Author: Chin@Strategy

On the 75th anniversary of the U.N. convention on genocide, the international body’s human rights chief called on the global community to hold perpetrators accountable, but was slammed for failing to condemn the situation facing Uyghurs in northwestern China. “Genocide is never unleashed without warning,” Volker Turk, the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in a statement. “It is always the culmination of preceding and identifiable patterns of systematic discrimination – based on race, ethnicity, religion or other characteristics – and of gross human rights violations, targeted as a…

About three months after ethnic Uyghur Nefise Oghuz posted videos in four languages on social media that called on the Chinese government to release her uncle Alim Abdukerim, her family finally got some answers. Nefise, 20, who lives in Turkey, took to social media in April, where she shared video of herself holding a portrait of her uncle and speaking about his case and what she called genocide of Uyghurs in western China. She spoke in Uyghur, English, Mandarin and Turkish. Police in Urumqi, capital of western China’s Xinjiang Uyghur…

Askar Azatbek didn’t realize that his friendship with a Kazakh consular officer would one day land him in prison. The ethnic Kazakh who lived in China’s far-western Xinjiang region had retired from his job at the Ili Prefecture Immigration Bureau and moved in 2016 to neighboring Kazakhstan, where he obtained Kazakh citizenship. But on Dec. 7, 2017, when he visited the Khorgos International Center for Boundary Cooperation, a special international trade zone on the Kazakhstan-China border, he was arrested by Chinese police and taken into custody. What he got was…

Arfiye Eri moved some audience members to tears when she read the poem “Yanarim Yoq” (“No Road Home”) written by prominent Uyghur scholar and influential educator Abduqadir Jalalidin, who was sentenced to life in prison by China in late 2019. The Japanese politician of Uyghur descent, who was elected to the lower house of the Japanese Parliament from the Liberal Democratic Party, recited the poem at the opening of the International Uyghur Forum: Global Parliamentarian Convention held on Oct. 30-31 at the National Diet of Japan.  [embedded content] Eri, 35, was…

Uyghurs marked the one-year anniversary of a deadly fire in Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi with vigils over the weekend, demanding accountability for the tragedy that they say killed as many as 44 people, four times higher than the official death toll of 10. The fire broke out at a high-rise residential building in the city’s Tianshan district just before 8 p.m. on Nov. 24, 2022, according to state media. Among the dead were Qemernisa Abdurahman, 48, and her four youngest children. The deaths, widely blamed on COVID-19 restrictions, prompted an outpouring…

The body of a Uyghur educator, researcher and poet who died in prison in Xinjiang in late August was taken by authorities directly to a cemetery for burial instead of first being returned to his family, a police officer and researcher who has compiled a list of arrested Uyghurs said. Abdusemet Rozi, 57, hailed from Suntagh village in Atush, also called Artux, capital of the Kizilsu Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture in Xinjiang. He was jailed for a second time in 2022, is said to have fallen ill while in prison, and…

A Uyghur filmmaker on trial for “separatism” and “terrorism” in Xinjiang told the court he was tortured into confessing crimes he didn’t commit, a police officer in the courtroom told Radio Free Asia. Ikram Nurmehmet, 32, and four Uyghur friends – all of whom studied in Turkey together – are being tried in Urumqi People’s Intermediate Court for alleged connections to Turkey-based organizations seeking independence for East Turkistan, the Uyghurs’ preferred name for the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the officer, other officials and family members said. The trial of the five…

A German newspaper report that it found close ties between China’s state-sponsored Uyghur labor transfer program and a regional partner of chemical giant BASF has prompted criticism that the company is ignoring the possibility of forced labor at the plant. Xinjiang Markor Chemical Industry Co., Ltd., has operated a plant in Korla – the second-largest city in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region – with German-based multinational BASF since 2016. German business newspaper Handelsblatt reported on Nov. 5 that some of the ownership rights to Xinjiang Markor Chemical Industry are held…

Pakistani authorities have temporarily extended the period of stay for Uyghurs living in the city of Rawalpindi who were at risk for deportation under a government order to expel all illegal migrants by the start of November, a Uyghur involved in the situation said. Nearly 20 Uyghur families — or about 100 individuals — who live in Pakistan’s fourth-biggest city but do not possess Afghan, Chinese passports or Pakistani residence permits have feared deportation to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan or China.  Most of the affected Uyghurs are descendants of individuals who migrated…

A company backed by local Chinese government bodies in far-western Xinjiang has created a matchmaking app that aims to set up single Uyghur women with Han Chinese men, people with knowledge of the company said. “Are there any singles who want to cross the region to marry our brothers from other ethnic groups and start a family?” asks a Uyghur woman in a recent video recorded on Douyin and posted on social media. “In order to carry out ethnic unity on a large scale, our Xinjiang My Fiancée Cultural Dissemination…