Medium, 11 October 2020

Below is an article published by Medium. Photo Medium.

In September, Uyghur poet Fatimah Abdulghafur received an information information from the United Nations’ Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (UNWGEID), informing her that her father, Abdulghafur Hapiz, a retired driver and entrepreneur in Xinjiang, died in November 2018. Having lost contact with her father since April 2016, Abdulghafur believed that her father may have died in one of the many internment camps in Xinjiang, where he was believed to have been detained since March 2017.

The last time Fatimah Abdulghafur heard from her father was April 25, 2016. He sent her a message on that day, in which he urgently asked her to give him a call. “I have something urgent to share with you, so please call me,” her father wrote.

However, Ms. Abdulghafur wasn’t able to call him back in time, and that message became the last message that she received from her father.

Then on September 8 this year, Ms. Abdulghafur received an e-mail from United Nation’s WGEID, telling her that the Chinese government has finally responded to the working group’s inquiry about Abdulghafur’s family members.

“The Chinese government told UNWGEID that my father died of severe pneumonia and tuberculosis on November 3, 2018,” said Ms. Abdulghafur. “The letter also mentioned that my mother is ‘living a normal social life.’ However, there was no update about my younger brother and my younger sister.”

After she learned about her father’s unfortunate death, Ms. Abdulgahfur said she cried and shouted for several minutes. “I shouted ‘my father is dead and now I have no father,’” said Ms. Abdulghafur. Since many people around the world have been following her quest to receive information about her missing family members in Xinjiang over the last few years, Ms. Abdulghafur decided to record a video and share the news through her social media accounts.

According to the United Nations, the Chinese government has detained more than 1 million Uyghurs and Muslim minorities in Xinjiang since 2017. A report published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute last month also found that the Xinjiang government is still expanding structures at 61 existing detention facilities in the region.

A Uyghur driver detained for possibly traveling to Islamic countries

Ms. Abdulghafur’s father was a driver and he later became an entrepreneur after he opened a restaurant in his hometown Kashgar. Due to his job as a driver and entrepreneur, Mr. Hapiz traveled to several Muslim countries like Pakistan, Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia throughout the years.

“My father went to Kazakhstan in 1993 and he went to the Hajj in Saudi Arabia afterwards,” Ms. Abdulghafur said. “Before that, he was traveling to Pakistan a lot for work as a driver. He worked for a travel agency controlled by the Chinese government. He would drive people to the border and pick up other customers from there. That’s why he traveled to a lot of Muslim countries over the years.”

The last time Ms. Abdulghafur met all of her family was in January 2016. Her mother was taking care of her new born niece in Istanbul at the time and her father brought her grandmother to Turkey for the family reunion. Not long after that, her father and her grandmother went back to Xinjiang. Then soon afterwards, Ms. Abdulghafur lost contact with her father and other family members in Xinjiang.

“I could only know what’s happening in Xinjiang through my mother and younger sister in Istanbul,” said Abdulghafur. “My mom and my sister brought my niece back to Xinjiang in February 2017. At the time, situation still seemed normal in Xinjiang, but situation quickly deteriorated in the region.”

However, soon a family friend told Ms. Abdulghafur that her father had been sent into one of the re-education camps in Xinjiang. During interrogation, the friend was told that Mr. Hapiz was sent into the camps due to his frequent travels to Muslim countries and he also went to Hajj, which had become illegal in China.

““They told the friend that my father is a ‘dangerous person and he is going to have a prison sentence that’s no less than 10 years,” Ms. Abdulghafur said. “When they were interrogating my friend, they also asked why my father traveled to Istanbul in 2016.”

Ms. Abdulghafur said after she learned about her father’s internment, she went into a period of psychological shock as she didn’t know what to do for her father. “I never planned to talk to any Chinese authorities,” Ms. Abdulghafur said. “I knew that once I visited the Chinese embassies in Australia, we would be contacted by the embassy and asked to go to parties organized by the embassy. We need to be ‘loyal’ to the embassy, as many of my friends said.”

Seeking help from the UNWGEID

In February 2019, Ms. Abdulghafur began to gather evidence about her father’s disappearance following suggestions from Uyghur activist Arafat Erkin, who lives in the United States. She submitted the documents to UNWGEID in April 2019, hoping to seek information about her father and other family members from the Chinese government through the United Nations Working Group.

“Writing down what happened to my father was a traumatic experience for me,” Ms. Abdulghafur said. “I’m a poet and my emotions are really strong. It took a lot of courage from me to write the experience down.”

Six months after she submitted her father’s case to the UNWGEID, the working group informed Ms. Abdulghafur that they will raise her family members’ cases to the Chinese government at a United Nations’ Human Rights meeting. However, she didn’t hear back from the UNWGEID until September 8, 2020.

Even though the Chinese government claimed that her father died of severe pneumonia and tuberculosis, Ms. Abdulghafur thinks there are many suspicious parts in her father’s death. According to her, when her father applied for a visa to visit Turkey, he needed to receive all kinds of vaccination shots, which include the vaccination for tuberculosis.

“I don’t think the Chinese government is telling me the truth,” she said. “My father had diabetes and migraines, but he didn’t have pneumonia or tuberculosis. My mission now is to find out how did my father die, where did he die and where is his body.”

Learning about her father’s death is only the beginning

While Ms. Abdulghafur has learned about his father’s fate, she is now requesting the Chinese government to let her get in touch with her mom, since Beijing claimed that her mother “is living a normal social life.”

“If my mother is living a normal social life, why can’t she talk to me?” Ms. Abdulghafur said. “Where is my younger brother and younger sister? Give me a letter and describe them as living a normal social life too.”

In fact, one of Ms. Abdulghafur’s younger sister in Istanbul has asked the Chinese Consulate General in Istanbul to provide updates about her family members. However, the Chinese consulate didn’t provide any updates about her family members, and they asked her sister to provide details of her Turkish citizenship.

“The consulate told her to write down details of her Turkish citizenship, her former name, and other personal information,” Ms. Abdulghafur said. “My sister refused to do so. Why will the Chinese consulate need to know my sister’s personal details?”

Ms. Abdulghafur said she never views herself as a human rights activist, but since her father’s death has been confirmed, she plans to maintain the pressure on the Chinese government for what they did to her family.

“They already killed my father, so I won’t tone down my activism,” Ms. Abdulghafur said. “I’m looking for organizations or human rights lawyers who can obtain legal documents about my father. I want to take the murderers to the international court. This is a criminal offence and this is not a human rights abuse. They killed my father.”

“I believe the reasons that they detained my father also include the fact that several of his daughters live abroad,” Ms. Abdulghafur said. “My father always tried to push us out of China because he knew a lot about the Chinese government’s corruption. He also knew the danger for Uyghurs living under such regime. He tried to prevent us from living under such an environment.”

Ms. Abdulghafur urges more Uyghurs to look for channels to force the Chinese government to share information about their missing family members in Xinjiang. She believes that the quest to seek justice for her father is a long-term commitment for her. “I might also have to sue the chain of people who are responsible for my father’s death. This is a long-term commitment and I’m up for it,” she said.