Mihrigul Musa also leafed through the thousands of photos released earlier this week following an unprecedented hack of police servers in Xinjiang. “At first I didn’t dare, afraid to meet my brother or mother.” Musa lives in Norway, and in a previous leak already got an insight into what happened to her relatives and friends.
“It’s about two cousins, old neighbors, my old chemistry teacher,” she says. Their sentences varied widely. From five years for ‘religious extremism’, for example wearing a beard, to 11 years and 11 months for ‘disturbing public order’, the documents say. “They were lucky,” Musa sighs. “From 2019, the penalties went up even further.”
She says UN Commissioner Bachelet only needs to walk the streets to get an idea of the scale of the convictions. “People are missing behind almost every door because they’ve been arrested,” she says. “It’s impossible to close your eyes to that.”
City locked
In 2018, about 12 percent of the population was imprisoned in Konasheher, where Musa comes from. Bachelet is visiting the Kashgar region, which also includes Konasheher, during her visit, which has been in the works since 2018. But spontaneous meetings are impossible, officially because of corona.
Apart from that, a substantial number of Uyghurs have been released from re-education camps in the years after 2019. An unknown number of people have been forced to work or are in more severe detention for extended periods of time. It is unclear what Bachelet will see from this. So far, no announcements have been made about her precise agenda. Reports came out of the capital Ürümqi this week that parts of the city are on lockdown.
At the end of 2020, correspondent Sjoerd den Daas for Nieuwsuur made this report about the fate of the Uyghurs:
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