Day: February 1, 2022

Two female members of an extended Muslim Uyghur family serving long prison sentences for committing religious “crimes” are believed to be held in a women’s prison in the town of Sanji (in Chinese, Changji) in China’s far-western Xinjiang region.

Additionally, two male members of the family and an in-law are also serving life terms, the wife of one of them said.

The women are Zahire Memet, who is now 38, and her sister-in-law Gulbostan Ibrahim, who is now 33. Zahire Memet was sentenced to 15 years in prison for wearing a hijab, while Gulbostan Ibrahim, who is also known as Bostan Ibrahim, was sentenced to 17 years for not confessing to holding religious activities at home.

They are from a family in Korla (in Chinese, Kuerle) that has been ripped apart by China’s persecution of the Uyghur community in Xinjiang, sources told RFA. Zahire Memet’s mother Halcham Pazil and sisters Melikizat and Patigul Memet are also serving between seven and 20 years in Sanji Women’s Prison for religious activities in which they took part in 2013, according to a verdict issued by the Korla Municipal People’s Court in April 2019 and recently seen by RFA.

They all were retroactively sentenced after China criminalized such activities in 2018 when it issued de-extremification regulations targeting Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Turkic minorities in Xinjiang, purportedly to prevent acts of terrorism and ensure social stability.

The charges against the family were brought by the Korla Municipal Procuratorate. Korla is the second-largest city in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

Zahire Memet, the third daughter of the family, “used to wear hijab and did not remove her hijab on time,” the verdict announcing her sentence said. Even though Chinese government officials repeatedly asked her not to wear a hijab, she continued doing so from 2010-2015, it said.

She was also convicted of attending religious preaching, providing a venue for religious instruction, and giving birth to one more child than permitted by law in 2015, the verdict said. She obstructed the law by “relying on superstition” because she did not abort her child, the document states.

Gulbostan Ibrahim was convicted of not admitting she had held religious teachings at her home, even though others who attended reported having done so. The verdict did not mention other crimes.

Although Chinese court and prosecutorial officials in Korla initially did not provide any information to RFA about where Zahire and Gulbostan were serving their sentences, one later confirmed that Zahire was serving her sentence at the women’s prison.

“Cell block No. 5,” the official said when asked where she was confined inside the detention center.

Another prison official confirmed to RFA that Zahire Mehmet was serving time there also. But another official took the phone and said they would not disclose information on Gulbostan Ibrahim because it was a “state secret” before hanging up.

After RFA ran earlier reports on the family, Yusup Firdavis, a Uyghur who lives in exile in Turkey, sent a message saying that he was the family’s neighbor in Korla. He told RFA over the telephone that the family had not done anything harmful to society.

“They have not committed any crimes that can make them prisoners,” he said. “This case is an example of Chinese racism against the whole Uyghur nation. I believe they are the victims of the Chinese policy to wipe out the Uyghurs from the surface of the earth. They are the victims of the Uyghur genocide.”

Chinese government officials began confiscating copies of the Quran and prayer mats from Uyghur families in Korla in 2017. At that time, an official from the Korla village of Qarayulghuz said that some of the religious activities that had been permitted were now banned because they endanger national security.

Yusup Firdavis said that Uyghur families were initially confused about what religious practices they could maintain and which ones they had to abandon.

Brothers locked up for life

Kifaye Yaqup, who married into the family and lives in Istanbul, told RFA that four other family members were also convicted of similar crimes, with three receiving life sentences, including her husband, Mehmut Memet, her brother-in-law Musajan Memet, and Musajan’s wife, Zohregul Hudaberdi. She did not mention the name of the fourth person.

Mehmut and Musajan are two of the three sons of Halchem Pazil.

Kifaye said Mehmut, 47, became a successful entrepreneur after he resigned from his job. She has not been able to communicate with any of them since their arrest.

In late 2015, Kifaye and Mehmut went to Turkey to enroll their children in school there, she said. While she stayed with the children, Mehmut returned to Xinjiang but visited Turkey periodically until October 2016 when the Chinese government confiscated his passport.

“My husband is innocent,” Kifaye said. “He didn’t commit any crime that warrants any prison term, let alone life in jail.”

Musajan Memet was expelled from Xinjiang University after he was found to have been praying while a student there, Kifaye said. Afterwards, he was arrested twice when the Xinjiang government stepped up measures against the Uyghurs to combat “terrorism” under China’s new antiterrorism law.

The law, which took effect in January 2016, expanded the government’s powers to monitor peaceful citizens, tighten censorship, and give officials greater legal cover to imprison ethnic and religious minorities.

Musajan was sentenced to five years after his first arrest in 2008 and to three years after his second arrest in 2015. He was released on bail in 2017 just as authorities began a major crackdown on Uyghurs, she said.

Musajan was later detained a third time and sentenced to life in prison, Kifaye said. His wife, Zohregul Hudaberdi, was also arrested then and received a life sentence. Her resignation from her job in the Korla municipal government was cited as evidence of her “crime.”

Chinese government officials in Korla contacted by RFA refused to give any information about the two Memet brothers. But a security official from a neighborhood committee in Korla confirmed that Mehmut had been sentenced to life in prison and that Musajan had been charged with “terrorism,” though he could not provide further details.

“He is now in prison,” the official said. “He was sentenced to life imprisonment. Musajan was arrested earlier.”

RFA obtained a list from the Yangguang neighborhood committee in Korla of the names of local residents who had been sentenced. It listed Musajan as sentenced to life in prison on “terrorism” charges and serving his term in the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps prison in the city.

More than 3,000 Myanmar refugees are stranded on the Myanmar side of the Thaung Yin River after Thailand took down their makeshift tents at a cattle farm on the Thai side of the river and deported them, aid workers told RFA Monday.

The refugees are from Lay Kay Kaw, a town near the Thai border in Kayin state, but had set up camp at the Mae Ko Kin Cattle Farm to escape the violence that engulfed their town in mid-December.

Soldiers loyal to the military junta that took over the country in a coup last February entered Lay Kay Kaw on Dec. 14 to try to arrest people taking refuge there, including a former member of Parliament from the ousted opposition party and government employees who had participated in the civil disobedience movement by refusing to work.

When the military called in airstrikes and fired artillery shells into Lay Kay Kaw, the residents fled, with some escaping into Thailand.

Rather than returning to their hometown, the recently deported refugees are now staying in temporary huts along the river.

“After the Thai authorities shut down the camp over the past few days, there are no more people left in the camp. … There are around 3,000 to 4,000. They are too afraid to go home,” Ye Min, a volunteer from the Aid Alliance Committee, a Thailand-based migrant worker rights organization, told RFA’s Myanmar Service.

“They build shelters out of tarps on the banks of the river on the Myanmar side,” said Ye Min.

The 3,000 refugees who were recently deported join around 10,000 internally displaced people taking refuge in Myanmar villages near the border, Ye Min estimated.

Intense fighting broke out in the area in December, and about 20,000 people fled their homes to hide on both sides of the river.

Though many have returned home, some of the 20,000 refugees remain on the Thai side and have received support from local residents.

“We have a shortage of drinking water. Many of our children fell sick as there were heavy rains during the rainy season,” a refugee living on the riverbank, who requested anonymity for security reasons, told RFA.

“Many of us have diarrhea after consuming unclean water and food,” she said.

A constant downpour has added to their misery.

“Some people get soaked as the rains got into their tents. Some even simply dug pits and are living in the pits,” she said.

A member of a local armed ethnic group fighting the military junta told RFA that it is providing aid to the refugees.

“We have committees for helping them. We scrape to provide them with emergency foods and shelters,” Padao Saw Taw Nee, the foreign affairs officer of the Karen National Union, which administers territory controlled by the Karen National Liberation Army, told RFA.

“We’ve got at least four of five temporary refugee camps, where we feed them and give them humanitarian assistance. Aside from that, we are also giving them protection. As long as we cannot find the places safe for them to live, we will have to keep fighting these problems,” he said.

Several refugees said that not only were their homes, farms and livelihoods damaged by the fighting, but the military also looted their abandoned belongings. 

Even if it were safe to return home, some said it would be challenging to rebuild.

RFA attempted to contact junta spokesman Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun for comment but received no response.

The district chief of Mae Sot on the Thai side of the border declined to comments on the Myanmar refugees, and calls by RFA to the Tak provincial governor and foreign ministry were not answered Tuesday.

The Tak provincial border center did not have a recent update on the refugee situation.

Translated by Ye Kaung Myint Maung. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

Hunan rights activist Zhu Chengzhi, who was detained in April 2018 after visiting the grave of Mao-era dissident Lin Zhao, was released from Jiangsu’s Dingshan Prison on Jan. 26 after serving a three-year, nine-month jail term for “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble,” a charge frequently used to target peaceful critics of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP),.

Zhu, who is currently being relocated to the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou by agreement with state security police, said he regards his release as a transfer from “little prison” to “big prison,” given that he will likely face ongoing surveillance and restrictions on his movement.

Zhu became one of China’s most prominent rights activists after he spoke out about the death in police custody of labor rights activist Li Wangyang in 2013, and had previously been held on suspicion of subversion after he questioned the official verdict of suicide in Li’s death.

A Chinese police investigation into Li’s death in June 2013 upheld an earlier verdict of suicide, despite widespread public doubts about the claim that the severely disabled 62-year-old hanged himself.

“So, I’m back in the big prison,” Zhu told RFA in an interview following his release and relocation. “Don’t worry about my health; I can still walk around pretty fast.”

He said he had been told he couldn’t return to Hunan’s Shaoyang city, and had requested relocation to Guangzhou, as his wife lives there, he said.

“In the end, I went from Dingshan Prison to Wuxi Airport, got on the plane under their supervision, and came back here to Guangzhou,” he said. “I was in no hurry to get back to my hometown.”

“I’ve been out of normal daily life for 45 months, and the things that were once familiar to me are now unfamiliar,” he said. “The past two days has been spent familiarizing myself with various electronic devices.”

“After Lunar New Year, I plan to get a total medical examination,” Zhu said, who spoke of being singled out for “special treatment” while serving his sentence, but declined to give further details.

Zhu was taken away from the Lingyan Shan hillside cemetery on the outskirts of Suzhou alongside fellow activists who laid wreaths to mark the anniversary of Lin Zhao’s execution for alleged counterrevolutionary crimes under the rule of late supreme leader Mao Zedong.

He was held in the Suzhou No. 1 Detention Center during his pretrial detention, in crowded conditions, he recalled.

“Conditions were overcrowded in the detention center: we slept more than 20 people to a room, everyone packed in close together,” Zhu told RFA. “The original specification for jails was supposed to be 14 people to a room, with 10 people to a room in the “elderly and infirm” wing. Typically there should be seven bunk beds [in a regular room], with three bunk beds and four single beds in an elderly and infirm room.”

But once he started serving out his prison sentence, he didn’t need to work any more.

“I’m 71 now. That’s why I didn’t have to do labor,” he said. “They made us work in detention centers before the pandemic, but it wasn’t very high pressure work, six days a week, and no more than eight hours a day. So there was a big change compared with that era.”

No regrets for his actions

Zhu said he feels quite fortunate compared with many other Chinese dissidents, despite having been singled out for “unusual” levels of control in jail.

“I spent three years and nine months in jail, but compared with a lot of my friends including Li Wangyang, [that was nothing], because they gave their lives. Others were subjected to torture or other inhumane treatment. I had it easy compared with them,” he said.

He said he has no regrets about any of the actions that led to his jailing.

“None of my actions have given me any trouble sleeping at night; I sleep great,” Zhu said. “Everything I have done has come from the heart, in the spirit of humanity and natural justice. Why wouldn’t I do those things?”

He added: “I don’t think too much about all the ramifications. I’m just a very, very ordinary old guy. The things I have done should be done by every other regular person. I have stayed steadfast throughout.”

“The truth about what happened to Li Wangyang will come to the surface one day, as part of the natural course of events. But I don’t have the power to bear the brunt of revealing that truth all by myself,” he said.

But Zhu denied having cut a deal with the state security police.

“And if you wonder whether they offered me some kind of promise [not to speak out], they lost any hope [of cutting a deal with me] way back in 2012. Nobody has set limits on [what I say in public], ever. Even if they did, I wouldn’t agree to it,” he said.

He said he has no problem with staying away from his hometown.

“I have a lot of relatives, classmates and friends in my hometown … but I’m going to go wherever seems good to me. The whole world is my village,” he said.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.