Turkey: A Muslim Kapo Nation

They Built a Homeland Far From China’s Grip. Now They’re Afraid.
By Carlotta Gall
Ablet Abdugani with his daughter Serife, 15, and his sons Abdussalam, 11, and Abdullah, age 5, at their home in Istanbul, Turkey.

ISTANBUL — Six years ago, he fled China’s crackdown on Muslim Uighurs and sought refuge in Turkey, joining a community of fellow exiles.
He started a business with his brother, translating and publishing self-help books into their language. His wife got a job as a teacher in a Uighur school where his children began to take classes.
Now, Ablet Abdugani worries the life he built will disappear.
The Turkish government told him he had to leave the country.
That could mean being sent back to China and likely straight into detention in a sprawling network of internment camps where about one million Muslims are held.
“I am scared whenever the door opens,” Mr. Abdugani said in his apartment on the far outskirts of Istanbul.
“I feel very sad about my six years here.”
Uighurs have left China in droves as the government intensified a campaign of assimilation in the western colony of East Turkestan.
In the last three years, at least 11,000 have landed in Turkey, long a favored haven.
Now, they worry they could become pawns in a geopolitical game.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who a decade ago called Beijing’s treatment of the Uighurs a genocide, has tried to reduce his country’s reliance on the West by turning to nations such as China.
In recent years, he has secured billions of dollars in loans and investments from the Asian giant to help prop up the faltering Turkish economy.

Renaay Muhammed, center, who teaches the Uighur language to children, with her students in an empty construction lot next to the school in Istanbul, Turkey.

Earlier this year, Turkey deported at least four Uighurs to Tajikistan. 
From there, they were sent back to China, alarming the Uighur community and drawing protests on social media.
Turkish authorities later said they would not send any Uighurs back to China.
But Mr. Abdugani, who was not deported, and many others like him remain anxious.
“We are caught in the middle of Chinese-Turkish relations and we don’t even know how much we are worth,” Mr. Abdugani said.
For those who have fled China, Turkey has offered them a place to reimagine their homeland.
Their people share a common heritage and similar languages.
Turkey’s government recognizes Turkic people as their own, making it a rare Muslim-majority nation that has spoken up for the Uighurs despite China’s objections.
They can practice Islam without fear and celebrate the culture of their 12 million people.
They teach classes on religion and the Uighur language and hold a yearly rally for their rights, activities that would be risky, or even banned, in China.
But many Uighurs in Turkey find themselves in a state of impermanence.
They are denied work permits and business licenses, and in some cases permanent residence and citizenship.
Once their Chinese passports expire, they are left effectively stateless.

‘Our people are being tortured’
The Uighurs speak a Turkic language and write in an Arabic script.
Their mosques feature turquoise tiled domes, their homes are decorated with Afghan-style rugs and their kitchens serve up cumin-spiced lamb pilaf and naan.
In their new home in Turkey, the Uighurs found something rare: a chance to restore their way of life and the reservoir of collective memory that China’s ruling Communist Party has sought to erode.
China intensified restrictions on the Uighurs after a spate of attacks in 2014 that the authorities blamed on "extremists".
Arrests and criminal convictions soared.
The authorities have confiscated Uighur books, restricted the use of the language in schools and detained scholars, artists and intellectuals, among others, in indoctrination camps.
Omer Hemdulla was studying in the Middle East in 2017 when his family in China warned him against going home.
The authorities had arrested his brothers and confiscated their businesses, they told him.
He went to Turkey and took over a bookstore in Istanbul in January, joining a burgeoning trade of printing books in the Uighur language.

Omer Hemdulla took over a bookstore in Istanbul in January and prints books in the Uighur language.

“The entire Uighur nation is in danger. Our people are being tortured,” said Mr. Hemdulla, 30, a law graduate.
He and his business partner, Nur Ahmet Mahmut, 32, publish anything they can find, from Uighur history and literature to children’s stories and cookery books.
They sell symbols of their hoped-for republic, East Turkestan — such as its sky blue flag with white crescent and star — items that are outlawed in China.
Mr. Hemdulla stocks books that were banned in East Turkestan.
Among the most popular, he said, are the novel “Awakened Land,” by Abdurehim Otkur, a well-known Uighur author, and “East Turkestan History” by Muhamet Emin Bugra, an exiled Turkic Muslim leader.
“I only read them when I came to Turkey and I realized China oppressed and occupied us a long time ago,” he said.
His shop is among half a dozen bookstores in the outlying districts of Sefakoy and Zeytinburnu in Istanbul, where many of the estimated 50,000 Uighurs in Turkey live.
Another publisher, Abduljalil Turan, 61, started his business in the 1990s, focusing on Islamic books and Uighur history and literature.
He asked friends to bring books to Turkey and then began publishing works of Uighur exiles, including his own writings.
He steadily expanded his stock to 1,000 titles and exports them to Uighur communities around the world.
“It is part of the cause,” he said, “to keep awareness alive about our condition.”

‘Will our culture disappear?’
For many Uighurs brought up under Communism, Turkey provides them a chance to raise a generation unbound by party orthodoxy, children who are free to embrace religion and their ethnic roots.
In China, Niaz Abdulla Bostani was imprisoned for three years for teaching the Quran to Uighur children.
Now, at 87, he holds religious classes for Uighur children on weekends at a local hall in Istanbul.

Niaz Abdulla Bostani, right, a religious teacher who moved to Turkey in 2016, and his wife, Hebibihan Merup.

“Young people come to me and ask questions,” he explained.
“Education is the answer. It will not solve things in a few days, but it will affect you all your life.”
Abdurashid Niaz, 55, was imprisoned for a year in China in 2005 for translating a book by the Egyptian Islamist Muhammad Qutb from Mandarin to Uighur.
He now runs a Uighur school in Istanbul with his wife, and says the internment drive in East Turkestan has made the Uighurs worried about their people’s survival.
“Everyone is discussing whether in 50 years, will our culture disappear,” Mr. Abdurashid said.
Four children were studying geography with his wife, Anifa Abdurashid, on a recent morning, and they leapt to answer questions about their homeland.
“I know the population is 32 million,” the youngest in the class, Abdulla, piped up.
The true population of the region of East Turkestan, of which Uighurs make up half, is closer to 24 million, but Mrs. Abdurashid let it go.
The Uighurs have preserved their identity through five millenniums, said Ferhat Kurban Tanridagli, a musician and scholar of Turkic languages.

Uighur children drew a map of their homeland during a class at a Uighur school in Istanbul.

He runs an arts school with his wife, a singer, and teaches music and dance to Uighur children.
He plays the dutar, a long-necked, two-string lute that has been played for 4,000 years in Central Asia.
“Made in Kashgar, in 1993,” he said proudly, turning the instrument of gleaming peanut wood, inlaid with bone, in his hands, referring to the fabled Silk Road trading town which now lives under tight police surveillance.
He warned that the Uighurs would not be able to withstand China’s onslaught on their own.
“If they destroy us, they will not stop. They will do it to others,” he said. 
“All the world needs to say to China to stop. We have no other choice.”

‘Still, there is danger’
This summer, the threat of deportation cast a new shadow of uncertainty over the Uighurs.
Mr. Abdugani, the businessman who had been told in July by the government to leave, said 40 others had received similar orders.
The Uighurs were deeply troubled when the authorities, as part of a crackdown on illegal immigrants, deported a Uighur woman and her two children to Tajikistan, which sent them back to China.
A fourth Uighur, also a woman, was deported as well.
The children were handed to their grandmother, but relatives have no news of the two women and fear they have been detained.
An estimated 2,500 Uighurs do not have legal residency.
Turkey’s interior minister, Suleyman Soylu, said in August that the government was trying to manage migration with “mercy and conscience,” and would not deport Uighurs.
Those without residence papers like Mr. Abdugani could seek humanitarian protection, he said.
That would grant them refugee status and access to health care services but not allow them to work.
Mr. Abdugani applied for humanitarian protection, but several months later was still waiting for a response and risks arrest for his illegal status.
The family was surviving on his wife’s salary and they could not pay for school books or the bus fare, so his children were walking to class most days.
Even as Turkey allows them to stay, many Uighurs said that immigration rules and the state bureaucracy make survival difficult.
Mr. Abdugani said he wanted long-term residence, which would allow him to work and support his family, and after seven years, apply for citizenship.
Businessmen complain they are restricted from developing their businesses, political activists say the authorities limit their demonstrations, and students are only offered free college education if they study religion.
And there is always a lingering fear of China’s reach.

Uighurs with flags of East Turkestan protested outside the Chinese Consulate in Istanbul.

Abdulla Turkestanli, 49, a book publisher, said he was detained without charge by the Turkish authorities for a year in 2017.
He suspected that Beijing had complained about him when he opened a second bookstore in the district of Sefakoy.
The Turkish authorities never explained why he was detained.
“A lot of writers are in prison or dead” he said.
“They are accused of terrorism in China, and so they say we are helping them.”
“I am fine, thanks be to God,” he said, “but still, there is danger.”

Axis of Evil

China Displaces Turkey as Top Jailer of Journalists in 2019
In its annual survey, the Committee to Protect Journalists found that at least 250 journalists are imprisoned around the world, largely by authoritarian leaders.
By Rick Gladstone

Jailed Journalist Pham Chi Dung Urges EU Not to Ratify FTA With Vietnam

China nudged past Turkey as the leading jailer of journalists this year, a press advocacy group reported in its annual survey, partly because of severe repression in China’s East Turkestan colony and Turkey’s eradication of “virtually all independent reporting,” which has left many reporters unemployed, driven into exile or intimidated into self-censorship.
The survey, released Wednesday by the Committee to Protect Journalists, also found that authoritarianism, instability and protests in the Middle East had led to a sharp rise in the number of journalists incarcerated in that region. 

Saudi Arabia and Egypt now share the rank of third-worst jailer of journalists, the group said.
For the fourth consecutive year, at least 250 journalists were imprisoned around the world, the group said in a news release announcing the findings. 

It said Xi Jinping, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia and President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt had shown “no sign of letting up on the critical media.”
It was the first time in four years that Turkey had not claimed the dubious title in the group’s survey, as the number of journalists incarcerated there fell to 47 from 68 in 2018. 

But the group said the reduction did “not signal an improved situation for the Turkish media.”
Rather, the group said, the reduction reflected the successful drive by Erdogan to “stamp out independent reporting,” with actions that included the closing of more than 100 news outlets. 

Scores of journalists are now in exile, jobless or too frightened to report on topics the Turkish government finds objectionable, the group said.
Other journalists who had been held in Turkish jails have been freed, because of shortened pretrial detention periods under new laws that grant appeals for convictions of offenses such as “propaganda for a terrorist organization,” which the group described as a frequent charge against journalists in Turkey.
“Dozens of journalists not currently jailed in Turkey are still facing trial or appeal and could yet be sentenced to prison,” the group said, while “others have been sentenced in absentia and face arrest if they return to the country.”
In China, at least 48 journalists are incarcerated, one more than in 2018, the group said, as Xi has “instituted ever tighter controls on the media.”
A crackdown in East Turkestan, where a million members of Muslim ethnic groups have been sent to concentration camps, has led to the arrests of “dozens of journalists,” the group said, including some incarcerated for work they had done years ago.
In Saudi Arabia, where the number of imprisoned journalists has risen steadily for years, at least 26 are being held, the group said, the same as the number imprisoned in Egypt. 

In 18 of the Saudi cases, the group said, the charges have not been disclosed.
The group found 16 journalists held in the reclusive sub-Saharan nation of Eritrea, including some who had not been heard from in nearly two decades.
Other countries on the group’s top jailers list include Vietnam, with 12 imprisoned journalists; Iran, with 11; Russia and Cameroon, with seven each; Bahrain and Azerbaijan, with six each; Syria with five; and Burundi, Rwanda and Morocco, with four each.
The group said it also had revised its 2018 list to 255 from 251, having belatedly learned of arrests, releases or deaths it had not known of a year ago.
The list is a snapshot of those incarcerated as of Dec. 1, and excludes the many journalists who are seized by the authorities and released throughout the year.
Based in New York, the Committee to Protect Journalists is a leading proponent of press freedom, and its advocacy work has helped lead to early release of at least 80 imprisoned journalists around the world since its founding in 1981.

East Turkestan

China's persecuted Uyghurs live freely in Turkey
By Jomana Karadsheh and Isil Sariyuce

Istanbul -- The call to prayer at Emine Inanc mosque brings together immigrants who have found sanctuary in Istanbul's working-class Zeytinburnu neighborhood.
With no room inside the overcrowded mosque, dozens of worshippers spill onto the street.

For some, like Ishqiyar Abudureyimu, praying openly would have been unimaginable just a few years ago when he was living in China.
The 27-year-old is among thousands of Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority from East Turkestan colony in western China, who have sought refuge in Turkey after escaping Beijing's brutal crackdown against the group.
Ethnic and religious ties between Turkey and the Uyghurs, the immigrants say, have made building new lives in Istanbul easier for them.
China 'at war with faith' says US ambassador at large

Uyghurs speak a dialect of Turkish and, like the Turks, are considered ethnically Turkic.
Dozens of Uyghur shops and restaurants line the streets of Zeytinburnu, a small neighborhood near Istanbul's international airport. 

Most shop signs are in the group's native script and language which was banned in East Turkestan province.
In a rundown building, children attend after-school classes to learn their mother tongue. 

Boys and girls crammed into small classrooms recite the Uyghur alphabet which most are learning for the first time.
"We are more comfortable than we were in our home country," says Abudureyimu, who has lived in Turkey since 2014. 

"I can practice my religion freely, speak my language freely," he adds. 

"In Turkey I saw that a man can live freely, in peace. We are free here."

Missing relatives
However, Abudureyimu is all too aware that back at home, oppression against Uyghurs continues. Seated in an Istanbul Uyghur restaurant, he lays out more than two dozen photographs of loved ones who he says have disappeared in China. 

He arranges the images along a straight line, then holds them up and introduces each of his family members.
"My father ... my mother ... my sister," he tells CNN, his voice fraught with emotion as he identifies them.
Abudureyimu does not know the whereabouts of his family or even if they are alive, but he believes Chinese authorities detained them. 

He adds that the crackdown against Uyghurs targeted his family for years but that it worsened after he fled. 

Many other families whose relatives left China have also come under increased pressure from authorities, he said.
Chinese authorities did not respond to CNN's request for comment.

After fleeing persecution, Uyghur children are learning their native language for the first time in Turkey.

An estimated 1 million Uyghurs are being held in concentration camps across eastern China as part of the crackdown, according to a 2018 US congressional report.
The Chinese government has never explained the disappearances, which began in 2017, nor said how many people are being held in the camps, which they insist are "vocational training centers" that local "students" willingly attend.
Uyghur refugee tells of death and fear inside China's East Turkestan camps

In early January, Chinese authorities took some foreign diplomats and journalists on a carefully supervised tour of some of the "vocational education centers."
Detainees were seen taking language courses in standard Mandarin Chinese, painting, performing ethnic dances and even singing the song, "If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands," according to a Reuters report.
"All of us found that we have something wrong with ourselves and luckily enough the Communist Party and the government offer this kind of school to us for free," one Uyghur inmate told journalists during the tour.

Ishqiyar Abudureyimu holds up a picture of his mother outside Istanbul's Hagia Sophia mosque. He says this is the last time he saw her and that she has disappeared since she returned to China.

But China's claims don't answer the Uyghur community's questions about their disappeared loved ones.
Diaspora members see solidarity protests as their main chance to support their families back home. Dozens of Uyghurs gather in central Istanbul, waving Uyghur nationalist flags and carrying photographs of missing parents, siblings and spouses. 

Some hold whole family portraits.
'"Those photos are of my relatives and Uyghur celebrities," said one protester, philosophy student Fazilet Gurec. 

"We lost contact three years ago."
"Our expectation is to know what happened to them and what is their situation now," she added.
One of the last photographs in Abudureyimu's collection back at the Uyghur restaurant is of his mother sitting outside Istanbul's Hagia Sophia mosque. 

He claims she was detained after she returned from a 2015 visit to Turkey.
He also shows a picture of his family home, which he hasn't seen since he fled East Turkestan. Recently, he discovered the photograph on social media -- it was blanketed with snow and appeared abandoned.

Solidarity in Turkey
A sense of solidarity with the Uyghurs is evident in Turkey, but trade ties with China have tempered Ankara's response to their plight. 

For the most part, Turkey has opened its doors to Uyghurs escaping persecution, but remained largely silent about the brutal crackdown.
However, Turkey's foreign affairs ministry issued an explosive statement in February slamming the Chinese government for undertaking a deliberate campaign to eradicate "the ethnic, religious and cultural identities of the Uyghur Turks and other communities in the region."
It condemned the camps where China holds Uyghurs as a "great shame for humanity," adding that hundreds of thousands of members of the group were subject to "torture and political brainwashing" in the camps.

A Uyghur restaurant displays the group's native script, which is banned in China.

Turkey's statement came after reports claimed the popular Uyghur folk musician Abdurehim Heyit had died in jail in China. 

The Turkish Foreign Ministry said it learned that he had died. 

Beijing denied the reports, broadcasting what it claimed was video footage proving Heyit was still alive.
In response, Uyghurs in Turkey joined a #MeTooUyghur social media campaign, with hundreds taking to the streets demanding China release proof-of-life videos of their disappeared relatives.

A Uyghur stand in Istanbul pays tribute to disappeared people, detained in Chinese concentration camps in western China.

"Every morning I wake up and hope not to receive a sad news," says Abudureyimu. 

"My dad, mom, brothers, grandfathers ... I live in fear of receiving news of their death."
The Uyghurs want China to be held to account for the disappearance of their missing relations. 

Abdul Melik, a member of Istanbul's Uyghur community told CNN: "There are some individual voices, some individual countries (speaking out), but the whole world is in deep sleep now."

Belt and Road forum: China's 'project of the century' hits tough times

Raft of countries including Turkey have refused to attend latest summit amid growing concern about debt trap diplomacy
By Lily Kuo in Beijing

Workers perfect a decoration in the shape of a train for the 2019 Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, China. 

As China fetes its Belt and Road initiative at a summit this week, Chinese officials will be working hard to defend the flagship project from growing international criticism.
The three-day forum starting on Thursday is meant to promote Chinese dictator Xi Jinping’s “project of the century”, a foreign policy initiative launched in 2013 to revive ancient trading routes between Asia and Europe, as well as build new links in the Middle East, Africa, and South America.
But in contrast to its first summit two years ago, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) takes place in a much less welcoming environment. 

Critics say the initiative is an effort to cement Chinese influence around the world by financially binding countries to Beijing by way of “debt trap diplomacy”.

This week’s event is especially important for Beijing, which uses the forum as a way to convince the international community, as well as its own citizens, of the success of the project.
Beijing is likely to laud the memoranda of understanding signed at the event, which will conclude with a joint communique.

The China-funded Lotus Tower in central Colombo. 

“The overall purpose of the Belt and Road initiative is to generate legitimacy for the Chinese leadership and the Chinese Communist Party more broadly,” said Thomas Eder, a research associate at the Mercator Institute for Chinese Studies.
“Such prestige is bolstered by every government signing a BRI memorandum of understanding and every head of government attending a grand BRI summit in Beijing. These countries allow Xi Jinping to then tell Chinese citizens that the entire world is endorsing his policies and that he is the one to have put China firmly back at the centre of the global stage,” Eder said.
The event is to be attended by 37 leaders, including Vladimir Putin, Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte, UK chancellor Philip Hammond, Pakistan’s prime minister Imran Khan and the heads of state of the 10 Asean (Association of South-east Asian Nation) states. 

The US is sending low-level delegates, and India is not attending.
Countries that previously attended but have chosen not to come this year include Turkey, which has publicly criticised China over is treatment of the Uighurs, a Muslim minority, Poland, Spain, Fiji, Sri Lanka, and Argentina, according to the Eurasia Group, citing geopolitical issues as a possible reason.

Books on Chinese dictator Xi Jinping are seen displayed in the media centre for the second Belt and Road Forum.

Critics have also called for China to institutionalise the Belt and Road initiative, so that the project is not seen as entirely Chinese-led. 

Others have cited environmental concerns, as Chinese companies build coal power projects around the world. 

Coal projects accounted for as much as 42% of China’s overseas investment in 2018, according to the China Global Energy Finance database.
“For the sake of the planet, for people who could be breathing in pollutants from coal plants and for the long-term economic health of many developing countries, let’s hope BRI quits coal,” said Wawa Wang, senior adviser at VedvarendeEnergi in Denmark.

Ahead of the forum, China has scored some key wins for the project. 

Italy is now the first G7 country to endorse the initiative, after signing up for Belt and Road in March, despite criticism from the US. 

This month, Malaysia agreed to continue a $10.7bn rail project, previously cancelled.
So far, China has signed more than 170 agreements with 125 countries, according to Chinese state media. 

Between 2013 and 2018, these deals totalled more than $90bn in Chinese investment.
Beijing has also begun to take some steps to soothe concerns. 

Officials are reportedly drafting rules on which projects can be called “Belt and Road”, to prevent the initiative’s brand from being diluted by unsuccessful projects. 

Chinese ambassadors in Kenya and Mexico have published editorials in local media defending the initiative.
On Friday, Xi will give a keynote address, where he is likely to strike a similar tone. 

“The Belt and Road is an initiative for economic cooperation, instead of a geopolitical alliance or military league, and it is an open and inclusive process rather than an exclusive bloc or ‘China club’,” Xi said in remarks given at a symposium in August.

Xiism and China's crimes against humanity

Global silence on China’s gulag
By Brahma Chellaney

For more than two years, China has waged a campaign of unparalleled repression against its Islamic minorities, incarcerating an estimated one-sixth of the adult Muslim population of the East Turkestan colony at one point or another. 

Yet, with the exception of a recent tweet from US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calling on China to ‘end its repression’, the international community has remained largely mute.
In its reliance on mass detention, the Chinese Communist Party has followed the Soviet Union’s example. 

But China’s concentration camps are far larger and more technologically advanced than their Soviet precursors, and their purpose is to indoctrinate not just political dissidents, but an entire community of faith.
Although independent researchers and human-rights groups have raised awareness of practices such as force-feeding Muslims alcohol and pork, the Chinese authorities have been able to continue their assault on Islam with impunity. 

Even as China’s security agencies pursue Uyghurs and other Muslims as far afield as Turkey, Chinese leaders and companies involved in the persecution have not faced international sanctions or incurred any other costs.
Chief among the culprits, of course, is Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, who in 2014 ordered the policy change that set the stage for today’s repression of ethnic Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Hui and members of other Muslim groups. 

The forcible assimilation of Muslims into the country’s dominant Han culture is apparently a cornerstone of Xiism—or ‘Xi Jinping Thought’—the grand ‘ism’ that Xi has introduced to overshadow the influence of Marxism and Maoism in China.
To oversee this large-scale deprogramming of Islamic identities, Xi, who has amassed more power than any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong, reassigned the notorious CCP enforcer Chen Quanguo from Tibet to East Turkestan and elevated him to the all-powerful Central Politburo. 

Though Chen’s record of overseeing human-rights abuses is well known, the Trump administration has yet to act on a bipartisan commission’s 2018 recommendation that he and other Chinese officials managing the gulag policy be sanctioned. 

In general, financial and trade interests, not to mention the threat of Chinese retribution, have deterred most countries from condemning China’s anti-Muslim policies.
With the exception of Turkey, even predominantly Muslim countries that were quick to condemn Myanmar for its treatment of Rohingya Muslims have remained conspicuously silent on China. 

Pakistan’s military-backed prime minister, Imran Khan, has feigned ignorance about the East Turkestan crackdown, and Saudi Arabia’s powerful crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has gone so far as to defend China’s right to police ‘terrorism’.
Emboldened by the muted international response, China has stepped up its drive to Sinicise East Turkestan by demolishing Muslim neighbourhoods. 

In Urumqi and other cities, once-bustling Uyghur districts have been replaced with heavily policed zones purged of Islamic culture.
The irony is that while China justifies its ‘re-education camps’ as necessary to cleanse Muslim minds at home of extremist thoughts, it is effectively supporting Islamist terrorism abroad. 

For example, China has repeatedly blocked UN sanctions against Masood Azhar, the head of the Pakistan-based, UN-designated terrorist group responsible for carrying out serial attacks in India, including on parliament and, most recently, on a paramilitary police convoy. 

As Pompeo tweeted, ‘The world cannot afford China’s shameful hypocrisy toward Muslims. 

On one hand, China abuses more than a million Muslims at home, but on the other it protects violent Islamic terrorist groups from sanctions at the UN.’
An added irony is that while China still harps on about its ‘century of humiliation’ at the hands of foreign imperial powers, it has for decades presided over the mass humiliation of minorities in East Turkestan and Tibet. 

Ominously, by systematically degrading Muslim populations, it could be inspiring white supremacists and other Islamaphobes around the world. 

For example, Brenton Tarrant, the Australian extremist arrested for the recent twin mosque massacres in Christchurch, New Zealand, declared an affinity for China’s political and social values.

There has been a good deal of reporting about how China has turned East Turkestan into a laboratory for Xi’s Orwellian surveillance ambitions. 

Less known is how Xi’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative is being used as a catalyst for the crackdown. 

According to Chinese authorities, the establishment of a surveillance state is necessary to prevent unrest in the province at the heart of the BRI’s overland route.
Like Marxism–Leninism, Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism, which left millions of people dead, Xiism promises to impose significant long-term costs on untold numbers of innocent people. 

It is the impetus behind China’s ruthless targeting of minority cultures and communities, as well as its aggressive expansion into international waters and introduction of digital totalitarianism.
Thanks to Xiism, the world’s largest, strongest and oldest autocracy finds itself at a crossroads. 

As the People’s Republic of China approaches its 70th birthday, its economy is slowing amid escalating capital flight, trade disruptions and the emigration of wealthy Chinese. 

The Chinese technology champion Huawei’s international travails augur difficult times ahead.
The last thing China needs right now is more enemies. 

Yet Xi has used his unbridled power to expand China’s global footprint and lay bare his imperial ambitions. 

His repression of Muslim minorities may or may not lead to international action against China. 

But it will almost certainly spawn a new generation of Islamist terrorists, compounding China’s internal security challenges. 

China’s domestic security budget is already larger than its bloated defence budget, which makes it second only to the United States in terms of military spending. 

The Soviet Union once held the same position—until it collapsed.

China's crimes against humanity

China Has Also Been Targeting Turkish Nationals In Its Brutal Crackdown On Muslims
Turkey is the only Muslim country to call out China’s crackdown on Uighur Muslims. Our investigation finds that several Turkish nationals have also disappeared, something that has never been publicly acknowledged by Turkey.
By Megha Rajagopalan and K. Murat Yildiz

A baker prepares bread for display in a Uighur bakery in the Zeytinburnu district of Istanbul.

ISTANBUL — It was supposed to be a routine business trip, so the young Turkish man was surprised when immigration officials at the Chinese airport pulled him into a room and questioned him for hours. 

He asked to speak to diplomats from his home country, but the Chinese officials shrugged their shoulders, telling him to take it up with police.
When police brought him in handcuffs to a jail cell on the other side of the country, so damp and dark that he immediately became sick, the man asked again. 

They told him his Turkish passport, whose edges had worn out from use, was fake.
A week later, with his arms and legs shackled to a chair in an underground interrogation room in the city of Ghulja in western China, where he had lived before he became a naturalized citizen of Turkey, he asked for a third time to speak to Turkish diplomats. 

This time the answer came sharp and clear.
“You are not a Turk,” an officer told him. 

“You are from here. Don’t think you are special — we kill people like you so that others can live in peace.”
The young businessman said he had endured 38 days of interrogations, hunger, sleep deprivation, and abuse in Chinese custody before finally being released and deported back to Istanbul, without ever being told of any charges against him.
He is an ethnic Uighur — a religious and cultural minority group that the Chinese government views as a threat to the country’s security. 

The government has subjected Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims in the far-west colony of East Turkestan to a sweeping campaign of mass surveillance and incarceration that has seen more than a million people detained in concentration camps.
Despite his ordeal, the young businessman was fortunate to have been released. 

BuzzFeed News has found that six Turkish nationals — and possibly dozens more — have gone missing in China’s East Turkestan colony, including a pair of young children. 

None of their cases have been publicly acknowledged by the Turkish government, and are being reported here for the first time.
Their families believe they have been sent to prisons or concentration camps, or in the case of the children, to state-run orphanages.

The families’ claims have been corroborated by email correspondence with government officials and copies of Turkish identification documents.
Every family interviewed by BuzzFeed News said Turkish authorities had given them little information on the status of their relatives, and that they had no evidence that their loved ones had ever been allowed to speak to Turkish diplomats — a privilege guaranteed to both prisoners and detainees by the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, to which China is a signatory. 

None of the six people hold dual citizenship with China, according to their families.
Three other families contacted by BuzzFeed News said they also had relatives who were Turkish nationals who had gone missing in East Turkestan, but declined to speak further or be identified because of the sensitivity of the cases. 

And three different Uighur community leaders in Istanbul said dozens more Turkish nationals have gone missing in East Turkestan, but BuzzFeed News could not independently verify all of these cases or speak to the families of those involved.
The families' stories show that Chinese authorities have been unafraid to sweep up foreign nationals in their campaign against Turkic Muslims, even people from countries that are important diplomatic partners.
The businessman who had spent more than a month in Chinese custody over the summer of 2017 became a Turkish citizen in 2011, giving up his Chinese citizenship, and was traveling in China on a tourist visa using his Turkish passport.
“At first I wasn’t that scared,” he said, neatly dressed in a black blazer and sporting a close-cropped haircut at a popular Uighur restaurant in Istanbul last month. 

“I told my cellmates I’m a Turkish citizen, and sooner or later they’d release me.”
The businessman, who asked his name not be used because he is afraid Chinese authorities will retaliate against his family there, was only released after weeks of interrogations about his contacts in Turkey and pictures he had shared on Facebook. 

Though he was never allowed to speak to his family or any Turkish diplomats while he was in custody, he believes he was ultimately let go because of his citizenship.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is one of the few leaders of Muslim-majority countries to have ever criticized China’s treatment of ethnic Uighurs, describing in 2009 a crackdown by Chinese authorities following deadly riots in East Turkestan as “genocide.” 

But the Turkish government, like many others in the world, went mostly quiet on the issue, as Turkey and China established closer economic and diplomatic ties.
That changed in February this year, when Turkey issued the strongest statement in years through its foreign ministry, condemning the use of “concentration camps” by China.
In its unusual rebuke, the foreign ministry called China’s treatment of Uighurs a “shame for humanity.” 

But it said nothing about its own citizens who have been sent to internment camps without charge or who have been missing, in some cases, for more than a year.
In the cases of disappearance confirmed by BuzzFeed News for this article, families said they have contacted the Turkish foreign ministry as well as the presidency, members of parliament, and the Turkish embassy and consulates in China; been assigned case numbers; and been told the ministry is working to find out more information about their missing relatives. 

But they have become distraught. 

After months of begging the Turkish government for information, there have been few responses and no real news on the fates of their children, parents, and siblings. 

Amid constant news reports of detainees facing torture, hunger, and abuse in Chinese internment camps, the lack of information has been terrifying.
The Turkish foreign ministry was asked whether dozens of Turkish nationals had gone missing in China, and if so why it had not said anything about the issue publicly, what Turkey was doing on behalf of the individuals and their families, and to respond to comments from the families that they had heard little from the Turkish authorities. 

The ministry did not comment by the time of this article’s publication.
The Chinese embassy in Turkey also did not respond to a request for comment.

The main street in the Zeytinburnu district of Istanbul, the unofficial center of the city's Uighur diaspora.

Turkey is home to one of the world’s largest Uighur diasporas, with a population of between 20,000 and 50,000 people, according to Uighur community leaders there. 

Uighurs share close cultural, historical, and linguistic ties with Turkish people, and the public there is broadly sympathetic to Uighurs. 

Protests have broken out in Turkey as recently as 2015 over news of mistreatment of Uighurs in China and over forcible repatriation of Uighur migrants.
More recently, there was a public outcry in Turkey after reports in February of the death of Uighur folk musician Abdurehim Heyit, whose music is popular in Turkey. 

It was after this that the Turkish foreign ministry issued its strong statement calling for China to close the camps.
“This tragedy has further reinforced the reaction of the Turkish public opinion towards serious human rights violations committed in the East Turkestan colony,” the statement said.
Heyit later appeared in a video released by Chinese state media saying he was in good health, sparking a Twitter hashtag campaign by overseas Uighurs calling for displays of proof of life for their own family members.
The Uighur community in Turkey has been the heart of the exiled movement for the independence of East Turkestan — the name of the independent state some Uighurs hope to establish as their homeland — since the Communist party took power in China in 1949 and a group of Uighur leaders migrated to Turkey, said Erkin Emet, an associate professor of language at Ankara University who is himself an ethnic Uighur and has researched the history and culture of Uighurs.
“From China’s perspective, Turkey is the most dangerous place for Uighurs,” Emet said, “because of the common culture and history we share with Turks. It is also a place where, unlike in many other Muslim countries, we can easily form political parties and organizations.”
The center of this independence movement, Emet said, is still in Turkey.
Since the early days of its campaign, the Chinese government has specifically targeted Uighurs with links to Muslim countries for detention. 

That has included people who have worked or studied in Muslim countries, or even those who just have relatives living there. 

In particular, China has seized on links to Turkey.
According to the Associated Press, Uighur activists and officials from Syria and China estimate at least 5,000 Uighurs at one time traveled to Syria to fight, many doing so via Turkey. 

China has also said Uighur separatist militants were responsible for a wave of deadly knife and bomb attacks in 2013 and 2014 in East Turkestan and elsewhere in the country. 

But China has targeted millions of Turkic Muslims in its crackdown, the overwhelming majority of whom have no proven links to any extremist cause.
The total number of foreign nationals swept up in the campaign against Muslim minorities, which includes ethnic Kazakhs, is not publicly known. 

Many countries have preferred to advocate for their citizens through quiet diplomacy rather than public advocacy.
Three Australian citizens were released last year after being detained in internment camps. 

Australia is also now working to secure the release of a Uighur Australian baby boy whose father believes he’s at risk of being sent to a state-run orphanage, in a case first reported by BuzzFeed News.
Kazakhstan has remained publicly silent about the plight of ethnic Kazakhs in the region who have been swept up by China’s crackdown, although last August, a Kazakh court ruled against deporting Sayragul Sauytbay — who had worked in an internment camp as a teacher and later fled to Kazakhstan — to China.
BuzzFeed News has shown how Uighurs in countries as far flung as Sweden, Australia, Turkey, and the United States have reported facing harassment and intimidation from Chinese government agents who have contacted them through social media.
Several countries and multinational bodies, including the United States, the United Nations Human Rights Council, and the EU, have publicly condemned the Chinese government’s human rights abuses in the region, but China’s incarceration campaign has not led to any international sanctions.
China does not consider the concentration camps to be a form of criminal punishment. 

Government officials have said they are for "vocational training" and have likened them to “boarding schools,” though escapees from the camps have reported being forcibly taught Chinese language and party propaganda, and subjected to hunger, stress positions, sleep deprivation, and other abuses.
But this puts families of detainees in a difficult spot because it means there is no arrest paperwork, no sentence, and frequently no communication at all from Chinese police. 

It is as if their parents, siblings, or children have simply vanished. 

And it’s unclear whether Chinese authorities have provided Turkish officials with any more information.

Hankiz Kurban and her younger sister Nurbiye Kurban in Istanbul.

Hankiz Kurban was, like her three younger siblings, born and raised in Turkey, but has lived in China on and off for years, trying to make the family’s import and export logistics business a success.
For years the 28-year-old had lived in Urumqi, the regional capital of East Turkestan, with her mother, Amina, and her father, Yahya, to whom she had always been close. 

A quiet, methodical man, 52-year-old Yahya would draw up a to-do list each morning before breakfast. 

Because they planned to keep working in China, he was careful, Hankiz said. 

He forbade her from getting involved in political causes, even in Turkey. 

She went to a Uighur cultural event once when she was younger, and he scolded her.
Hankiz started taking Chinese lessons, hoping it would make it easier to work with business partners in China.

In 2017, she started hearing rumors of people who were disappearing. 

Friends and neighbors told her about fathers and brothers who were taken away by police in the middle of the night.
Hankiz started to worry, but her father was unfazed. 

After all, they were Turkish citizens, staying legally in China. 

They paid taxes. 

They had taken care to do everything aboveboard.
When Hankiz’s visa expired, she returned to Turkey to renew it. 

This was already unusual, she said — in the past she could have done this within China. 

While she was in Turkey, what she had feared the most happened. 

Both of her parents were detained. 

She found out through a final voice message from her mother. 

“They’re taking us away,” she said in the message. 

“Contact the embassy.”
“That was when our hell began,” Hankiz said.
Yahya and Amina Kurban were not the only family members to disappear. 

Hankiz’s uncle, Mehmet Emin Nasir, 39, disappeared in Kashgar, a city in southern East Turkestan, on September 9, 2017.
“We never thought this would last so long. We thought that as a Turkish citizen, sooner or later he’d be released,” Muyesser Temel, Nasir’s sister and Hankiz’s aunt, said as she sat in a yellow armchair at her family’s home in the immigrant-heavy neighborhood of Zeytinburnu, where much of Istanbul’s Uighur community lives in apartment blocks. 

“At the beginning I wasn’t scared, but as time passed I realized this was serious.”
Temel first heard that Nasir was taken away by police from her mother, who had gotten a phone call from relatives in East Turkestan. 

Nasir, who ran a shop that sold curtains, was living in Kashgar with his wife and four children at the time. 

He held a Turkish passport, but unlike many other Turkish Uighurs, he wanted to live in his homeland. 

His wife never sought Turkish citizenship because the family was settled in East Turkestan.
Temel said she reached out to the Turkish foreign ministry through repeated phone calls for months since she discovered her brother had been taken away. 

“They tell us they’re in touch with Chinese authorities, but we have no proof of it,” she said. 

“They just tell us on the phone they are dealing with this, but there’s no evidence.”
“We trust above everything our country, Turkey,” she said. 

“But nothing has come out of this. We have exhausted all of our options.”
Both women, and other individuals interviewed for this article, said they had received few signals from the Turkish foreign ministry about the status of their families, even when Turkish officials promised to help.
Even Turkish children have not been spared from China’s crackdown.
Pashahan Kuçar, 75, has two young grandchildren. 

Both Turkish citizens who were traveling on their mother’s Chinese passport, they have disappeared in East Turkestan along with their mother, Kuçar's daughter-in-law. 

According to their identification records, which her family provided to BuzzFeed News, Kuçar's granddaughter is 7 and her grandson has recently turned 6. 

When their mother was taken away to an internment camp, the children were left alone. 

A neighbor took them in and explained the situation to Kuçar's family by text. 

But not long after, the neighbor stopped responding to messages. 

Kuçar hasn’t heard from her grandchildren in months.
Though Kuçar can barely walk and suffers from several health conditions, she has relentlessly campaigned for the release of her family. 

In Turkey’s capital, Ankara, she has protested outside the presidential palace on a mobility scooter, draped in the light blue flag of East Turkestan. 

She has met with Turkish foreign ministry officials, but they’ve given her no clues about where her grandchildren are or whether Turkish diplomats have been able to contact them.

Pashahan Kuçar

In a way, Temel, the woman whose home is in Zeytinburnu, counts her missing brother among the lucky. 

The fact that he holds Turkish citizenship means at least she can expect Turkish authorities to help.
“You cannot find a family in this neighborhood that does not have family in the camps,” she said. “The internet is blocked over there; there’s no way to contact them — if my mother had not gotten that call we would simply not know.”
Hankiz Kurban, the 28-year-old who once dreamed of building a business in China with her father, has tried everything to find news on her missing parents. 

She reported the matter to Turkish authorities and received a case number in an automated email. 

She began calling the Turkish Embassy in Beijing every other day — so much that officials started to hang up when they heard her voice.
She lies awake at night obsessing about what might be happening to her father and mother. 

She tried taking medication for her anxiety and depression, but it just made her feel sleepy and fuzzy. What she can’t figure out is how her father, who all his life eschewed political causes so as not to get on the wrong side of the government, could have been targeted.
Two years ago in Ghulja, interrogators asked the young businessman detained at the airport in China the same questions about his politics and connections over and over again, searching for evidence of his connections to extremist groups. 

There were two interrogators, he said, one Han Chinese — China’s largest ethnic group — and the other Uighur, both fluent in the Uighur language.
One day they demanded his social media passwords — to Facebook, WhatsApp, and the Chinese messaging app QQ. 

They found a post he had shared on Facebook showing both the Turkish flag and the flag for East Turkestan. 

That day they became certain, he said, that he was a threat. 

It was like they had discovered a smoking gun.
Another day they asked him to list his contacts in Istanbul, to tell them which Uighur restaurants he frequented. 

He gave a list of made-up names, he said. 

But the pair of interrogators knew the Uighur community in Turkey well.
Unlike many Uighurs in Istanbul, the businessman didn’t live in Zeytinburnu. 

His interrogators knew the neighborhood’s shops and alleyways better than he did.
In the days before his departure, one of his interrogators mentioned he’d be traveling to Turkey in a few months. 

“If you see us in Istanbul,” he said, “will you welcome us?” ●

Turkey urges China to respect religious freedom in East Turkestan

China must respect human rights of Muslims, including freedom of religion, Turkish FM says.

al jazeera
China must learn to distinguish between terrorists and innocent people, Mevlut Cavusoglu said.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has voiced concern over China's mistreatment of Uighur and other Muslims in its East Turkestan colony and called on Beijing to protect freedom of religion there.
The United Nations Human Rights Council opened its annual four-week session on Monday as Western countries are looking to Turkey and other members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to spotlight what China calls "re-education and training" facilities in East Turkestan.
UN experts and activists say the camps hold one million Uighurs, who speak a Turkic language, and other Muslim minorities. 

China has denied accusations of mistreatment and deems criticism within the UN council to be interference in its sovereignty.
In his remarks, Cavusoglu did not specifically mention mass detention camps in the remote western colony of China.
However, he told the Geneva forum that reports of human rights violations against Uighurs and other Muslims in East Turkestan were serious cause for concern.

'Distinction needed'
A distinction should be made between "terrorists and innocent people", Cavusoglu said.
"We encourage Chinese authorities and expect that universal human rights, including freedom of religion, are respected and full protection of the cultural identities of the Uighurs and other Muslims is ensured," Cavusoglu said.
China, a member of the 47-member Human Rights Council, did not immediately respond to the Turkish foreign minister's remarks, but delegations will be free to reply later in the session.
East Turkestan has been enveloped in a suffocating blanket of security for years, particularly since a deadly anti-government riot broke out in the regional capital, Urumqi, in 2009.
The roughly 10 million Uighurs make up a tiny proportion of China's almost 1.4 billion people and there has never been an uprising that could challenge the central government's overwhelming might.

Turkey condemned China's treatment of Uighur people as "a great embarrassment for humanity"

Ankara calls for UN to act on ‘human tragedy’ of the Turkic-speaking minority in China's East Turkestan colony
Agence-France Presse

People protest at a pro-Uighur rally outside UN headquarters in New York. 

Turkey has condemned China’s treatment of its Muslim ethnic Uighur people as “a great embarrassment for humanity”, adding to rights groups’ recent criticism over mass detentions of the Turkic-speaking minority.
“The systematic assimilation policy of Chinese authorities towards Uighur Turks is a great embarrassment for humanity,” Turkish foreign ministry spokesman Hami Aksoy said in a statement.

Aksoy also said Turkey had learned of the tragic death in custody on Saturday of Uighur poet and musician Abdurehim Heyit.
“We’ve learned with great sorrow that dignified poet Abdurehim Heyit, who was sentenced to eight years in prison for his compositions, died in the second year of his imprisonment,” he said.
“This tragic incident has further strengthened the Turkish public’s reaction to the serious human rights violations in East Turkestan region.”
The East Turkestan colony of China, where most Uighurs live, has been under heavy police surveillance in recent years, after violent inter-ethnic tensions.
Nearly one million Uighurs and other Turkic language-speaking minorities in China have been held in concentration camps, according to a UN panel of experts.
Beijing says the “vocational education centres” help people steer clear of terrorism and allow them to be reintegrated into society.
But critics say China is seeking to assimilate East Turkestan’s minority population and suppress religious and cultural practices that conflict with communist ideology and the dominant Han culture.
“It is no longer a secret that more than one million Uighur Turks – who are exposed to arbitrary arrests – are subjected to torture and political brainwashing in concentration centres and prisons,” Aksoy said in the Turkish foreign ministry statement.
“Uighurs who are not detained in the camps are also under great pressure,” he added.
Turkey called on the international community and the UN secretary general, António Guterres, “to take effective steps to end the human tragedy in East Turkestan colony”.
Most mainly Muslim countries have not been vocal on the issue, not criticising the government in China, which is an important trading partner.

'We can reach you wherever you are': Uighurs abroad feel China’s reach

China’s security services are pressing members of the country’s Uighur minority abroad to spy on compatriots when abroad, including in Nato and Western countries
By Borzou Daragahi in Istanbul

Eysa thought he had finally escaped the shadowy Chinese security services that had pressed him into serving as a spy against his own community and turned his life in East Turkestan province into a living hell for three years.
He had moved himself and his family to Turkey, and begun to carve a new life out for himself among the ethnic Uighur Muslims seeking refuge in a country with a language and religion similar to his own.
Then the 36-year-old began receiving messages on his phone from Qurban, the state security official who had detained him, pressed him into collaborating with the Chinese services, and then sought to throw him to the wolves when he had proven himself useless.
“Eysa,” his interrogator begins, in one of several recordings he retained on his phone and plays for The Independent. 
“You think you’re safe in Turkey. But what about your brothers and in-laws?”
Eysa, a 36-year-old ethnic Uighur, was blackmailed into spying for the Chinese intelligence services.

Human rights advocates in recent years have raised alarms about the treatment of China’s Uighur minority, a Turkic language-speaking, mostly Muslim population concentrated in the nation’s western East Turkestan colony.
The UN in August voiced concern that perhaps a million Uighurs were being held in conditions resembling a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy”.
But increasingly, say members of the community, security professionals and scholars, the crackdown on Uighurs is extending across the globe, with Chinese operatives threatening to silence, intimidate and blackmail those who make it abroad.
In addition to Istanbul, experts close to the Uighurs living abroad say the Chinese security forces are seeking to infiltrate, recruit spies, and threaten members of the ethnic group in Munich, Frankfurt, Stockholm, Oslo and Helsinki.
The goal is to pressure Uighurs into serving as intelligence assets when they’re abroad, as well as to sow friction and mistrust among members of the ethnic group seeking refuge abroad. 
“Just the fact of being able to travel abroad and coming back home puts them under suspicion,” says Rune Steenberg, an expert on China’s Uighur minority.
“It destroys the community.”
Inspired by his time studying linguistics at the University of Kansas on a Ford Foundation scholarship, Abduweli Ayup returned to China and launched a preschool for kids, teaching in English, Chinese, as well as Uighur.
It became enormously popular, with East Turkestan’s elite enrolling their kids.
But the scholar’s project raised the suspicion of the authorities, who warned him to shut down his school, and in 2013 arrested him when he refused.
He spent 15 agonising months in prison, where he was subject to torture and sexual assault. 
“My life was full of humiliation and full of torture,” says Ayup.
“From eight in the morning until six in the evening they interrogated me in the interrogation room,” he continues.
“Those officials get tired and go home. That’s when the problems start. Then I am humiliated and tortured in the detention cell. They insult me, and my sex. It’s very hard for me as a man. Those guys did sexually attack me.”
In addition to prisons, Beijing authorities have set up a network of “re-education camps” where Uighurs are taught about the dangers of Islam and the superiority of Chinese culture and the Communist Party ideology over their own customs.
Abdursalam Mohammed, 40, spent weeks in a Chinese re-education camp.

“From very early in the morning we wake up and are forced to run for an hour, and then breakfast, and then four hours of classes, and then fours in the afternoon and then classes until 10pm,” says Abdursalam Mohammed, a 40-year-old cook from the East Turkestan city of Hotan.
He fled China in late 2016 after spending seven weeks at a re-education camp.
A draconian system of checkpoints makes life unbearable even outside the camps.
Loudspeakers affixed to utility poles suddenly announce mandatory ideological indoctrination classes in villages and neighbourhoods.
“When you hear the voice on the loudspeaker, you know you have to run to the meetings,” says Mohammed, now residing in Istanbul.
An elderly man stands near a mosque in China’s East Turkestan colony.

Eysa’s entanglement with China’s security services began on 23 October 2015, after he returned with his family from a trip to Turkey.
He was detained on arrival at the Urumqi Diwopu International Airport, shackled, had his jacket pulled over his head, and whisked away to an army base where he was held for two days, and then taken to an encampment which belonged to the East Turkestan Production and Construction Corps, a government paramilitary organisation, for six weeks.
During hours-long interrogations, he was accused of contacting separatist groups while in Turkey and Malaysia.
He explained that he travelled abroad only to purchase soaps, spices, and herbs for his shop.
The Chinese had other plans for him.
His interrogator, Qurban, played the good cop.
“He told me, ‘Yes, I know you are innocent,’” Eysa, whose last name is being withheld for security reasons, recalls.
“‘But the problem is we need someone to work with us.’ He told me, ‘If you want to keep running your business, and traveling abroad, you have to spy for us on other Uighurs.’”
China’s ethnic Han-dominated society and Communist Party has long looked suspiciously upon the Uighurs, a Sunni Muslim minority with strong ethnic and cultural ties to Turkey and Central Asia. Chinese central government repression of Uighurs escalated dramatically with a series of attacks claimed by Islamists and separatists that began in the 1990s, with tensions exacerbated by the arrival of Han Chinese seeking economic opportunities in the undeveloped region.
On 22 May 2014, men in two vehicles began hurling explosives at shoppers in a busy street in Urumqi before blowing themselves up, killing 43 people and injuring nearly 100, prompting a ferocious and unprecedented clampdown by security forces.
An Uighur man looks on as a truck carrying paramilitary policemen travels along a street during an anti-terrorism oath-taking rally in Urumqi, East Turkestan.

Chinese officials have been struggling hard to keep stories about East Turkestan under wraps, and to control the activities of even those Uighurs living abroad.
The Chinese intelligence services have long pressured or recruited Chinese citizens studying abroad as assets or informants, but that the Uighur infiltration is far more pervasive.
“It goes further with Uighurs and goes beyond students,” says Michael Dillon, a Sinologist and historian.
He spent years traveling in and out of China’s East Turkestan colony for research.
Steenberg says he’s spoken repeatedly to Uighurs who’ve been offered benefits or money to keep an eye on the communities, with initial approaches sometimes disguised as innocuous requests for help. 
“The recruitment as a spy is often a slow and sneaking process, and not an overt one,” says Steenberg.
Eysa says he agreed to spy, but only to get his passport back so he could continue to travel to Turkey for business.
He says he didn’t really know many Uighurs abroad and none that were up to nefarious activities or attached to separatist or violent groups.

He was arrested again a little more than a year later after arriving back from a trip to Turkey.
Qurban got him released, but he was summoned by police again on 18 March 2017, and taken to a detention camp.
His relatives were also arrested.
This time, the conditions were harsher and filthier, and Eysa was subject to grueling interrogations. They accused him of failing to come up with any intelligence while abroad.
“They said, ‘You didn’t do anything for us,’” he recalls.
Qurban had him released again, with the stipulation that he would attend a re-education workshop for a day and try harder to gather intelligence next time he was abroad.
He left again for Turkey in June 2017.
Eysa, a Chinese ethnic Uighur, with his child at their home in Istanbul.

But Qurban had seriously misread Eysa.
Instead of spying, he moved to Turkey permanently, refused to go back home, and then began writing about his experiences at the hands of the Chinese authorities in social media posts that went viral. That’s when the phone messages started.
“I helped you to get your passport and got you out of prison twice and you didn’t do anything for us,” Qurban said in a message sent in May.
“Yes, you are in Turkey,” he said in June.
“But your brother, brother-in-law, and father-in-law are in our hands. If we torture them it’s on you. Think about that. We are very powerful and we can reach you wherever you are.”

China is putting Uighur children of living parents in ‘orphanages’
China’s Uighur minority shackled by technology as thousands detained

China ‘bans’ Muslims from fasting during Ramadan

After years of allowing Uighurs relatively free travel abroad, Chinese authorities have severely restricted them from leaving since around the summer of 2017, in what scholars believe is an attempt to keep the lid on stories they might tell about the ongoing repression inside East Turkestan.
“When people are working abroad, they are told they have to return or they will lose their properties,” says Steenberg.
“They’re told, ‘You musn’t say anything bad, or terrible will things will happen to your family.’”
Ayup, who serves informally as a community leader for Uighurs in Turkey, says he’s repeatedly been in touch with other members of the community who’ve been harassed by Chinese security officials, even from abroad.
During one video chat, the Chinese enforcer put an Uighur man’s terrified, elderly parents on the screen and demanded he spy on fellow Uighurs in Turkey, note addresses, their connections to each other, sources of income, names and activities of civic groups, and the locations and actions of former detainees.
“They told him he has to work for them,” recalls Ayup. 
“Otherwise they will put his mother and father in jail. ‘If you work for us you can live freely. If you don’t, we’ll put your parents into jail. If you love your parents you are a patriot. If you don’t, we will put them in a detention centre.’”
People from the Uighur community living in Turkey carry flags of East Turkestan, during a protest in Istanbul on 6 November 2018 against oppression by the Chinese government to Muslim Uighurs in the far-western East Turkestan colony. 

The heavy-handed measures against the Uighurs may wind up backfiring.
Instead of targeting terrorist networks, Chinese authorities are “going after the whole thing”, says Steenberg, engendering a global revulsion.
“It’s really a paranoia on the side of Chinese state,” he says.
“They didn’t know what they were up against and they panicked.”
The repression is coupled with uneven economic development in the East Turkestan colony that has benefited newly arriving Han businesspeople more than Uighurs, who have been displaced from local governance and lost out on contracts, exacerbating grievances and feeding the potential for a violent reaction.
“The Chinese government forces us to take action,” says Mohammed.
“They arrest my brothers and sisters. They don’t allow me to read what I want, think what I want. These things force us to act.”

Western nations condemn China at UN for repression of Muslims

By NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE
Uyghurs people demonstrate against China during the Universal Periodic Review of China by the Human Rights Council, walking to the place des Nations in front of the European headquarters of the United Nations, in Geneva, Switzerland, Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2018.

Canada has publicly accused China of repressing Muslims amid a “deterioration of human rights” in the world’s second largest economy.
China must “end prosecution and persecution on the basis of religion or belief,” Tamara Mawhinney, Canada’s deputy permanent representative to the United Nations, said Tuesday as China was subjected to a rare moment of global scrutiny before the UN Human Rights Council, which examines each country’s treatment of its people every five years.
Ms. Mawhinney called on Beijing to “release Uyghurs and other Muslims who have been detained arbitrarily and without due process for their ethnicity or religion.” 

Canada, she said, is “deeply concerned by credible reports of the mass detention, repression and surveillance of Uyghurs and other Muslims in East Turkestan,” referring to the region in western China where, western scholars have estimated, hundreds of thousands of Muslims have been incarcerated in centres for political indoctrination.
The U.S., too, on Tuesday urged China to “abolish all forms of arbitrary detention, including internment camps in East Turkestan.”
The public censure marked a new step in the international condemnation of Chinese conduct in what Beijing calls an “anti-extremism” campaign.
But criticism levelled by a smattering of democratic nations — Croatia, Japan and Switzerland among them — was all but drowned out by a chorus of flattery for Beijing.
More than 150 countries signed up to speak on Tuesday, and dozens of them — authoritarian regimes from Africa, Asia, Europe and South America — used their allotted 45 seconds to compliment China for fighting poverty, combatting corruption, encouraging entrepreneurship, responding to climate change, reducing smog, expanding forests, opposing double standards in human rights, imposing low tariffs on imports, providing radio broadcast coverage to virtually its entire population and penning a “high-quality” report on its own human rights.
China has cited separatist groups as a security threat in East Turkestan, where Beijing has in recent years built a network of concentration camps for political indoctrination amid an intensive campaign against what it calls "extremism".
Inside such camps, authorities force the disavowal of religion and recitation of loyalty to the Communist Party and Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, former detainees have said.
Residents of the region say fears of detention without trial are so widespread that religious observance has largely been halted in a region that makes up one-sixth of the Chinese landmass.
But even among Muslim nations, China received little criticism Tuesday, underscoring the influence China has amassed as the world’s second-largest economy, and an increasingly important global source of trade, foreign investment and aid.
Indonesia commended “China’s strategic approach” to ensuring the “well-being of its population.” 
Malaysia pointed to China’s “many achievements in human rights.” 
Kuwait suggested Beijing focus “on the prevention of juvenile delinquency to ensure minors’ physical and psychological health.” 
Saudi Arabia recommended China “continue friendly exchanges in the field of cultural and religious issues.” 
Syria urged China to counter “extremist religious movements and continue its struggle against terrorism and separatism.” 
Pakistan said China should “continue its efforts to maintain and promote peace and stability.”
The upbeat assessment is ”partially a reflection of China's economic clout amongst these countries, but also its leadership role amongst countries that are actively trying to undermine human rights standards,” said Frances Eve, a researcher with the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders.
Among Muslim nations, only Turkey spoke out strongly against Chinese practices that involve “restrictions on basic rights and liberties, like confinement of individuals without any legal grounds, and their separation from families and society.”
More forceful denunciations of China’s conduct came largely from western nations.
Switzerland said it is “concerned about repression” and demanded the closure of what it termed “re-education centres” in East Turkestan.
France called on Beijing to “put an end to mass internment in camps” and guarantee freedom of religion.
Germany said China should ”end all unlawful detention, including unconstitutional mass detention of Uyghurs and other Muslims in East Turkestan.”
“Despite China’s best efforts — through propaganda and platitudes — to reduce the [UN review] to fawning adulation, numerous states expressed serious concerns,” said Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch.

Mahathir puts Uighur rights above China ties

Malaysian leader's move to send ethnic Uighur Muslim detainees to Turkey defied Chinese extradition requests
By NILE BOWIE

Ethnic Uighurs take part in a protest march asking the European Union to call upon China to respect human rights in East Turkestan and the closure of "re-education centers" where Uighurs are massively detained, during a march in Brussels, April 27, 2018. 

China and Malaysia’s relations are set for a new test after the Muslim-majority country freed 11 ethnic Uighur Muslim detainees it held on humanitarian grounds, ignoring a months-old request from Beijing for their repatriation on security grounds. 

The detainees had been charged with illegally entering Malaysia after escaping a jail in Thailand last November.
Malaysian prosecutors dropped charges against the Uighurs, a Turkic language-speaking Muslim ethnic minority indigenous to China’s East Turkestan colony. 

Last week they were allowed to travel to Turkey, where thousands have fled to seek asylum from Chinese persecution and are welcomed by Turkish nationalists who regard them as kin.
The Uighur detainees had been imprisoned in Thailand since 2014 and were ordered to remain in custody until their nationalities could be proven, a situation complicated by the fact that both China and Turkey claim them as their citizens. 

Twenty prisoners staged a jailbreak last year using blankets to scale barbed-wire fences, with some crossing into neighboring Malaysia.
“They have done nothing wrong in this country, so they are released,” Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad told reporters in his first public comments on the issue since charges against the Uighur detainees were withdrawn. 

A statement by China’s Foreign Ministry, however, took a hard diplomatic line against the decision.
“These people are all Chinese nationals. We resolutely oppose them being deported to a third country,” said the statement, which expressed hope that Malaysia would “attach great importance” to its concerns. 

Beijing has been vigorous in its attempts to persuade foreign governments to extradite ethnic Uighurs it believes pose a security threat.

Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad speaks during a press conference at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, August 20, 2018. 

The Chinese government has overseen a massive security crackdown in East Turkestan in recent years, imposing sweeping restrictions on Islamic practices in a bid to eliminate Islam. 

It accuses armed Uighur separatists of plotting unrest and carrying out stabbing and bomb attacks that have killed hundreds of China’s ethnic Han majority.
Sources cited in a Reuters report earlier this year claimed Malaysia had been under “great pressure” to deport the Uighurs to China rather than to Thailand. 

Western foreign missions and human rights groups later tried to dissuade authorities from handing the Uighurs to Beijing over fears they would be persecuted if returned.
Former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak’s administration fulfilled Beijing’s extradition requests for Uighurs. 

Biometric information provided by Beijing enabled the arrests of 29 Uighurs in Malaysia since 2011, all of whom were deported to China, including six who were repatriated in 2012 despite having pending refugee status applications.
Human Rights Watch, a rights lobby, had called on the then Malaysian government to provide the 11 Uighurs with access to refugee status determination proceedings. 

The US State Department echoed those calls, urging Malaysia to provide temporary protection for the detainees while their eligibility for refugee protection was determined.
Malaysia had been in talks with Thai authorities over the fate of the detained Uighurs, though it never reached a resolution. 

Analysts believed Malaysia would eventually comply with China’s extradition requests, as it has in the past to maintain and deepen already robust economic and security ties.

Police watch as Uighur Muslims leave the Id Kah Mosque after prayers in the old town of Kashgar in East Turkestan.

Prior to his defeat at the ballot box in May’s general election, Najib relied on China’s economic largesse as a political life raft. 

Despite being a relatively minor recipient of Chinese investment up until 2012, Malaysia became one of the top investment destinations for projects linked to China’s US$1 trillion Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) under Najib’s watch.
Malaysia’s new Mahathir-led government has taken a significantly more independent stance toward China, making the recalibration of ties with Beijing a key foreign policy priority. 

Since taking office in May, his administration has cancelled or deferred some US$23 billion worth of projects awarded to Chinese companies by the previous government.
Though Mahathir has moved to reset the terms for dealing with China, his administration has consistently signaled his broad support for BRI and Chinese investment. 

Chinese state media has in recent months been relatively cautious in its response to Mahathir’s rebalancing efforts and has appeared careful not to criticize Malaysia’s new administration.
Indeed, Beijing has shown patience and a certain willingness to entertain valid criticism of mega-projects that Mahathir had cautioned against on grounds of safeguarding national sovereignty. 

Some analysts, however, believe Malaysia’s open defiance of China’s request to extradite asylum-seeking Uighurs could be a bridge too far for Beijing.
“China’s Foreign Ministry has said it ‘resolutely’ opposed the move, a sparingly used term normally reserved for core interest issues such as Taiwan or the South China Sea,” said Shahriman Lockman, a senior analyst at the Institute of Strategic & International Studies in Malaysia.

The United Nations has cited harrowing reports about Uighur detention centers in China. 

“There’s good reason to expect China to impose certain costs on Malaysia, if for no other reason than to warn other countries to comply with China’s wishes on the extradition of Uighurs,” said the analyst, who believes deporting the Uighurs to China would have been “untenable” for the government given strong civil society support for the detainees.
“Muslim and human rights NGOs were instrumental in lobbying the government to release the 11 Uighurs to Turkey. Malaysia has strongly advocated for Muslim communities around the world — the Palestinians and Myanmar’s ethnic Rohingya minority in particular,” he said. 

“But we shouldn’t pretend that it hasn’t been selective at times.”
Under Mahathir, who served previously as premier from 1981 to 2003, Malaysia had been “noticeably mute” during Russia’s 1990s military campaign in Chechnya, said the analyst. 

“I don’t expect Malaysia to be particularly vocal on the Uighurs given the importance of the relationship with China. It will just do what’s needed to placate domestic pressures on the issue.”
While it remains to be seen whether Mahathir’s latest defiance of China will spiral into a full diplomatic tiff, Chinese state media has so far been quiescent on the move, pointing fingers instead at Western politicians and media for setting off “a wave of anti-China” rhetoric over Beijing’s human rights abuses in East Turkestan.

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed (L) and Li Keqiang at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, August 20, 2018. 

In August, a United Nations committee said it had received credible reports that up to a million ethnic minority Uighurs and other Muslims were being held in Chinese concentration camps and subject to political indoctrination.

Beijing refers to the sites as “vocational training centers”, where those accused of minor criminal misdemeanors receive reformative training.
China denies the arbitrary detainment or ill-treatment of its citizens, though has refused to release statistics on how many Uighurs and other Muslims have been detained in East Turkestan. 

Experts have characterized Beijing’s efforts to impose political and social control in the colony as a campaign of assimilation aimed at erasing Uighur culture and identity.