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.”
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