The Missing Uyghur Children
“I don’t know if my children are dead or alive”: Uyghur parents share the anguish of being separated from their children.
By
April 21, 2021
Advertisement
Maryem Abdulhamid, 47, is a mother of four children. She fled Xinjiang and came to Istanbul in 2016 with only two of her children at the time. Meryam was pregnant with her fourth child when she decided to leave Xinjiang, fearing that she would be persecuted by Chinese authorities for having another child. Abdulhamid’s third daughter, Rizwangul, was just 12 years old the last time she saw her and was left in the care of her husband back in 2016.
The Globe and Mail Bookmark Please log in to listen to this story. Also available in French and Mandarin. Log In Create Free Account
Getting audio file . This translation has been automatically generated and has not been verified for accuracy. Full Disclaimer
Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is warning Beijing of potential repercussions from the international community after its envoy to Canada rejected reports of genocide, forced labour and relocations of China’s Uyghur population.
Ambassador Cong Peiwu held a virtual news conference Wednesday with select Canadians news outlets, including The Globe and Mail, in which he faced questions about Parliament’s recent vote declaring that genocide was being committed against Uyghurs in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region.
Advertisement
Names in this story have been changed to protect people in this article from retribution.
At a popular Uyghur restaurant in Istanbul’s bustling Zeytinburnu district, Kerim, a young man from Urumqi, serves customers generous plates of shish kebabs, laghman noodles, and pilaf rice. He points to a sign in the window of the traditional noodle house which says in Chinese, English, and Turkish: “Chinese do not enter.” The shopkeepers put up the sign after numerous unknown people repeatedly came in to watch them, take photos of them, and intimidate them.
“People keep disappearing here, so we can’t relax,” he says.
China possibly carried out genocide against Uyghurs and other minority Muslims in its western region of Xinjiang, said a commission of the United States Congress in a new report. The report, released by The Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), stated that the Chinese government and Communist Party have taken unprecedented steps to extend their repressive policies through censorship, intimidation, and the detention of people in China for exercising their fundamental human rights. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) where new evidence emerged that crimes against humanity and possibly genocide are occurring, and in Hong Kong, where the one country, two systems framework has been effectively dismantled, read a report released on Thursday.