Two Uyghurs confirmed detained for religious activities in Xinjiang

Chinese authorities in Xinjiang detained two Uyghur men for participating in religious activities, Radio Free Asia has confirmed, shedding light on the reason for their detention for the first time.

The names of both men – Osmanjan Tursun, now about 35 years old, and Qeyum Abdukerim, believed to be 55 – appeared in the “Xinjiang Police Files,” confidential documents hacked from Xinjiang police computers that contain the personal records of 830,000 individuals.

The files had pointed to other reasons for their detention.

The files date from 2017 to 2018, the height of one of China’s “strike hard” campaigns, during which hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities were sent to the “re-education” camps. They provide more evidence of Beijing’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang, which the Chinese government has repeatedly denied.

Files from police in Kashgar’s Konasheher country, a subset of records from the larger cache, indicate that authorities deemed Tursun “dangerous and emotionally unstable.” In 2017, he was sentenced to seven years in prison because authorities previously imprisoned five people from his family, including his mother, a sister, two brothers and a sister-in-law.

But during a phone interview on the fate of detainees listed in the Xinjiang Police Files, a police officer in Zemin town, who declined to be identified, said Tursun and his relative had been sentenced “because they engaged in illegal religious activities in 2014.”

Although the Kashgar Konasheher police files indicated that authorities arrested Tursun because of the previous arrests of his family members, police actually accused him of disturbing public order and conspiring with others, according to the police officer. The records did not contain details of his purported crime such as how, when, and where he disturbed public order or with whom he conspired, however.

Police contacted by RFA also confirmed that Abdukerim, another detainee mentioned in Kashgar Konasheher police files, was still in prison. The files said he was about 48 years old when he was apprehended, but provided no further information.

But police told RFA that authorities sentenced Abdukerim to a 10-year prison for engaging in “illegal religious activities.”

Abdukerim’s “crime” was “watching illegal religious videos and attending illegal religious sermons,” an officer said.

A 2018 article by Chinese researcher Qiu Yuan Yuan from the Communist Party School in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region shed light on why authorities targeted the family members of Uyghurs who had been arrested and detained in “vocational skills education and training centers,” as the Chinese called the “re-education” camps.

He noted that following the Chinese government’s brutal attack against Uyghur “terrorists” during 2014-2015 and 2016, the number of counterattacks declined sharply.

But because the number of people in Xinjiang punished was so large, their family members harbored a hatred of the central government, so that they were deemed dangerous people.

To protect the “results of the three-year war on terror,” Chinese authorities had to confine the family members of those punished and “educated” them, he wrote.

Chinese authorities later removed Yuan’s article from from the Party School’s website.