When no excuses are needed to penalize someone simply for existing, anything serves as an excuse. Even eating a meal.
According to a Bitter Winter report by Kok Bayraq, to avoid being accused of participation in “illegal gatherings,” one must “stand up and leave immediately” if one hears the regime being criticized at a restaurant table. And Quddusjan Abduweli (shown above), a Uyghur, neglected to do this.
The Uyghurs, Muslims who live mostly in the Xinjiang region of China, are one of the groups that the Chinese government subjects to especially severe repression.
Sehibe Sayramoglu’s 24-year-old brother, Quddusjan Abduweli, was sentenced to five years and four months in prison for “disturbing public order by illegal gathering.” Sehibe lives in the USA.
According to the court, the process of “illegal” gathering is as follows: Quddusjan Abduweli and a friend come to Qumul from Bortala to look for work; their friends from Qumul meet them at a restaurant. At the table, there was a conversation about a friend who had been convicted two years before. Somebody commented that he was a good man and was just caught up in the wind of politics.
Quddusjan’s “crime” was to listen to those provocative words instead of standing up and leaving at once an “illegal” meeting where a prisoner was praised as a good man and the decisions of the state authorities were implicitly criticized.
When Sehibe originally posted about the matter on Twitter soon after her brother was detained, the Chinese embassy in Istanbul called her and told her to lay off. (She was living in Turkey at the time.) She refused. Embassy officials also threatened her parents to try to get her to stop reporting the situation.
“I was on the phone with my dad while this was happening,” she told Radio Free Asia. “They pressured me, insisting that I should stop posting on social media. If I didn’t comply, they threatened to arrest my parents and cut off communication from WeChat.”
Sehibe says that her brother has done nothing wrong and that as long as he is being held, she will never stop fighting for his release.
