From Sarajevo, where the World Congress of Uyghur Exiles was held, director Zumretaj Arkin denounces Pecino’s pressures. “The positive narrative that living standards in Xinjiang continue to improve is just propaganda.”
Sarajevo () – From Xinjiang, the Turkic province in northwest China, where Uyghurs and other representatives of ethnic groups with a Turkic language and culture live, worrying news continues to arrive about the sending of people to concentration camps, where they are forced to work for his “rehabilitation.” Radio Azattyk spoke about it with the director of the World Congress of Uighurs Abroad, Zumretaj Arkin, to understand why this situation is talked about in the West, but silence is kept in neighboring Central Asia.
The Congress held its general assembly in recent days in Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, where Uyghur delegates from 25 countries in Central Asia, the Middle East, Europe and North America met. The organizers highlighted the criticism received from the Chinese authorities. Bosnia was also chosen because it had witnessed a genocide, as Arkin explains, although there are differences between the situations in the Chinese and Balkan worlds. The repression and violence in these lands have been documented and denounced before international courts, as we would like to see happen with the fate of the Uyghurs.
Cooperation is sought with civil society and with survivors, historians and people sensitive to these events, to learn from the events in the Balkans what should be done to support the Uyghurs of Xinjiang. Especially considering that the tribunal for the international Uyghur case was chaired by the Englishman Sir Geoffrey Nice, who was also a prosecutor in the case of the Serbian war criminal Slobodan Milosevič. Bosnian victims continue to fight for recognition of their responsibility in the genocide and the search for the remains of their murdered relatives.
Bosnia is also a Muslim-majority country, so it shows more intense solidarity with its Uyghur co-religionists. Since the announcement of the assembly last June, its leaders have received numerous threats, says Arkin, and “veritable smear campaigns against members of Congress, especially candidates for positions of responsibility.” The Chinese government put pressure on their families in their country, taking several relatives hostage, not to mention the slander spread on the Internet and social networks, with an avalanche of spam messages from Chinese accounts, in which the signature was even used. of the former president to send falsified documents.
Even the Chinese embassy in Bosnia threatened to prevent the rally, going so far as to conjure catastrophes at the rally site and sending unwanted guests from Türkiye to disrupt the entire organization. As Zumretaj explains, “the Chinese use many tools to organize transnational repressions, as we call tactics adopted through people they trust, often with the support of diplomats and a vast network of informants.” Uyghurs loyal to the Beijing government also act, spying on their own community in several countries and sowing discord among their compatriots, as well as various Chinese and other agents.
In Xinjiang, persecution is especially aimed at restricting religious freedom, with a series of increasingly strict laws and regulations beginning in 2014 under the auspices of “deextremisation” and counterterrorism. Even private prayer at home is considered a crime of extremism, not to mention Friday prayer meetings or other Islamic rituals such as pilgrimage and visiting mosques. For these reasons, more than three million Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang have been placed in rehabilitation camps in the past ten years. The Chinese government attempts to deny these accusations and present a positive narrative that the living standards of Uyghurs continue to improve, but, as Arkin states, “this is nothing more than propaganda,” and the silence of the governments of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan is because all of them are “indebted to Beijing for the large Chinese investments of recent years.”
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