Speaking out: Uygurs in the United States break silence on China’s crackdown
Emboldened by international scrutiny, the American Uygur diaspora is increasingly willing to publicly condemn China’s re-education programmes, despite the risk to loved ones in Xinjiang
Zulpiya Jalaleddin is not a political person, according to her husband. “She doesn’t hate the Communist Party,” Jurat Nizamidin said in the living room in his small Virginia condo. “Yet she’s in prison.”
In January, after visiting her husband and their son, Ezmurat, in the United States, Jalaleddin returned to northwestern China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous region and was promptly imprisoned for reasons unknown to Nizamidin.
He said she had been swept up in the Chinese government’s broad crackdown on the Turkic Muslim population in the region, an operation reported to involve the mass detention and re-education of between several hundred thousand and one million Uygurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities.
Xinjiang is home to at least 11 million mostly Muslim Uygurs. The Chinese government has denied the existence of any arbitrary detention policy, instead saying that citizens guilty of minor offences are being sent to vocational centres.
It also claims that campaigns to crack down on violent terrorist activities – China claims there is a serious threat from Islamic extremists – were all carried out in accordance with the law.
The 54-year-old Nizamidin, once a senior editor at the Xinjiang Daily newspaper and now a care-giver in a local elder-care home, is speaking to journalists for the first time about his wife’s detention, despite the prospect of retaliation against his family back home.