Muslim Solidarity

A Critic of China’s Concentration Camps Says His Family Faces Deportation From Turkey

By DAKE KANG

In this Aug. 25, 2018, photo, Omir Bekali, right, an outspoken critic of China's internment camps for Muslims, poses for a picture with his children Aisha, left, and Ibrahim in a cafe in Istanbul. 

An outspoken critic of China’s concentration camps who now lives in Istanbul says his wife and son face deportation to China because Turkish authorities might bar them from entering the country.
Omir Bekali, a Kazakh national, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that Turkish authorities are holding his wife and 2-year-old son at the airport in Istanbul and are accusing them of using fake passports.
“My family has been split in two,” he said by phone from the airport. 

“They didn’t let me see her. I’ve been waiting here. My heart is hurting.”
Bekali was among the first to speak publicly about the ordeal he endured in new indoctrination camps in China’s East Turkestan colony — camps that China denies exist.
Bekali told The AP in a report in May that he and dozens of other Muslim minority Kazakh as well as Uighur detainees were held in camps for months and forced to disavow their Islamic beliefs, criticize themselves and their loved ones and give thanks to the ruling Communist Party.
The camps are estimated to hold upward of 1 million people and reports about them have drawn growing criticism of China from the U.N. and the U.S. 

The U.S. is considering sanctioning Chinese officials responsible for the stifling security crackdown in the region.
Bekali returned to Kazakhstan after being released from detention but moved to Turkey earlier this year, fearing for his safety. 

His wife, Ruxianguli Taximaimaiti, 45, a Chinese ethnic minority Uighur, and their youngest son Mukhamad Bekali were to join him in Istanbul this week.
They arrived in Istanbul on a plane from Almaty on Sunday night. 

Bekali, who had been waiting for them at the airport, got a call from his wife telling him that border police weren’t letting them into the country.
Turkish airport authorities accused his wife and son of holding fake passports, Bekali said, and had earlier booked them on a flight back to Kazakhstan, where she no longer has a valid visa that would allow her to stay.
“I’d rather die here in Turkey then go back,” she had told Bekali at the time.
It was not immediately clear if they boarded any flights. 

Attempts to reach Turkish airport police for comment on Monday were unsuccessful.
If they are sent back to Kazakhstan, Bekali said, authorities in that country would likely deport his wife back to China where she could be punished for his criticism of the indoctrination camps, leaving nobody to take care of his son.
East Turkestan, the tense colony where most Uighurs live, has been enveloped in recent years in a vast dragnet of police surveillance which authorities insist is needed to root out separatism and Islamic extremism.
Critics of China’s policies in the region and the harsh restrictions imposed on Uighurs and Kazakhs have been punished severely. 

Zhang Haitao, a Han Chinese electronics salesman who complained online about the treatment of Uighurs, was sentenced to 19 years in prison in 2016.
Prominent Uighur scholar Ilham Tohti, a moderate critic of the government’s policies in the region, was handed a life sentence in 2014 on charges of fanning ethnic hatred.
Bekali said the uncertainty over his wife and son’s fate had reignited a persistent anxiety he had about China and the detention he had left behind.
“I feel like I’m a thief, hiding and sneaking around. The pressure is enormous,” Bekali said. 

“I can’t live like an ordinary person. We have no way to live safely in the 21st century.”

Rogue Nation

China's crackdown on Uighurs spreads to even mild critics
By GERRY SHIH
In this photo taken early Dec 27, 2017 and released by China Aid, Li Aijie poses for a photo with one of two photos she has of her husband Zhang Haitao after authorities confiscate her electronic devices after arriving in the U.S. in Midland, Texas. Li is seeking political asylum in the U.S. Zhang who was sentenced to 19 years in prison had been a rare voice in China, a member of the Han ethnic majority and salesman by day who complained on social media about government policies he said were unfair to Muslim minority Uighurs. 

Zhang Haitao was a rare voice in China, a member of the ethnic Han majority who for years had criticized the government on social media for its treatment of the minority Muslim Uighurs.
Zhang's wife had long feared some sort of backlash despite her husband's relative obscurity. 

He was a working-class electronics salesman, unknown even to most Uighur activists. 

So she worried that authorities might block his social media accounts, or maybe detain him. 

Instead he was arrested and prosecuted for subversion and espionage. 

His punishment: 19 years in prison.
"They wanted to make an example of him, to scare anyone who might question what they do in the name of security," Zhang's wife, Li Aijie, told The Associated Press earlier this week, one day after she arrived in the United States and asked for political asylum. 

"Even someone who knows nothing about law would know that his punishment made no sense."
Elsewhere in China, Zhang would have been sentenced to no more than three years, said his lawyer, Li Dunyong, and may not have been prosecuted at all.
But East Turkestan, the tense northwestern region where most Uighurs live, has been enveloped in recent years in a vast dragnet of police surveillance, which authorities insist is needed to root out separatism and Islamic extremism. 

Zhang, who moved to East Turkestan from central Henan province more than a decade ago in search of work, wondered in his social media posts whether these policies were stoking resentment among Uighurs. 

He warned that China's restrictions on the Uighurs' religious practices risked sparking an insurgency.
But questioning government policies in Xinjiang has become an untouchable third rail in today's China.
Court records say Zhang was convicted of sending 274 posts from 2010 to 2015 on Twitter and the Chinese social media service WeChat that "resisted, attacked and smeared" the Communist Party and its policies, earning him 15 years in prison for inciting subversion of state power. 

He was given another five years for talking to foreign reporters and providing photos of the intense police presence in the streets of Xinjiang. 

That, the court said, amounted to providing intelligence about China's anti-terror efforts to foreign organizations.
The court said it would combine the two punishments and sentence him to 19 years in prison.
He was convicted in January 2016. 

An appeals court in December 2016 refused to hear his petition, noting he had never expressed regret or admitted guilt.

Hoping to draw attention to Zhang's plight, Li provided her husband's court documents and letters from jail to the AP, as well as her own account.

The daughter of a farming family in Henan's hardscrabble hill country, Li met Zhang in 2011 after stumbling across a personal ad he had arranged to have placed in a local park where singles sought partners. 

The flier said he sold wireless routers and listed his modest height: 168 centimeters (5-foot-6). 

On their first date, when Zhang was back home in Henan, he wore a jacket with threadbare cuffs but showed Li his identity card in an awkward attempt to prove he was genuine.
That simple directness was something she grew to love, Li said, but it was also Zhang's downfall. 

He had been repeatedly warned by police about his social media activity, but he always ignored them.
When the authorities finally arrested him in 2015, they told Li he was suspected of inciting ethnic hatred. 

The charges were raised to subversion and espionage, Li suspects, after he refused to confess. 

In a letter he wrote to Li and his sister earlier this year, Zhang described how Nelson Mandela, who spent nearly three decades in prison, had become an inspiration.
"Life must have greater meaning beyond the material. Our mouths are not just for eating, but also for speaking out," Zhang wrote.
While the severity of Zhang's sentence stands out, others in the region have been punished for mild criticism.
Ma Like, a Muslim hostel owner in the ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar, was accused in April of "propagating extremism" because he had retweeted two Weibo posts — one about how Chinese policies were alienating Uighurs, the other a veiled reference to restrictions on the Islamic headdress — according to two of Ma's friends, who provided copies of Ma's indictment and spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of government retaliation.
The prominent Uighur scholar Ilham Tohti was handed a life sentence in 2014 on charges of fanning ethnic hatred, advocating violence and instigating terror on a website he ran. 

He, too, was known as a moderate who argued against Uighur separatism and stressed the need for dialogue.
But when it comes to East Turkestan, calling for public debate amounts to an intolerable act of defiance, said Wang Lixiong, a Han Chinese writer and dissident.
"The government removes the middle road so it leaves two extremes," Wang said. 

"You're either their mortal enemy or their slave."
Zhang was arrested when Li was three months pregnant. 

She gave birth to their son two years ago, while he was being held in a desert prison. 

She returned home to Henan to raise him and began blogging and speaking to the overseas media.
The authorities tried to silence Li, pounding on her front door as she did a phone interview, for example, and threatening to derail the careers of her two brothers, low-level government workers.
Li's family begged her to divorce Zhang, even give up their child.
When words didn't sway her, in October her siblings and parents beat her, leaving her bruised on the family home's floor.
"I cannot hate them," Li said. 

"They were trying to resist enormous pressure. But after that, I had nowhere to go."
A month ago, she sneaked away and made her way to Bangkok. 

With the help of the U.S.-based organization China Aid, she flew to Texas, where a host family had been found for her, and where she hopes to start a new life with her son.
When she files her asylum paperwork, she lists the boy's legal name.
But in quiet moments, she calls him by his nickname: Xiao Man De La.

"Little Mandela."

Freedom Fighter

He Called Xi Jinping ‘Xitler’ on Twitter. Now He Faces Prison.

By CHRIS BUCKLEY

BEIJING — From his hometown in northeast China, Kwon Pyong used the internet to mock and criticize the nation’s rulers, including posting a selfie in which he wore a T-shirt that likened Xi Jinping to Hitler.
But Mr. Kwon, an ethnic Korean who studied in America, disappeared into police custody last September, soon after he shared on Twitter a picture of the T-shirt featuring scabrous names for Mr. Xi, including “Xitler.” 

And on Wednesday Mr. Kwon faced trial on a charge of “inciting subversion,” said his two former defense lawyers, who were abruptly dismissed from the case days before the trial.
Mr. Kwon’s fate showed that even crude online posts about China’s rulers can lead to a prison term these days, Liang Xiaojun, one of the dismissed lawyers, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. The Communist Party authorities are especially sensitive about protecting Xi's image, and comparisons with the Nazi dictator seem sure to anger them.

“Before, there were cases of people like Liu Xiaobo tried for subversion for long commentaries and essays, but now even short comments on Weibo and Twitter can be treated as inciting subversion of state power,” Mr. Liang said. 

“That point is a change from before. There are other cases like it, including ones that haven’t come to trial yet.”

Weibo is China’s equivalent of Twitter, a popular platform for short comments shared with followers.
But Mr. Kwon, 28, mostly aired his views on Twitter and Facebook, which are both inaccessible in China, except for people with the knowledge and tools to burrow under a wall of online censorship.
“Let’s work together and topple this invisible wall,” Mr. Kwon said in the Twitter post that showed him in the T-shirt mocking the Chinese dictator. 

Mr. Kwon’s Chinese name is Quan Ping, but online he preferred to use his Korean name, and on Twitter he described himself as a “perpetual student, citizen, dedicated to overturning communism.”
The indictment against Mr. Kwon said the charge was based on 70 or more comments, images and video that he shared on Twitter and his Facebook page, Mr. Liang said. 

The comments and images “slandered and insulted state power and the socialist system,” the prosecutors charged, according to the Human Rights Campaign in China, an advocacy group that has followed his case.
But Mr. Kwon’s lawyers said they did not know which ones were classified as subversive and did not know whether the picture of the T-shirt was one of them because officials denied their requests to see Mr. Kwon and the case files. 

They also disputed the claim that such criticism amounted to subversion.
The two lawyers hired by Mr. Kwon’s parents were excluded from defending him in court days before the trial started, when a judge demanded extra paperwork and then Mr. Kwon’s father said their services were no longer needed.
“A judge from the court told us that we needed to provide a letter of introduction from our local bureau of justice” in Beijing, Zhang Lei, who was Mr. Kwon’s other defense attorney, said by telephone. 

“That’s an impossible request and outside the bounds of the law. It’s an unlawful and unreasonable demand.”
Mr. Kwon embodies a phenomenon that worries the Chinese communists: young people, exposed to foreign ideas, sometimes through study abroad, who feel free to criticize the government, Mr. Liang said.
“He’s from a younger generation that’s absorbed ideas about democracy and freedom,” he said. 

“They have a clearer spirit of opposition.”
In January of last year, Zhang Haitao, an activist in his 40s, was sentenced by a court in far western China to 19 years in prison on charges of “inciting subversion” through his writings on the internet and of illegally providing information abroad.
Mr. Kwon studied aerospace engineering at Iowa State University but worked for the family trade business after finishing his studies in 2014, Mr. Liang said. 

Yanbian, the city where Mr. Kwon lives and stood trial, is a hub for trade between China and North Korea, and South Korean businesses have also invested there, partly because of its ethnic Korean population.
But in his spare time, Mr. Kwon’s thoughts turned to the wider world. 

He often sent messages criticizing the Chinese government’s censorship and political controls and voicing support for dissidents and other banned causes. 

In one of his Twitter posts, he discussed being told to “drink tea,” a popular Chinese euphemism for being questioned by security officials.
“If I have to drink tea again, I won’t be shy and nervous,” he wrote on Twitter in September. 

“I’ll very clearly declare my views, as bright as a banner opposing the Communist Party. That’s my attitude. I won’t seek out trouble, but if it comes to me, I’ll live with it.”
But trouble came to Mr. Kwon that month, after he posted a picture of the provocative T-shirt and then, according to later accounts from overseas human rights groups, told friends that he would wear the T-shirt in a show of protest on Oct. 1, China’s National Day.
On Sept. 30, Mr. Kwon sent a message to friends, “There’s trouble,” and then he disappeared, according to the Human Rights Campaign in China.
His family later learned that he had been taken away by the police. 

Officials had told his parents that Mr. Kwon could expect a prison sentence of one and a half years, as long as he dropped Mr. Liang and Mr. Zhang as his lawyers, Mr. Zhang said. 

Mr. Kwon’s parents initially resisted that demand but on Monday told the lawyers that they were no longer needed.
The court did not give a verdict after the one-day trial, and Mr. Kwon’s former lawyers were unsure when it would announce a decision. 

Officials at the Yanbian Intermediate People’s Court refused to comment on the trial, and Mr. Kwon’s mother, Li Lianhua, told Radio Free Asia that she did not want to say anything.
“The authorities were insistent that he plead guilty,” Mr. Liang said. 

“He’s been under all kinds of pressure.”