The Chinese government has taken the rare step of formally confirming to the UN the death of a Uighur, whose family believe had been held in a Xinjiang internment camp since 2017.
More than 1 million people from the Uighur and Turkic Muslim communities in Xinjiang are believed to have been detained in camps since 2017, under a crackdown on ethnic minorities that experts say amounts to cultural genocide.
The Chinese Communist Party has repeatedly refused requests by international bodies to independently visit and investigate the region, despite a growing international backlash.
Photo: AFP
Abdulghafur Hapiz’s disappearance was registered with the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID) in April last year, but the Chinese government did not respond to formal inquiries until this month.
When it did respond, in a document seen by the Guardian, it told the WGEID that the retired driver from Kashgar had died almost two years ago, on Nov. 3, 2018, of “severe pneumonia and tuberculosis.”
“I don’t believe it,” his daughter, Fatimah Abdulghafur, told the Guardian. “If he died of anything it would have been diabetes.”
Fatimah Abdulghafur, a poet and human rights advocate living in Australia, said that she last heard from her father in April 2016, when he left her a voice message on WeChat saying: “‘I have something urgent to tell you please call me,’ but when I called him back he wasn’t there.”
Fatimah Abdulghafur believes that her father was sent to the camps in March 2017 and she had been advocating for his release, or at least information on his whereabouts ever since.
“I was frantically looking for my father, when he was already gone. It’s also really sad because I couldn’t speak to him before his death,” she said.
The Chinese government gave no information about his burial, or the location of his body.
Fatimah Abdulghafur said that the formal acknowledgement of her father’s death was significant for the Uighur community, not just because it was an extraordinarily rare response — other than state media reports targeting their claims — but because it brings hope and potentially legal recourse.
No Chinese human rights lawyer would go near the sensitive Uighur cases, she said.
“This is an official letter from the government given to the UN, so I can take this letter to maybe an international court to say this is my evidence, and let the Chinese government show their evidence,” she said. “To me it’s a major personal success. I’m not sure who can help me, but I’m searching.”
One of thousands of Uighurs living in Australia, Fatimah Abdulghafur said that it is not safe for her to contact her family in Xinjiang directly, but she had received some messages via third parties over the years.
The WGEID also inquired after her mother and two younger siblings, who have also disappeared, and Fatimah Abdulghafur said that authorities reported back that her 63-year-old mother was “leading a social, normal life.”
“I haven’t been able to speak to her at all. That’s another lie,” she said. “She is at home, I’m sure of it, but she’s not living a normal life. I think she is under house arrest.”
Fatimah Abdulghafur said that while she applied anonymously to the WGEID to investigate her family’s disappearances, her sister in Turkey had asked the Chinese embassy in Istanbul for information, but was harassed and intimidated after being told to hand over her personal details.
In a report this year, the WGEID urged China to provide information to families and legal groups on missing Uighurs, and said that “failure to do so amounts to an enforced disappearance.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) last week said that his policies in Xinjiang are “totally correct,” and education of the population was “establishing a correct perspective on the country, history and nationality.”
“The sense of gain, happiness and security among the people of all ethnic groups has continued to increase,” Xi said.
“As long as he stays in power it will continue, and the world will watch all the Uighur people disappear one by one,” Fatimah Abdulghafur said. “They are fully armed to either completely get rid of us or completely make us one of them, like complete assimilation. There is no in-between pathway.”
A humanoid robot that won a half-marathon race for robots in Beijing on Sunday ran faster than the human world record in a show of China’s technological leaps. The winner from Honor, a Chinese smartphone maker, completed the 21km race in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, said a WeChat post by the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area, also known as Beijing E-Town, where the race began. That was faster than the human world record holder, Ugandan Jacob Kiplimo, who finished the same distance in about 57 minutes in March at the Lisbon road race. The performance by the robot marked a significant step forward
Four contenders are squaring up to succeed Antonio Guterres as secretary-general of the UN, which faces unprecedented global instability, wars and its own crushing budget crisis. Chile’s Michelle Bachelet, Argentina’s Rafael Grossi, Costa Rica’s Rebeca Grynspan and Senegal’s Macky Sall are each to face grillings by 193 member states and non-governmental organizations for three hours today and tomorrow. It is only the second time the UN has held a public question-and-answer, a format created in 2016 to boost transparency. Ultimately the five permanent members of the UN’s top body, the Security Council, hold the power, wielding vetoes over who leads the
South Korea’s air force yesterday apologized for a 2021 midair collision involving two fighter jets, a day after auditors said the pilots were taking selfies and filming during the flight and held them responsible for the accident. “We sincerely apologize to the public for the concern caused by the accident that occurred in 2021,” an air force spokesman told a news conference, adding that one of the pilots involved had been suspended from flying duties, received severe disciplinary action and has since left the military. The apology followed a report released on Wednesday by the South Korean Board of Audit and Inspection,
An earthquake registering a preliminary magnitude of 7.7 off northern Japan on Monday prompted a short-lived tsunami alert and the advisory of a higher risk of a possible mega-quake for coastal areas there. The Cabinet Office and the Japan Meteorological Agency said there was a 1% chance for a mega-quake, compared to a 0.1% chance during normal times, in the next week or so following the powerful quake near the Chishima and Japan trenches. Officials said the advisory was not a quake prediction but urged residents in 182 towns along the northeastern coasts to raise their preparedness while continuing their daily lives. Prime
RSS