Jewher Ilham and Sophie Richardson for The Guardian
China’s president, Xi Jinping, declared back in 2014 in a series of speeches delivered in private to officials that he intended to crack down harshly in Xinjiang, the north-western region of China where about 13 million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims make up half the population. The reality of that “strike hard against violent extremism” campaign, which followed decades of repressive policies, is now clear: Chinese authorities are committing crimes against humanity.
Xi’s comments followed several violent incidents reportedly involving Uyghurs that year. And among his statements, in documents leaked to the media, was this: “Don’t be afraid if hostile forces whine, or if hostile forces malign the image of Xinjiang.”
The Uyghur economist Ilham Tohti – Jewher Ilham’s father – who devoted his career to promoting equality and defending free speech, was an early victim of that crackdown, with a sentence to life in prison on baseless charges of separatism. Jewher has not seen her father since 2013, and does not know when or if she will see him or other family members again. None of her family members have seen her father since 2017.
Ilham Tohti’s fate was a grim harbinger of the government’s campaign of repression against Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Muslims across the Uyghur region. The Chinese government has since arbitrarily detained an estimated 1 million Turkic Muslims in “political re-education” facilities. There they are pressured to relinquish their cultural identity. Unprecedented numbers have been imprisoned after sham trials and given harsh sentences. Many were tortured or forcibly disappeared.
In addition to these violent attempts to strip the Uyghur people of their culture, the Chinese government is running a programme to “cleanse” ethnic minorities of their “extremist” thoughts. More than 80,000 Uyghurs and people from other Turkic and Muslim minorities have been coercively transferred to work in factories, where they are not given the freedom to return home.
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