Relatives demand answers as Muslims disappear in China

February 19, 2019 00:00:00

ALMATY: Clients of Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights, an activist group, showing photographs of family members who have disappeared in China, in Almaty, the capital of Kazakhstan recently — New York Times

NEW YORK, Feb 18 (New York Times): Many members of the Uighur ethnic group living in exile are worried that their relatives back home in China are locked up in internment camps - or dead.

So when China released a video this past week to prove that a prominent Uighur musician had not died in custody as rumoured, Uighurs around the world sat up.

"Show me that my father is alive and well!" one wrote on Twitter. "Where are my relatives?" another asked. In one clip, a child held up a photo of her missing father, weeping as she said: "Show his video to us."

Murat Harri Uyghur, a doctor living in Finland, and a group of fellow activists gave the campaign a hashtag, #MeTooUyghur (#MenmuUyghur in Uighur), and urged others to add their voices to it.

"Now, we want to know, where are millions of #Uyghurs?" the doctor wrote, using an alternate spelling of Uighur. He referred to reports that China is holding 1 million or more Uighurs, Kazakhs and members of other mostly Muslim Turkic minorities in internment camps in the far western Xinjiang region.

Uyghur said he and other activists hoped to echo the #MeToo campaign led by survivors of sexual assault and harassment. At first, they were afraid the hashtag would be offensive to women, Uyghur said by telephone.

"But then we said the Uighurs are also abused," he said. "As a nation, it is like we were raped."

The social media campaign is part of a nascent effort to collect testimony and maintain a list of detainees - like an expanding wall of missing persons notices - to put pressure on China and demand answers: Who is being held in the sprawling network of camps? Are they alive or dead? What are the conditions like? And where are the children, the elderly and the infirm?

The campaign strikes at the heart of Beijing's effort to portray the camps as job training facilities, meant to improve detainees' lives and foster stability in a once-restive region.

Former detainees deny that, saying the camps are prisonlike facilities where they were forced to renounce devotion to Islam and praise the ruling Communist Party. In recent months, evidence of a system of forced labour in the camps has emerged.