BRI by China’s party-media, furthermore, suggest the BRI is less about benefitting China’s partners than strengthening domestic support for China’s Communist Party. 

Chinese enthusiasm for Xi’s vision is reaching absurd heights. 

At a Beijing conference which the authors attended in late 2017, a Chinese foreign-policy analyst claimed that Xi’s vision could not only guide the peaceful development of the human race, but would benefit non-human animal species and plants as well. 

There is reason to think such fulsome nonsense, now as during the Mao era, serves to mask Chinese doubts about the wisdom of the BRI.
Nonetheless, China’s framing of Eurasian integration now drives policy discussions worldwide; it is the BRI, not Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union or the United States’ all-but-forgotten New Silk Road initiative that captures imaginations and headlines. 

No one can accuse Xi of thinking small. 

Eurasia and Africa, which remain the short-term focus of the BRI, comprise 57 percent of the world’s landmass, 86 percent of its population, and 65 percent of its GDP. 

The BRI vision — the economic integration of these regions through infrastructure — would be a historic achievement. 

It is already accepted as commonplace that existing regional transportation networks cannot be connected, nor can new ones be built, unless China plays a major role in the financing and construction of highways, rail systems, pipelines, and ports.
But Xi’s BRI plan is as vague as its promised $1 trillion in investments is enticing. 

Despite Xi’s lofty promises, China’s total foreign direct investments have grown along the same trajectory established before the BRI was announced, and actually fell in BRI nations in 2016. 

And though it’s early days for the BRI, the program has so far generated few smashing successes and experts remain skeptical that Eurasian rail networks can ever compete with the low costs of ocean transport. 

Nor is it clear that China’s branding, cash, and ambition can overcome the uneven development, political and cultural diversity, age-old hatreds, and daunting geography of the World-Island.
Accordingly, reactions to China’s proffered largesse have been mixed. 

Russia, Kazakhstan, and even Pakistan harbor deep suspicions despite official enthusiasm. 

The G-7 nations, India, and Japan have declined to endorse the initiative despite China’s constant pleading, primarily because they see the BRI as China’s bid for global dominance. 

Despite doubts about the feasibility and revisionist tendencies of the BRI, however, Xi’s signature program is winning support from Thailand to Tajikistan to Greece. 

Seventy-one countries have “joined” the initiative, although it is not clear what joining entails.
But while Xi speaks in certainties, China’s Russian and Kazakh partners are more circumspect. 

They welcome Chinese investment when it suits them, but do not embrace Xi’s calls for a “community of common future” overseen by a "benevolent" China. 

Such doubts need not be fatal to Eurasian infrastructure integration, but widespread unease over China’s growing power indicates that many of China’s neighbors will not march under Beijing’s banner, even if they benefit from its wealth.

Moscow’s Eurasian pivot
In the aftermath of its annexation of Crimea, Moscow can hardly reproach Beijing for advancing expansive territorial ambitions by creating facts on the ground. 

Both Russia and China regularly trumpet the primacy of sovereignty in international relations, yet neither shows much deference to the sovereignty of smaller neighbors. 

Such attitudes have strained China’s ties with the West, and have utterly upended Russia’s relations with the United States and Europe, and thus driven Russia’s own “pivot” toward China and the Asia-Pacific. 

For Moscow, China’s enthusiasm for enhanced Eurasian connectivity comes just in time, as Russia finds itself increasingly cut off from Western markets.
Of course, Russians are not only looking eastward out of pique or desperation. 

Russian officials and experts talk explicitly about China’s “return to its natural place in East Asia” and insist that they cannot miss the opportunity to be a part of China’s and Asia’s rise. 

At the same time, Russians recognize that their relatively small demographic and economic presence in East Asia will not alone secure them a leadership role in the resurgent, realigned region. 

They hope to compensate for these limitations by capitalizing on their strength as a security and geopolitical actor in the region, and on warm personal ties between the Russian and Chinese leaders. It is against this backdrop that Vladimir Putin proposed a “greater Eurasian partnership,” also dubbed the “integration of integrations,” as a path to connecting the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union with China’s Belt and Road.
The Russian-Chinese strategic partnership announced in 2012 was hardly a conceptual breakthrough. Moscow and Beijing signed partnership agreements in 1994 and 1996 and concluded a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation in 2001. 

For years, they have sought to coordinate positions in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, BRICS, the G-20, and of course, the U.N. Security Council. 

When asked about his most important foreign-policy achievement at the end of his second presidential term in 2008, Putin cited the settlement of a long-simmering border dispute with China. In case there was any doubt about warming relations, in 2006 and 2007 the two countries declared reciprocal years of Russia and China to celebrate trade and cultural and political ties.
Yet Russians recognize that China’s growing weight and ambition will test the durability of their own position in East Asia. 

Like their Western counterparts, Russians are watching Chinese investments in Eurasian infrastructure closely, and say they will assess the significance of the Belt and Road based neither on fears nor promises, but on real-world results. 

One such outcome was described to us by a Russian businessman who cautioned that while Chinese business partners would never make overt political demands, transactions with them would eventually be conducted entirely in renminbi, and supply chains would be reoriented entirely toward Chinese manufacturers. 

As one Russian official put it to us, “Chinese culture does not orient to domination — they simply see themselves as the center of the world.”
Russia’s enthusiasm for increased Eurasian economic connectivity is partly an expression of its frustration with Europe and the United States. 

It is not only that Western sanctions are damaging to Russia’s economy — they are, though that has not changed the Kremlin’s policies in Ukraine or Syria — but rather that they are marks of continuing disregard for what Russia sees as its rightful stature. 

Some Russians still think in terms of a geopolitical “triangle,” with the United States, Russia, and China at the corners, while others are convinced that a new Cold War looms between Washington and Beijing.
Either way, many Russians consider China’s rise the leading indicator of the West’s decline, and they expect this fact to force concessions from Washington and Brussels over time, including the end of economic and political punishments imposed on Russia after 2014. 

For Russians who share this view, pursuing economic integration with the East is, ironically, largely about securing better relations with the West. 

But Russians may be mixing metaphors in their conjuring of the BRI as a counterweight to Western pressure and isolation. 

After all, Russia matters most of all for China as a potential land corridor to Europe, whose half-billion wealthy consumers are the largest single market for Chinese goods.

Kazakhstan: the buckle in the belt?
Kazakhstan is landlocked and sparsely populated, though rich in energy and other natural resources. Hemmed in by the behemoths, Russia and China, and saddled with the legacies of rule from Moscow during the tsarist and Soviet periods, Kazakhstan has no shortage of geopolitical challenges. 

So Kazakh officials are justifiably proud of having secured their country’s sovereignty, built a relatively stable, prosperous economy, and forged a distinctive but still pluralistic national identity over the past three decades. 

A sense of that determination and pride comes across when Kazakhstan’s leaders refer to their nation as the “buckle” in China’s BRI.
Kazakhstan’s geography makes it central to the belt. 

The most efficient land route from Western China to Eastern Europe passes through Kazakhstan en route to Russia. 

The rail journey from China to Europe over this route now takes about 14 days, but Kazakh officials aim to bring that down to 10 through physical infrastructure enhancements and streamlining border crossings. 

Kazakhstan’s participation as a core member of the Eurasian Economic Union with Russia and Belarus means that customs are standardized across all three former Soviet states, so that — at least in theory — shipments should be held for inspection only once at each end of the route, where trains must shuttle between standard (European and Chinese) and wider (Russian and Kazakh) gauges. Climate-controlled rail cars moving swiftly from Chinese factories to European markets in less than two weeks promise to revolutionize trade in high value-added products such as advanced electronics. European producers aim to fill returning rail cars with food and luxury items that find eager buyers in China.
Kazakhstan, while hardly a poor country, is acutely aware of the need for new sources of growth and a development vision that looks beyond energy exports. 

Connecting Eurasia may offer the opportunity not only to boost Kazakhstan’s own trade with China and Europe, but to extract transit fees provided rail volumes continue growing as they have over the past decade, from 1,200 containers in 2011 to over 200,000 in 2017. 

Moreover, Kazakh leaders argue that the construction of transportation infrastructure connecting the country’s own eastern and western regions has particular value for a country that has historically been focused on north-south linkages. 

This is why, according to officials, Kazakhstan invested $5 billion of its own sovereign wealth in BRI infrastructure projects, including construction of what is meant to be the world’s largest dry port facility at Khorgos. 

“When China proposed the [BRI] idea,” one Kazakh expert explained, “they found a very motivated partner.”
So much for the attraction of the BRI for Kazakhstan. 

What about the risks? 

For now, Kazakh officials insist they have relations with both Russia and China well in hand. 

They are confident in their ability to keep trade and investment separate from politics and security. Whereas Moscow’s pivot eastward was a largely political decision, they argue, for Astana it’s just good business, with no political component. 

Yet while Kazakhstan has paid for its share of infrastructure construction the Chinese have invested nearly $30 billion across more than 50 projects as well. 

In fact, China is now the leading foreign investor in all five of the former Soviet Central Asian republics, Kazakh students are increasingly studying abroad in China (some 40,000 to date), and Chinese workers have flocked to attractive jobs in pipeline, rail and other construction projects, especially in Western Kazakhstan.
How close is too close for comfort? 

Although Kazakhs embrace their status as a “truly Eurasian” country, they have absorbed Eurocentric views about China from their long association with Russia, while channeling insecurities and prejudices of their own. 

Kazakh-Chinese projects to connect Eurasia may be all business for both sides, but they are hardly equal partnerships. 

As one Kazakh expert queried, “how could we integrate with 1.5 billion people?” 

In 2016, thousands of Kazakhs protested over a proposed land reform that critics argued would result in Chinese buying up too much Kazakh soil. 

Arms-length business ties may suit Kazakhstan, but China will almost inevitably seek more respect, and much more control, as its investment in the region continues to grow. 

“Remember,” cautioned one well-placed international observer in Astana, “that the biggest central Asian country is western China.”
Like most of China’s neighbors, Kazakhstan and Russia judge China’s intentions not by China’s dubious historiography and lofty rhetoric, but in light of their own experience, interests, and vulnerabilities. 

They are enticed by China’s deep pockets, but unconvinced of its good will. 

Considering the sensitivities of its neighbors, Beijing may be wise to keep its BRI vision vague and to let the program evolve gradually. 

It runs the risk, however, that this lack of specificity will be read as a cover for Chinese self-interest. China’s prospective partners across Central Asia and Eastern Europe, after all, are no strangers to imperialist plots and bristle at any hint of cultural condescension, economic exploitation, or encroachment on their sovereignty.
Despite Xi Jinping’s difficulty in translating his vision to foreign and domestic skeptics, the BRI has become a global force, both symbolically and as an engine for real investment. 

As Eurasian integration evolves, and if China continues to adjust its practices as a world power, the BRI may achieve many of its goals. 

It is unlikely, however, that the nations of the World-Island, many of which are proud civilization-states, will embrace Chinese leadership. 

Even if the BRI helps to forge a Eurasian logistical network, its anxious beneficiaries are not likely to give China the deference it seeks.
China’s response to that disappointment will be the true measure of its Eurasian dreams.