Women of the oppressed Uyghur minority demonstrated at the Chinese consulates in Kazakhstan and Turkey on Monday, International Women’s Day, to call attention to the Chinese Communist Party’s …
Women of the oppressed Uyghur minority demonstrated at the Chinese consulates in Kazakhstan and Turkey on Monday, International Women’s Day, to call attention to the Chinese Communist Party’s brutal campaigns of “re-education” and ethnic cleansing against their families. Human rights magazine Bitter Winter reported on the demonstration in Kazakhstan, which borders on China’s Xinjiang province, where the Uyghurs and other minorities have been herded into “re-education camps” and subjected to population control programs: Halida Akhytkhan has lost her entire family. “In 2018, she says, they arrested my three sons — Rahimbergen Satipaldi, Rahimbergen Orazjan, and Rahimbergen Ahimetjan — and their wives. Then put them all into the concentration camps. My daughters-in-law were sentenced to prison terms from 2 to 6 years, while 28 years were given to my two elderly sons, and 10 years to my youngest son.” Halida is very popular on the Web, where she tells her story as a grandmother of 14 boys and girls living in Xinjiang — but she does not know where they have been taken now. Their men are accused of “separatism” or “religious extremism.” But Gulbaran Omirali says Azamat Aibolat, the 23-year-old son of her brother, was arrested just for performing namaz, the prayer in direction of the Kaaba in Mecca, and he believed it was not forbidden. He was wrong. In April 2018, he was arrested, and he was later sentenced to 15 years in jail. Bikamal Kaken is the wife of Alimhazi Mukhay. “I haven’t seen him in the last four years, she says.
