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An ethnic Uyghur woman jailed for \u201cattempting to flee the country\u201d has died due to complications from a medical condition that was left untreated while in detention, according to her husband, who said that authorities illegally detained his wife after she applied for a passport.<\/p>\n
Hayrigul, 42, was arrested in January in the municipality of Tianjin where she had lived since relocating from Kashgar (in Chinese, Kashi) prefecture, in northwest China\u2019s Xinjiang region, a decade earlier, her husband Zhang Long recently told RFA\u2019s Uyghur Service.<\/p>\n
Zhang, who is an ethnic Hui Muslim, said his wife first came under the scrutiny of authorities in 2015 after the two of them traveled to her home village of Boz\u2019eriq in Maralbeshi (Bachu) county\u2019s Siriqbuya (Selibuya) township to apply for a passport from the county government\u2014a standard procedure amid tighter restrictions facing Uyghurs who hope to travel abroad.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe went to her hometown to apply for a passport for her \u2026 [and] after applying we returned to Tianjin,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the end of December 2015, I received a phone call from the Maralbeshi county police station saying that the passport was being processed and would be ready soon, but requesting that we go to our nearest police station [in Tianjin] for her fingerprints to be taken.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hayrigul had her photograph, fingerprints, and blood samples taken by police\u2014also a routine collection of data that is digitized and stored on a chip in Chinese biometric passports\u2014and Zhang sent the information to the station in Maralbeshi for processing.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn Jan. 19, 2016, my wife was suddenly arrested in Tianjin,\u201d Zhang said, adding that he later learned that several of her family members had also been detained, including her brother Eli, who ran a restaurant in neighboring Hebei province\u2019s Cangzhou city and was taken into custody two weeks earlier.<\/p>\n
He said many Uyghurs who sell kebabs in Tianjin had recently been accused of planning to leave the country illegally and that authorities \u201cclaimed my wife helped them by interpreting for them over the telephone.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cShe was just a housewife, but she was arrested for the same reason as her brother was accused\u2014attempting to flee overseas,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
According to Zhang, \u201cmany Uyghurs\u201d were arrested around the same time as Hayrigul, though most were later released.<\/p>\n
\u201cI believe that around four people were punished,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Zhang noted that his wife\u2019s home township was the site of a violent incident in November 2013, when Chinese authorities gunned down nine Uyghur youths who attacked a police station and bludgeoned to death two auxiliary policemen, as well as one on April 21 of the same year, when 21 people were killed in clashes between Uyghurs and security forces.<\/p>\n
But he and Hayrigul had moved with her daughter from her first marriage to Tianjin shortly after their wedding in 2007, while Hayrigul\u2019s mother, one of her sisters, and her brother had joined them soon after, Zhang said, adding that the family had no link to the incidents that took place six years later.<\/p>\n
Hayrigul, who at the time of her arrest suffered from severe stomach pains, was transferred to a detention facility in Xinjiang\u2019s capital Urumqi three days later.<\/p>\n
Within weeks, Hayrigul\u2019s condition had worsened, and on Feb. 18 an official with the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau told Zhang to pick up his wife and bring her home for medical treatment, without specifying what was wrong with her.<\/p>\n
The People’s Hospital of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region soon diagnosed Hayrigul with stomach cancer and, after six months of treatment, she succumbed to the disease. Her body was sent to Tianjin, where she was buried.<\/p>\n
Zhang said that he has since petitioned the Tianjin People\u2019s Court, the Intermediate People\u2019s Court, and the Supreme People\u2019s Court in the capital Beijing, over what he called the illegal detention of his wife and neglect during her incarceration that led to her death, but has yet to receive a response.<\/p>\n
Telephone calls to Xinjiang\u2019s head office of the Criminal Investigation Department and the Shi Cheng police substation in Tianjin\u2014the couple\u2019s local station\u2014went unanswered this week. An officer on duty at the Seriqbuya police station hung up the phone when an RFA reporter requested information about Hayrigul\u2019s case.<\/p>\n
Anti-terrorism law<\/strong><\/p>\nIlshat Hassan, the president of Washington-based exile group Uyghur American Association (UAA), called Hayrigul\u2019s case a \u201creal illustration of how Uyghurs are victimized\u201d under a December 2015 anti-terrorism law that bans the dissemination of images or information regarding \u201cterrorist\u201d activities and authorizes operations by security forces beyond China’s borders.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn Chinese law there are too many vague concepts\u2014for example, \u2018terror\u2019 and \u2018combating terror\u2019 were never clearly defined under the anti-terrorism law,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is so broad that the normal practice of religion can be defined as terrorism, so any Muslim can become a target. We can see this from the tragic fate of Hayrigul.\u201d<\/p>\n
Until China\u2019s government abandons such laws and establishes an \u201cindependent judicial system,\u201d he said, cases such as Hayrigul\u2019s will continue to occur.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe vagueness of the law causes the illegality of the law\u2014in this case, we can see that it led to illegal entrapment,\u201d Hassan said.<\/p>\n
\u201cDifferent people interpret the law in different ways and use it to their advantage,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn Hayrigul\u2019s case, the Chinese government used this law against her simply because she was Uyghur. Therefore she was considered to be a threat and was arrested. In the end, to avoid letting it happen in prison, she was released to go home and die.\u201d<\/p>\n
Observers have said the anti-terrorism law could be used to target peaceful dissent and religious activities among ethnic minorities in China, particularly among the Uyghur ethnic group.<\/p>\n
China regularly conducts \u201cstrike hard\u201d campaigns in Xinjiang, including police raids on Uyghur households, restrictions on Islamic practices, and curbs on the culture and language of the Uyghur people, including videos and other material.<\/p>\n
While China blames some Uyghurs for “terrorist” attacks, experts outside China say Beijing has exaggerated the threat from the Uyghurs and that repressive domestic policies are responsible for an upsurge in violence there that has left hundreds dead since 2009.<\/p>\n
Reported by Jilil Kashgary for RFA\u2019s Uyghur Service.\u00a0Translated by RFA\u2019s Uyghur Service.\u00a0Written in English by Joshua Lipes.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Radio Free Asia An ethnic Uyghur woman jailed for \u201cattempting to flee the country\u201d has died due to complications from a medical condition that was left untreated while in detention, according to her husband, who said that authorities illegally detained his wife after she applied for a passport. Hayrigul, 42, was arrested in January in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chinas-uyghur-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=667"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":668,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667\/revisions\/668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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