Mick Hartley

How China targets the families of Uighur activists abroad – from Hannah Lucinda Smith in the Times:

Visiting Turkey was a lifelong dream for Nurnisa Emet, a Uighur housewife. Growing up in China, she read books about Istanbul’s mosques, palaces and the glittering Bosphorus.

When she finally travelled to the country in 2013 to visit her brother, a journalist and professor at Ankara University, she toured the historical cities and was pictured smiling with her husband outside the Hagia Sophia. Years on, however, the trip became the basis for her detention in one of China’s concentration camps. […]

“She was a housewife who loved to read, and she was so impressed when she saw Istanbul for herself,” Erkin Emet, the brother with whom she stayed in Turkey, said.

“Until October 2016 I could still talk to her on WeChat [the Chinese social media platform] — just ‘we are fine, how are you?’. Then the contact was completely cut.”

It wasn’t until the start of this year, nearly four years since he last spoke to his sister, that Mr Emet began to learn what had happened. A friend in China sent him an encrypted message hinting that his relatives had been detained. Then, in June, he forwarded Mr Emet their indictments.

Nurnisa, 50, had been convicted of providing financial support to terrorists. The prosecutors’ proof was Nurnisa’s contact with her brother, and the gifts she had brought him when she came to Turkey. All of them — gold rings, money and a dutar — a string instrument used in traditional Uighur music — were listed in the document.

Mr Emet’s three brothers were arrested on the same charges and at the same time, in December 2018, even though he hadn’t seen them in 22 years. Nurnisa and his brother Enver are now imprisoned in Yopurga, a camp close to the city of Kashgar. Another brother, Memetinin, is in the nearby Pailou prison. Mr Emet does not know where his third brother, Emer, is being held.

He is sure, however, why they been targeted. “I have written six books, numerous articles, and given many lectures on Uighur issues and human rights violations in China. This disturbs China a lot. I have been threatened so many times,” he said.

“The police kept coming to my home and asking my father about me. Later, the police installed a voice-recording phone in my father’s and my sister’s house. When I called them, they could not speak comfortably. We could feel the pressure growing.”

Mr Emet has been reporting on China’s abuses against the Uighur people since he emigrated to Turkey 30 years ago. He is also a prominent member of the World Uighur Congress, the Munich-based organisation that has worked to bring the plight of the Uighurs to the world’s attention. The congress has repeatedly called for trade embargoes against Beijing, and boycotts of companies whose supply chains lead back to the camps.

Turkey's Erdogan, as we know, has not the slightest interest in China's persecution of the Muslim Uighurs, despite the close ethnic ties between Turkey and Xinjiang, aka East Turkestan.