UN Beijing’s persecution of the Uyghurs: concentration camps and torture

The report of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights is awaited in the coming days. Michelle Bachelet would have received pressure after her visit to China last May. The testimony of the Uyghur activist Jukhia Ilham. Her father, Ilham Tokhti, was arrested in 2014 and the family has not heard from him for five years and has not been able to see him. The problem of the identity of minorities.

Moscow () – In the coming days, the report of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, is expected, who should also report on the current situation in Chinese Xinjiang. The Commissioner was in China last May and the press had reported that Beijing had put pressure on her to prevent publication of the report.

In fact, Bachelet was going to check the situation of the numerous “reeducation camps” in which thousands of Muslims are confined. What works in the autonomous region is nothing more than concentration camps for dissidents. Many countries and associations around the world express great concern about the persecution of minorities in Xinjiang, but despite numerous testimonies of forced arrest, torture and enslavement, and the sterilization of Uyghur women, there is no sign of

that the pressure from the Chinese authorities has eased.

The website Sibir.Realii interviewed Uyghur humanitarian activist Jukhia Ilham. She is the daughter of a world-renowned Beijing economist, the writer Ilham Tokhti, author of articles and essays on cross-cultural relations between Uyghurs, Khanty and other ethnic groups in China. Jukhia was 18 years old when, in early 2014, she was due to leave with her father on a flight to the United States, but authorities removed Tokhti from the plane and later sentenced him to life in prison on charges of inciting separatism.

Subsequently, the dissident received several awards for his humanitarian activities, including the title “Vaclav Havel” and the “Sakharov” award, which were presented to his daughter. Jukhia confesses that she knows almost nothing about the current state of her father: since 2017, visits from his relatives are not allowed and his whereabouts are unknown – it is not known where he is confined, whether in prison, in a concentration camp or in a a slave labor factory. During his last visit he looked extremely thin and had lost all his hair. In his first incarceration, he was in an isolation cell in front of an always-on television that broadcast state propaganda at full volume, even at night.

Since the 1990s, Ilham has publicly spoken out in favor of the Uyghur people’s right to self-determination, accusing the authorities of discriminating against his compatriots, who were prevented from accessing stable social norms and regular work. The situation was different for the Khanty, who are considered an ethnic group of Chinese origin. The economist defended the need to build adequate infrastructure in the region, since most of the roads were not even paved, and the Uyghurs still had to travel by mule, if only to visit a doctor in a nearby city.

He also denounced the confiscation of the resources of Xinjiang, “a huge territory” that represents “a sixth of China’s fertile land,” he wrote in his articles. And it is not fair to appropriate all the natural gas, gold, uranium, oil, without giving anything in return, without building hospitals and schools, without fixing the roads.” As Jukhia states, “my father’s crime was only that: the attempt to protest against injustice”.

Ilham’s daughter spent her childhood and early youth in Beijing: “I don’t even know the Uyghur language well, I studied it in the United States; only in the summer did I go to visit my grandmother in the Uyghur city of Artush, where she was born. my father”. At home, her parents spoke Uyghur, but Jukhia attended boarding school and only came home on Sundays. “In boarding school, I was surrounded by ethnic Khanty people and I never felt Uyghur enough or Chinese enough,” says the dissident’s daughter. “I kept asking myself: who am I? What town do I belong to? They called me Xinjanka in a derogatory way, but I felt suspended between opposite worlds”. An identity problem that today, certainly, does not only affect persecuted ethnic minorities in China, and whose sacrifice should be an example for many.