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 ship that appears to be taking on the identity of a scrapped gas carrier exited the Strait of Hormuz on Friday, showing how strategies to get through the waterway are evolving as the Middle East war progresses. The vessel identifying as liquefied natural gas (LNG) carrier Jamal left the Strait on Friday morning, ship-tracking data show. However, the same tanker was also recorded as having beached at an Indian demolition yard in October last year, where it is being broken up, according to market participants and port agent’s reports. The ship claiming to be Jamal is likely a zombie vessel that
Cannabis-based medicines have shown little evidence of effectiveness for treating most mental health and substance-use disorders, according to a large review of past studies published in a major medical journal on Monday. Medical use of cannabinoids has been expanding, including in the US, Canada and Australia, where many patients report using cannabis products to manage conditions such as anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and sleep problems. Researchers reviewed data from 54 randomized clinical trials conducted between 1980 and May last year involving 2,477 participants for their analysis published in The Lancet. The studies assessed cannabinoids as a primary treatment for mental disorders or substance-use
NATIONWIDE BLACKOUT: US President Donald Trump cut off Venezuelan oil shipments to Cuba, strangling the Caribbean island’s already antiquated grid Cuba’s national electric grid collapsed on Monday, the nation’s grid operator said, leaving about 10 million people without power amid a US-imposed oil blockade that has crippled the already obsolete generation system. Grid operator UNE on social media said that it is investigating the causes of the blackout, the latest in a series of widespread outages that last for hours or days and that this weekend sparked a rare violent protest in the communist-run nation. Officials ruled out a major power plant failure, but had still not pinpointed the root cause of the grid collapse, suggesting a problem with transmission. Officials said that
‘HEALTH ISSUE’: More than 250 women are hospitalized every day due to complications from unsafe abortions, and about three die, a study showed Jane had been bleeding heavily for days before finally seeking help, not from a hospital, but from the man who sold her the pills meant to end her six-week pregnancy. Abortions are strictly outlawed in the mainly Catholic Philippines, forcing women to turn to a patchwork of providers operating in the online shadows. While rare in practice, Philippine law allows for prison terms of up to six years for abortion patients and providers, leaving thousands of Filipinas to search for solutions in online forums where unlicensed sellers promote abortifacients. “It was very painful, as if my abdomen was being twisted,” said Jane, whose
RSS