A member of Xinjiang’s government-targeted Muslim population disappears. His loved ones may or may not receive official word of his detention and imprisonment. One day, he comes home, the worse for wear, perhaps even critically ill. Or he never comes home.
Radio Free Asia reports on the government-inflicted tribulations of Mexmutjan Memet and his family.
A Uyghur man serving a 20-year sentence in northwest China’s Xinjiang region is in critical condition due to poor conditions at his prison, according to his wife, who has called for pressure on Chinese authorities to release him and reunite him with his family in Turkey. . . .
Memet’s story is all too common for Uyghurs who have moved abroad only to be arrested on their return to China for actions deemed crimes by the state, including exercising their right under the country’s constitution to uphold their cultural and religious traditions. . . .
Éhsan recently contacted RFA Uyghur expressing concern for her husband’s well-being after she learned that he had become severely ill in prison from liver disease and related complications and is “in need of urgent medical attention.”
“The police said . . . that his condition is severe and requires medical attention,” she said. “They also said that if anything goes wrong with him, they won’t be responsible.”
It is probably impossible to separately report on all of the Chinese state’s unjust incarcerations of members of targeted populations—in part because family members, friends, and neighbors living in Xinjiang may be reluctant to talk to reporters for fear of being arrested themselves, in part because the number of victims is so large. Radio Free Asia and other sites steadily chronicle the plight of individual Muslims caught up in the torturous prison system. But since 2017, China has imprisoned more than a million Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Uyghurs left comparatively free in the region are constantly surveilled and are at risk of being forcibly sterilized or impressed into forced labor.
Memet’s family has been hit hard by the government’s perverse mission of acculturation. After he returned to China from Turkey in 2016, “at least seven” members of his family were imprisoned, including his brothers and his mother. Now in her 80s, she too became seriously ill while incarcerated. She was released this year.
