Kazakhs despair for missing relatives
UZYNAGHASH: When Bikamal Kaken’s husband vanished during a 2017 visit to Xinjiang in northwestern China, she had good reason to believe he would not be returning home to Kazakhstan anytime soon. But she did not anticipate just how dire his fate was, or that it would be revealed during a spat online between US and Chinese diplomats. Rights groups at the time of Adilgazy Muqai’s disappearance were sounding the alarm over a mushrooming network of facilities for the massive incarceration of mostly Muslim minority citizens in Xinjiang.
Kaken heard that her husband had fallen victim to the system. But three agonizing years later, she learned he had met an even worse judgment: a nine year prison sentence for extremist crimes. “I am so worried. The Chinese (authorities) will destroy him in jail,” Kaken, a China-born ethnic Kazakh who is now a Kazakh citizen, told AFP through tears, pressing her two young daughters tightly to her body. Beijing has robustly defended its policies in the Xinjiang region where more than one million people - mostly Muslims from Turkic speaking groups like Uighurs and Kazakhs - have been rounded up on vague extremism and separatism pretexts, rights groups say. China claims the sprawling network of detention centers are vocational “training” facilities used to counter extremism where attendance is voluntary. Yet in neighboring Kazakhstan, 44-year-old Kaken is just one of a growing number of relatives to discover their missing family members are not in the centers as previously thought, but serving hard jail time instead.
Kaken and her husband, a retired oil worker, moved to Kazakhstan when she was pregnant with her youngest child, now three, after hearing reports that Xinjiang authorities were forcing women from minority groups to have abortions. But 47-year-old Muqai, who had right of residency in Kazakhstan but was not a passport-holder, was lured back to his native region in May 2017 by his former employers. They said the company pension that his family subsisted on could be cancelled if he failed to attend a meeting.
When news of Muqai’s sentence finally emerged three years after his disappearance, it came from an unlikely source - a senior diplomat of the country that had jailed him. China’s ambassador in Kazakhstan Zhang Xiao told a state-owned news outlet that Muqai was sentenced to nine years on extremism charges, and in the same interview dismissed Kaken’s account of her family’s ordeal, which was reprinted by the US embassy in Kazakhstan. —AFP