Hannah Lucinda Smith in the Times, on Uighur exiles in Turkey blackmailed into spying for the Chinese:
Uighurs living in Istanbul have described how the Chinese Communist Party is pressuring them to spy on their compatriots by using their families back in China as pawns.
Whatsapp messages from handlers and audio recordings of conversations with the Chinese consulate in Istanbul show officials offering the exiles money or the chance to make contact with family members who have been rounded up and taken to prison camps in China, in return for information about fellow Uighurs in Turkey....
About 30,000 Uighurs live in Turkey, many of them having fled Xinjiang since Beijing’s crackdown started, and increasing numbers are now speaking out about the punishments being meted out to their families at home.
Jevlan Shirmemmet, 29, who moved to Turkey as an undergraduate student in 2011, was first approached by party officials on his last visit to Xinjiang in 2016. “Two agents came to me. We sat in a café in Urumqi for more than two hours, and they were speaking with me very kindly,” he said. “They told me: ‘The government likes you, you are a son of China. You went to school and to Turkey because of the CCP, you have to do something to thank them’.”
The documents and testimonies reveal the extent of Beijing’s global campaign to silence the Uighurs, a Muslim minority who speak a Turkic mother tongue and inhabit the northwestern province of Xinjiang. More than a million have been incarcerated since 2017 in what the Chinese government terms “education centres” but are little more than concentration camps.
About 30,000 Uighurs live in Turkey, many of them having fled Xinjiang since Beijing’s crackdown started, and increasing numbers are now speaking out about the punishments being meted out to their families at home.
Jevlan Shirmemmet, 29, who moved to Turkey as an undergraduate student in 2011, was first approached by party officials on his last visit to Xinjiang in 2016. “Two agents came to me. We sat in a café in Urumqi for more than two hours, and they were speaking with me very kindly,” he said. “They told me: ‘The government likes you, you are a son of China. You went to school and to Turkey because of the CCP, you have to do something to thank them’.”
When he returned to Istanbul the agents continued to message him, telling him to let them know when he next bought a ticket to China so that they could meet him at the airport.
By then, however, news of the mass detention of Uighurs was leaking out. Several of Mr Shirmemmet’s friends in Istanbul had disappeared after they went back to Xinjiang for holidays, and so he decided to remain in Turkey.
In January 2018 all contact with his family was suddenly cut, with relatives and friends apparently deleting him from their WeChat accounts, the Chinese social media app. In December last year he learnt that his parents and brother had been taken to the camps, with his mother jailed for five years for a trip she took to Turkey in 2013.
His father and brother have since been released, but Mr Shirmemmet has been able to speak to his father only once, when he called from a police station in the Qorghas area of Xinjiang in June last year. “We hadn’t spoken for 30 months, but what was the first thing my father said to me? He told me to stop my campaign to free my mother.” Desperate for information, Mr Shirmemmet began contacting the Chinese consulate in Istanbul to try to find out what had happened to his family. In a telephone conversation on February 12, a consulate official suggested that his own activities in Turkey may have contributed to his mother’s detention, accusing him of meeting dissidents in Egypt, which he has never visited.
Other Uighurs, insisting on anonymity, say they have also been asked to provide information on their contacts in Turkey....
Uighurs head to Turkey, of course, because of their close cultural and ethnic ties. It's the obvious place for Uighurs in exile to campaign about the cultural genocide that the Chinese state is overseeing in Xinjiang.
President Erdogan though, that brave scourge of those like France's Macron who would dare to defame Muslims, has made his position quite clear: carry on China. Genocide of the Muslim population? Not a problem.
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