When he looks back on his youth in China’s far-west Xinjiang region, Akikat Kaliolla, an ethnic Kazakh, recalls the place’s natural beauty and the big, colorful weddings typical of his majority-Muslim community.
But now Emin County where he grew up is a sealed-off pocket in a region experiencing a security crackdown against what Beijing calls separatist elements.
Over a million people are allegedly being held in a secretive network of extrajudicial, political re-education centers, according to a United Nations panel of experts.
In an interview with AFP in Kazakhstan, Kaliolla, a 34-year-old national, said this year he’d lost contact with his mother, father and two younger brothers, who he believes were interned in one of the camps.
Elderly parents
“What they are doing to people there, especially to my parents, is illegal,” the professional musician said, during the interview in Kazakhstan’s largest city, Almaty. “They are not livestock but people with rights. Both of my parents are elderly and in ill health.”
About 1.5 million ethnic Kazakhs live in Xinjiang, a region that borders Central Asia and has long been home to ethnic tensions. They had until recently avoided the kind of state repression of which the mostly Muslim Uighurs, who make up the region’s demographic majority, have long complained.
But Kaliolla is just one of many to have been separated from relatives across the border, as the Chinese authorities now train their sights on the ethnic Kazakhs.
He said that he knows of “around a hundred people” either interned in the camps or with relatives there. “Lots of them are the same people I watched get married,” he added.
His only contact with the missing family members in over six months was in August when his brother got in touch at the request of Xinjiang authorities and demanded that Kaliolla stop “speaking out imprudently” about their situation, saying this would only bring them harm, he said.
Advances in surveillance
A report by Human Rights Watch on political repression in Xinjiang said rights violations in the nominally autonomous region “are of a scope and scale not seen in China since the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution.”
What has changed since that time, according to the report released in September, are advances in surveillance techniques and bio-data collection that are being practiced systematically on largely Muslim minorities.
In August, Beijing described as “completely untrue” the claim by a United Nations human rights panel that over a million ethnic Uighurs and other ethnic minorities had been placed in re-education camps.
Kaliolla, who moved to Kazakhstan after meeting his future wife, a citizen at a music school in Xinjiang, said his family was targeted because his father spoke out against injustices perpetrated by police in Emin County.
“My father was a legal counsellor there. When the government began putting more and more pressure on the Kazakh people, he wrote an appeal to the central authorities in Beijing,” he told AFP.
‘Help us, please’
Unlike Uighurs, many of whom say they face cultural and religious repression, Kazakhs had long moved freely between China and their historic homeland. That freedom disappeared after hardline official Chen Quanguo, known for his control measures in Tibet, became the Xinjiang Communist Party chief in 2016.
China has pointed to a series of attacks in Xinjiang by suspected Islamist radicals in recent years as justification for the clampdown.
With concerns growing over the rights of the region’s ethnic minorities, neighboring Kazakhstan has inadvertently become the focus for those speaking out.
Kazakhstan officials themselves have steadfastly refused to refer specifically to the camps, even after voicing concern over the situation.
But Kazakh nationals with relatives missing in Xinjiang have been more forthright, sharing stories of despair and separation at press conferences in Almaty.
“Eight months and no contact! Help us, please!” exclaimed one woman, Gaukhar Kurmanaliyeva, to reporters in August. Kurmanaliyeva spoke of how her male cousin, a Kazakh citizen, was snatched by Chinese police at a shopping area at the border.
Her account was followed by that of Muratkhan Kasengazy, who said his wife – another Kazakh passport holder – had been held in China since December 2017 after going there for medical treatment.
In recent months, Kazakhstan risked China’s wrath by refusing to deport an ethnic Kazakh woman of Chinese citizenship, who had confessed to crossing the border illegally to join her husband and children.
The woman, Sayragul Sauytbay, became an international media sensation after testifying in a court hearing that she had been forced by Beijing to work in a re-education camp, where, she said, 2,500 ethnic Kazakhs were interned.
Rare happy endings
Kazakh Foreign Minister Kairat Abdrakhmanov said in August that his country was in dialogue with Beijing over nearly 700 cases of Kazakhs unable to leave China. In some instances, the approach appears to have borne fruit.
Guzalnur Jeniskazy went to China to visit relatives in 2016, leaving her four-month-old daughter at home for what was meant to be a short trip.
But she ended up spending several months under house arrest and even a short stint in detention after losing her Kazakh passport, she told AFP correspondents, who witnessed her emotional family reunion at an Almaty bus station in July.
“Thanks to the Kazakh consulate [in Urumqi, Xinjiang] I was freed,” she said, holding her daughter tightly pressed to her.
Such happy endings seem a rarity, however.
Dependent on China’s economic largesse and seeking a pivotal role in its trillion-dollar trade and infrastructure drive, the oil-rich Central Asian country is poorly placed to make demands, analysts say.
“Kazakhstan’s leverage over China is miserly,” Aidos Sarym, an Almaty-based political scientist, said. “If China does not bend to the European Union and the United States, what can we say of Kazakhstan?”
– Agence France-Presse
Now the story shifted to Kazakhstan. What are they doing in China? Illegal? Didn’t the US, Europeans, Australia put them behind bars? Those who live in glass house should learn not to throw stone.
Any time an author uses the "One million people detained…" you know it is propaganda by the West.
Along with the mandatory, I/we lived a beauty pastoral life before the bad government came in and took it all away, narrative, in this article the author states, "Over a million people are allegedly being held in a secretive network of extrajudicial, political re-education centers, according to a United Nations panel of experts." but nowhere gives a link.
If you Google the million detained topic you get the usual Western press releases but no where do you get the link to the UN COMMITTEE ON THE ELIMINATION OF RACIAL DISCRIMINATION, where the report was issued in Aug. 2018. Here are the reports for a number of countries including China: https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/treatybodyexternal/SessionDetails1.aspx?SessionID=1196&Lang=en
Go to the Concluding Observations report and you will get this.
"Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region
40.The Committee notes the statements delivered by the State party delegation concerning the non-discriminatory enjoyment of freedoms and rights in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. The Committee is, however, alarmed by:
(a)Numerous reports of the detention of large numbers of ethnic Uighurs and other Muslim minorities, held incommunicado and often for long periods, without being charged or tried, under the pretext of countering religious extremism. The Committee regrets the lack of official data on how many people are in long-term detention or who have been forced to spend varying periods in political “re-education camps” for even non-threatening expressions of Muslim ethno-religious culture, such as a daily greeting. Estimates of the number of people detained range from tens of thousands to over a million. The Committee also notes that the delegation stated that vocational training centres exist for people who have committed minor offences without qualifying what that means;"
So can we dispense with the "one million" as some sort of factual number? As shown in the Syrian conflict you simply can’t use opposition persons to obtain unbiased information. Being "alarmed" by reports from opposition parties and it actually being true are not the same.
I find the timing of the US and it’s western MSM outlets intriguing as it is obviously for propdaganda purposes. Carry on. 🙂
I’m surprised at the lack of progress by the CCP!: They detained 1m several months ago, one month went by same number; another month same number!! Obviously CCP is asleep here and becoming lazy and not capturing any more Uighur terrorists!!
American propagandists call them Khazak for the purpose of spurring separatism. They have been in China for at least 20 generations and mixed with other ethnics in China and they don’t even look anything like Khazak.
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Good riddence. Who wants unwanted garbages strewn all over their homestead anyway. The more they break up, the better. We don’t want them.
How about Trump and gang tearing apart thousands of illegal immigrant families and putting infants and children in cages. I did not say this. It is reported by the US mainstream media.
Bunin should write about it.
My prayer to god, please seperate the hearts from the body of the evil politicians. God please let these policy makers live in the living hell.
One evil is doing evil and you are telling to follow more evils.
Mr. P H Chan, can you think anything for peace.?
Are you trying to say only one (1) person is detained for what?
Richard Truong , Does your picture look like a thug ?
Can you verify?
Nurun Nabi
Do you swallow all these lies?!! If you do, sorry, I have not much to counter you. Good luck!
Nurun Nabi Ship them to America and let Trump have his way with them. ahhahaha
Sounds like BS. This story just emerged a short time ago. Building housing and support services for a million people takes time. All this activity should have been noticable in its early stages.
Plus, you have Islamophobes like Pence crying crocodile tears for Muslims, of all people. These are the fortunate Muslims, not the millions killed by the US in places like Iraq and Syria.
Please note Sayragul is a China national of Kazakh descent and crossed the frontier illegally. She was dealt with according to the law. So, the accusers want China to be lawless, without laws on the illegal movements of people.
Guzalnur lost her passport and could not prove she entered China legally.
Gaukhar’s cousin and Muratkhan’s wife are Kazakh nationals of Kazakhstan. The possibility is very high they entered China illegally and dealt with according to the law.
Is Bunin aware that in 2017, USA has more than 323,000 immigrants detention ?? Write something about this. Please refer to the link and the footnotes on the deprivation suffered by these people:
https://www.globaldetentionproject.org/countries/americas/united-states
That leaves only one person, Kaliolla, and the whole article accused China of gross violations based on the words of one man !!
It was meant to be small and temporary. But the precise rows of US government tents by the lonely border crossing just a few feet from Mexico keep multiplying. The detention camp for migrant children in the south-west desert at Tornillo, Texas, not only remains in place weeks after it was expected to shut down, but is expanding fast.
Children are being brought by the busload and kept here on this remote patch of federal land surrounded by scrub and pecan nut farms. Hidden from public view on the ground, its proliferation is clearly visible from the air.
The camp sprouted up four months ago in the midst of Donald Trump’s crackdown on unauthorized border crossings and immigration, starting with about two dozen neat, brown tents and one or two larger, white communal tents.
It came to wider attention when the administration escalated the practice of tearing families apart and detaining adults and children separately, after the government’s “zero tolerance” declaration in May on unlawful immigration. A small number of those children at the time were expected to end up at Tornillo, alongside teenagers already there who had been apprehended after crossing the border alone.
Trump ended the policy of family separations on 20 June following huge public outcry. But the controversial camp at Tornillo persists and grows.
Seen from a small aircraft on Sunday morning, it was clear the camp has expanded exponentially from when the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) opened it in June and initially said it would operate for a few weeks, which turned into three months. About 100 uniform brown tents are now visible and several more of the larger, white utility tents.