Uighur

The grim reality of being a ‘model Uighur’

I left China a decade ago when life there as a Uighur simply became too difficult. People know about the ongoing genocide of the Uighurs, but it didn’t come out of nowhere: it followed years of smaller scale persecution, which I experienced daily. I first grew aware of how bad things were in 2009, when I got a job in an inland city that required me to travel — a role that became impossible because hotels would refuse to let me stay. Receptionists would see my identity card, which bore my ethnicity, and curtly reply that there were no rooms available. Once, one smiled kindly and told me to wait

Is anywhere in the world still safe for China’s Uighurs?

Amannisa Abdullah was in the last weeks of her pregnancy when her husband, Ahmad Talip, was arrested in Dubai. ‘He was on his way to buy a dress for our unborn girl,’ she says. Ahmad, who had lived and worked in Dubai for nearlyten years, never arrived at the shop and his family have not seen him since. He was held at a local police station for several days and then was deported to China in 2018, where he is reportedly in prison. ‘He just disappeared. We don’t know where he is or what he is accused of,’ says Amannisa, who fled to Istanbul. Ahmad is a Uighur Muslim. His

China’s ambassador has no answer to the treatment of Uighur Muslims

When Liu Xiaoming agreed to come on the Andrew Marr show, he ought to have expected that – as the Chinese ambassador – he’d be asked about Uighur Muslims. He doubtless came on to bemoan the Huawei decision. But as anyone with a social media account could have told him, video footage of people with their heads shaved, blindfolded, kneeling, handcuffed, being forced on to trains have been circulating widely for days now. It was fairly obvious that the subject would come up. Marr didn’t just raise the topic, he screened the video. The ambassador seemed flummoxed. It made for some very striking television: The ‘re-education’ camps are understood to detain about

Sunday shows round-up: Chinese Ambassador denies Xinjiang concentration camps

Liu Xiaoming – No Muslim concentration camps in Xinjiang Today’s Sunday interviews took a heavier focus on foreign affairs than usual, with Andrew Marr counting not one, but two ambassadors among his guests. He began by speaking to Liu Xiaoming, the Chinese ambassador, and confronted him with aerial footage appearing to show restrained Uighur Muslims preparing to be transported to ‘re-education’ camps, alongside testimony that Uighur women were being forced to undergo sterilisation procedures. Liu denied that such human rights abuses were Chinese government policy and tried to brand the claims as fake: LX: The government policy is strongly opposed to this kind of practice, but I cannot rule out