For several years, Khalib had hardly any information about her other children.
In the past two years, the Chinese authorities have repeatedly promised to help track down any reports of missing children in Xinjiang to prove that they were not forcibly separated from their parents. However, BBC reporter John Sudworth, who followed the incident, reported that these promises have not yet been made. cash.
China’s first public pledge to help find the children of Kalbinur Tursan was in 2019.
In July of that year, Liu Xiaoming, the then Chinese ambassador to the UK, said in an interview with BBC Live TV: “If you know of people who have lost children, tell me their names.”
Liu Xiaoming denied that China’s policy in the Xinjiang region of the western border may cause a large number of children to be separated from their parents, but he said that if we have any evidence, he will conduct an investigation.
“We will find a way to find them and let you know who they are and what they are doing,” he said.
Khalib is a Uyghur native and currently lives in Turkey. Until late at night, she was still sewing clothes in a small studio apartment to feed her broken family.
She came here in 2016. She was 8 months pregnant and her seventh child, Merziye, was in her belly, which violated China’s family planning law.
Khalib now lives with Marzia.
“If the Chinese authorities knew that I was pregnant, they might force me to have a miscarriage,” she told the BBC.
“So, I use two hours a day to wrap up my belly and hide the bulging part, so we passed the border inspection smoothly.”
Although Khalib applied for passports for all of her children, China’s strict exit restrictions on ethnic minorities in Xinjiang allowed only one child to be approved: her two-year-old son Muhammad.
Due to time constraints, she has no choice but to keep the other children, hoping that they can follow her husband when they get the formalities in the future.
When she boarded the plane, she didn’t know that she might never see them again.
In China’s vast western region, a large-scale detention campaign has quietly begun. The scale of the “re-education” camp, which was initially highly classified, has rapidly expanded.
A parallel boarding school system is also under construction, with the same goal: to compulsorily assimilate Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. Their identities, culture and Islamic customs are now regarded as threats by the ruling CCP.
Xinjiang Uyghur: “China, where is my child?”
A policy document published a year after Khalib left clearly stated that the purpose of this kind of boarding school is to “block the religious atmosphere” from the influence of the children at home.
A few weeks after she left, her husband was detained. Like thousands of other Uighur immigrants watching their families disappear in the distance, she found herself in exile.
Almost overnight, it became impossible to even call relatives, because for those still living in Xinjiang, any overseas communication was seen as a potential sign of radicalization, and it was sent to a detention camp. One of the key reasons.
If Khalib returns to Xinjiang, she will almost certainly be detained. Today, her child has no parental care and has no contact with her at all-except for one shocking discovery.
In 2018, she accidentally saw a video of her daughter Ayse on the Internet, and found that her daughter, whom she had not seen for two years, is now in a school more than 500 kilometers away from home.
She shaved her hair short and played games with a group of children under the leadership of a teacher. The teacher did not speak her mother tongue Uyghur, but Chinese.
Aisai appeared in a video, playing games with a group of children under the leadership of a teacher.
For Khalib, this video not only relieved her—at least she had a tangible connection with a child who had lost the news—but also made her feel deeply distressed because it made her painfully and intuitively remembered from Never leave her guilt and sadness.
“When I learned that she was in another city, I felt that even if I went back, it was impossible to find my child,” she said.
“I want my children to know that I did not abandon them, I have no choice but to leave them. Because if I stay, their new-born sister will not survive.”
Khalib’s story is just one of a large number of similar cases of missing children obtained by the BBC from Xinjiang Uyghur and Kazakh diaspora who are now in Turkey and Kazakhstan.
After obtaining their consent, we provided Ambassador Liu Xiaoming with the details of the six interviewees and attached copies of their passports, Chinese ID cards and last known addresses.
The parents involved in three of the cases have reason to believe that their children are now under the care of the Chinese authorities.
Although Liu Xiaoming’s remarks in the 2019 program marked the first time China publicly promised to investigate, in fact, when the BBC visited camps in Xinjiang under the government’s organization a few months ago, the authorities had made similar promises.
China’s “re-education” camp system in Xinjiang has become one of the core issues in the confrontation between China and the West in recent years.
The original strict secrecy of the detention camp was replaced by a new language trick. China insists that these camps are actually vocational schools, where people affected by separatist or extremist ideologies voluntarily “reform” their minds.
Xu Guixiang, deputy director of the Propaganda Department of the Party Committee of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region, denied that a generation of Uyghur and Kazakh children might become de facto orphans because adult guardians and other family members were detained or stranded overseas.
“If all family members are sent to the education and training center, then the family must have serious problems,” he told the BBC.
“I have never seen this before.”
But when we passed some details of the case to them with the prior permission of the parties, the officials promised to investigate the matter.
Khalib recently participated in a 400-kilometer hike from Istanbul to Ankara with other Uyghur mothers, hoping to appeal to the Chinese authorities not to remain silent.
In one of the cases submitted to Xinjiang officials and Ambassador Liu Xiaoming, not only the missing children but also 14 missing grandchildren were involved.
Khalida Akytkankyzy, 66, is from Biestobe Township in Xinyuan County in northern Xinjiang. Like many Kazakhs, she has family ties in the Republic of Kazakhstan on the other side of the border.
In 2006, she emigrated with her husband and youngest son, and her three other married sons who had their own children stayed in Xinjiang.
But in early 2018, the ruthless mass detention mechanism also found them.
Kalida received news that her three sons and wife were detained for “political education.”
Kalida left Xinjiang in 2006.
She tried many ways to find out, including calling officials in her home village, but no one revealed who was taking care of her grandchildren.
By 2019, when China began to declare that these detention camps had succeeded in fighting separatism and terrorism, almost all of them had “graduated”. For Kalida, this was even worse news.
Village officials told her that they had been convicted for “worship.”
If they were imprisoned for other reasons, the authorities did not provide any details.
Reply from the Chinese Embassy to the BBC (translated from English).
The Chinese Embassy in the UK confirmed that it received the documents we sent to Ambassador Liu Xiaoming, but despite our follow-up emails sent in November 2019 and February 2020, we still did not get a reply.
Officials in Xinjiang told us that the information we handed to them was “inconsistent” and suggested that we let interviewees contact the nearest Chinese embassy.
Kalida misses not only her children, but also her 14 grandchildren.
In July 2020, Ambassador Liu Xiaoming appeared again in the same live TV show and was asked about the progress of his promise a year ago.
“Since our last show, I have never received any names,” he told the host Andrew Marr.
“I hope you can tell me your name, and we will definitely give you an answer.”
He went on to say that his colleagues in Xinjiang can easily handle these applications. “They responded very quickly to us,” he added.
Therefore, we continued to follow up and sent emails in August, September 2020 and January 2021.
“Received follow-up emails,” read the latest reply from an embassy official. “I regret that there has been no progress so far.”
Image source,Getty Images
China is accused of linking ordinary religious ceremonies in Xinjiang with extremism or separatism.
Now, Kalida gets up early, as Chinese officials had advised her to change to several buses to the Chinese Consulate in Almaty.
However, carrying photos of her three sons, she found that her daily efforts to find answers were stopped by a line of police officers.
“It’s not just for me,” she said in a video interview at home.
“I often go there with 10 to 15 other people, and the Chinese consulate has not provided any information to anyone.”
In Turkey, Khalib is also still trying to obtain her husband Abdulrehim Rozi and the missing five children Abduhalik, Subinur, and Abdusa. Ram (Abdulsalam), Aisai and Abdullah (Abdullah) news and run away.
Image source,RFE / RFA
Kalida was stopped by a line of police outside the embassy.
She recently participated in a 400-kilometer hike from Istanbul to Ankara with other Uyghur mothers, hoping to appeal to the Chinese authorities not to remain silent.
Her actions drew at least a limited response. At a press conference hosted by Xu Guixiang, deputy minister of the Xinjiang Propaganda Department, officials denied that her daughter was in a boarding school and insisted that the children were looked after by relatives.
But Khalib was still unable to get in touch with them, so he could not verify the authorities’ claims.
“I hope the authorities will let me see my child,” she said to me during a break while protesting on a busy highway.
“In this information age, why can’t I contact my child?”
The case we sent to Ambassador Liu Xiaoming did not involve a missing child, but a missing mother.
The 68-year-old retired engineer Xiamuxinuer Pida worked for a Chinese state-owned enterprise for many years. In 2017, she was sent to a detention camp, where she was released after being detained for 18 months.
Her daughter Reyila Abulaiti has been living in the UK since 2002. She stated that the authorities still refused to issue a passport to her mother. Like many other released persons, she is closely monitored at home.
During our visit to Xinjiang in 2019, Chinese officials insisted that she was completely free, but that she was in poor health. One of the officials told us that many elderly Uyghurs have diet problems and eat “too much meat and milk.”
This statement made Reyila feel angry and sad. She told me that, in fact, her mother had lost 15 kilograms in weight due to the poor conditions during detention.
Reyila Abulaiti was born in Xinjiang and now lives in the United Kingdom.
“They are trying to cover up what they did,” she replied when asked how the authorities explained why Natshinur was sent for re-education.
“She is a well-educated retired woman. She doesn’t need vocational courses. She was in a detention camp and they didn’t want my mother to speak out.”
Earlier this year, Liu Xiaoming completed his term as Chinese ambassador to the UK and bid farewell to British dignitaries online, but his promise has not been fulfilled by the Chinese authorities.
At the same time, as the authorities put more and more pressure on my journalism work, especially with more and more threats to sue me for my reports on Xinjiang, I was forced to leave China.
Some of these threats came directly from Xu Guixiang, whom I interviewed two years ago.
He told the official media that the BBC had created “fake news” and violated professional ethics.
However, although Chinese officials have insisted that as long as we provide names, they will quickly find and prove that these families have not been forcibly separated, but they have remained silent.
Liu Xiaoming has stepped down as China’s ambassador to the UK.
In addition to those already mentioned, we are still waiting for the whereabouts of some other children, including the children of Yasin Zunun. He suspects that Muslima, Fatima, Parhat, Nurbiya and Asma are all in boarding schools.
Merbet Maripet has not received her four children Abdurahman, Muhammad, Adila and Mardan since 2017. ) Any news, she also thinks that her child is now under the care of the country.
The BBC asked the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China why there has not been a government agency able to fulfill its clear promise to provide information about these missing persons.
We did not receive any reply before the publication.
Producer: Kathy Long
More BBC reports on Xinjiang’s “re-education camps”
