RFA. 27 May 2021

Below is an article published by RFA. Photo:Social Media.

Authorities in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) have detained a woman in an internment camp on suspicion of “religious extremism” after she intervened in a domestic dispute between her neighbors, according to authorities.

While investigating the detentions of women in the XUAR, where authorities are believed to have held up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in a network of internment camps since early 2017, RFA’s Uyghur Service spoke with a police officer in the prefecture-level city of Turpan (in Chinese, Tulufan) who volunteered that a village elder named Zaytunhan Ismail had recently been arrested.

“I believe it was around January … it’s been quite a while now,” the officer from Turpan’s Chatqal township said of the 67-year-old Ismail.

She said that Ismail’s arrest stemmed from an incident that had occurred in her village a year earlier, when the husband of someone in the neighborhood “came back home drunk” and the couple “exchanged some words.”

“[Ismail] came and told him not to do this,” the officer said.

“His wife was pregnant, apparently, and she told him not to [fight with her] while she was carrying the baby. The man who’d come home drunk had been cursing [at his wife]. She told him he shouldn’t do that.”

According to the police officer, Ismail was “involved in neighborhood matters large and small” in her village, and frequently “set things right and [gave advice] on what not to do.”

For years, she said, Ismail had played a leading role in weddings and funerals, and received encouragement and recognition from the local village committee, which saw her as having contributed to social stability in the community.

Ismail was able to defuse the argument in a way that everyone appeared to agree with at the time, but apparently her intervention was deemed inappropriate by the village committee, which had been sent to break up the fight.

The police officer said that Ismail was taken into custody in January for “getting involved in a legal matter” and subsequently accused of “religious extremism” before being sent to a camp.

After denying the camps’ existence initially, China in 2019 changed tack and began describing the camps in the region as residential training centers that provide vocational training for Uyghurs, discourage radicalization, and help protect the country from terrorism.

But reporting by RFA and other media outlets indicate that those in the camps are detained against their will and subjected to political indoctrination, routinely face rough treatment at the hands of their overseers and endure poor diets and unhygienic conditions in the often-overcrowded facilities.

Former detainees, several of whom plan to testify at the Uyghur Tribunal in June, have also described being subjected to torture, rape, sterilization, and other abuses while in custody.

Parliaments in Canada, The Netherlands, the U.K., Lithuania, and the U.S. State Department, have described China’s actions in the region as “genocide,” while the New York-based group Human Rights Watch (HRW) says they constitute crimes against humanity.

The Italian parliament voted unanimously on Wednesday to condemn Chinese atrocities against Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples.

The motion, which calls on the Rome government to make a similar move, stops short of using the term genocide, but cites illegal birth control practices, repression of religious freedom, forced labor, internment camps, arbitrary detention, and massive digital surveillance.