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China's expanding war on Islam: Now they're coming for the Kazakhs.
Source: Washington Post
China’s expanding war on Islam: Now they’re coming for the Kazakhs.
It’s not just Uighurs. Muslims across the border are also caught in the crackdown.
By Reid Standish
Reid Standish, a former editor at Foreign Policy magazine, is a freelance journalist based in Astana, Kazakhstan, covering Central Asia.
March 1
ALMATY, KAZAKHSTAN
Sometimes Zharqynbek Otan can be found in the middle of the night, standing stiffly at attention beside the bed he shares with his wife, Shynar Kylysheva. She says his memory fails him, and he periodically wanders off into the streets of Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city. When his family manages to find him, he has difficulty recognizing them and resists returning home. Otan, a 31-year-old cook, spent nearly two years in various forms of detention in neighboring China, including in one of the notorious “reeducation” camps in Xinjiang, the massive western region that shares a 1,100-mile border with Kazakhstan. His wife petitioned tirelessly for his release from a camp in Zhaosu County, but when he came home in late 2018, he brought the trauma of his ordeal back across the border with him: Otan is not the man he was.
Cases like his are common in this part of the country. And they represent a significant shift in Beijing’s repressive approach to Muslim minorities. For decades, China has suppressed the language and faith of its Muslim citizens. But until recently, the effort has been contained largely within China’s own borders. Now the sweep has come to include the fluid region where Chinese nationals and Kazakh citizens have long moved freely back and forth between their countries, with those on opposite sides of the border mingling and marrying and working among one another.
Like thousands of other ethnic Kazakhs caught up in the crackdown, Otan is a Chinese national married to a Kazakh citizen and living in Kazakhstan as a legal resident. He traveled to China in late 2016 to obtain documents necessary for taking Kazakh citizenship. Instead, officials arrested him, seized his passport and sent him to a camp in January 2017, Otan says, where he lived alongside people whose ethnic identities, distinct from the Han majority that controls China, seem to scare Beijing. Prisoners at these places are taught to abandon their Turkic-based mother tongues and renounce outward displays of Islam. And while the targets have for years been supposed domestic enemies, China now pursues some Kazakhs with the same zeal — cleaving families and even violating Kazakhstan’s sovereignty to send them for reeducation in the expanding camp system.
-snip-
It’s not just Uighurs. Muslims across the border are also caught in the crackdown.
By Reid Standish
Reid Standish, a former editor at Foreign Policy magazine, is a freelance journalist based in Astana, Kazakhstan, covering Central Asia.
March 1
ALMATY, KAZAKHSTAN
Sometimes Zharqynbek Otan can be found in the middle of the night, standing stiffly at attention beside the bed he shares with his wife, Shynar Kylysheva. She says his memory fails him, and he periodically wanders off into the streets of Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city. When his family manages to find him, he has difficulty recognizing them and resists returning home. Otan, a 31-year-old cook, spent nearly two years in various forms of detention in neighboring China, including in one of the notorious “reeducation” camps in Xinjiang, the massive western region that shares a 1,100-mile border with Kazakhstan. His wife petitioned tirelessly for his release from a camp in Zhaosu County, but when he came home in late 2018, he brought the trauma of his ordeal back across the border with him: Otan is not the man he was.
Cases like his are common in this part of the country. And they represent a significant shift in Beijing’s repressive approach to Muslim minorities. For decades, China has suppressed the language and faith of its Muslim citizens. But until recently, the effort has been contained largely within China’s own borders. Now the sweep has come to include the fluid region where Chinese nationals and Kazakh citizens have long moved freely back and forth between their countries, with those on opposite sides of the border mingling and marrying and working among one another.
Like thousands of other ethnic Kazakhs caught up in the crackdown, Otan is a Chinese national married to a Kazakh citizen and living in Kazakhstan as a legal resident. He traveled to China in late 2016 to obtain documents necessary for taking Kazakh citizenship. Instead, officials arrested him, seized his passport and sent him to a camp in January 2017, Otan says, where he lived alongside people whose ethnic identities, distinct from the Han majority that controls China, seem to scare Beijing. Prisoners at these places are taught to abandon their Turkic-based mother tongues and renounce outward displays of Islam. And while the targets have for years been supposed domestic enemies, China now pursues some Kazakhs with the same zeal — cleaving families and even violating Kazakhstan’s sovereignty to send them for reeducation in the expanding camp system.
-snip-
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/chinas-expanding-war-on-islam-now-theyre-coming-for-the-kazakhs/2019/03/01/16ebbe76-38ff-11e9-a2cd-307b06d0257b_story.html