These stories originally published on believermag.com were recorded in Almaty by Ben Mauk, a travel writer and journalist based in Berlin, in collaboration with the Atajurt volunteer-run human rights group. In 2018, Ben began to travel to Kazakhstan to interview the family members of Xinjiang’s prisoners and disappeared. He also interviewed former detainees who described their …
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U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE Office of the Spokesperson FACT SHEET July 1, 2020 Issuance of Xinjiang Supply Chain Business Advisory The U.S. Department of State, along with the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security are issuing a business advisory to caution businesses about the …
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Rahima works in a clothing workshop. Yes, I was in the camp. For more than a year… We were thinking of our children, you know? And their future. That’s why we moved here. We came because it’s the motherland. All Kazakhs should return to Kazakhstan! That’s what we were told. So, in 2013, we came: …
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Press Statement Michael R. Pompeo, Secretary of State June 29, 2020 The world received disturbing reports today that the Chinese Communist Party is using forced sterilization, forced abortion, and coercive family planning against Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang, as part of a continuing campaign of repression. German researcher Adrian Zenz’s shocking revelations are sadly …
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Razia (name changed to protect her identity) crouched behind the bushes along a highway in Kazakhstan, hiding every time a car passed by. She was determined to escape, fearful that her “owner” was chasing her and that she might have to return to the meaningless existence she had been trapped in for months. “I was …
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Bikamal has three children. The youngest two are in the room with us, crawling over everything. In China, my husband was working at the Karamay oil fields. He’s a steam worker, generating steam for the oil pumps. When he retired, we moved to Kazakhstan with our two children. Then my daughter was born here, in …
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No matter the occasion, whether an interview or a press conference, Gulzira never lets her young daughter out of sight. She is in her lap now, laughing and squirming. I saw enough while I was there. I want to speak. I want what happened to be published. The thing is, my relatives are against me. They’re …
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The photograph: a young man, head shaved, leaning on the bars of a hospital bed. He is wearing an Adidas jersey and has an intravenous cannula in his left arm, held in place by medical tape. Two women, one young and one old, are helping him stand. His gaze is urgent. I’ve been complaining since …
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My uncle Raman Zharkyn was born in Zhiek, a small hamlet in Kurty township. His name should be Rakhman. But it was a religious name—forbidden—so my family entered Raman in the ledger. He was a prominent man in our village, and in May 2017, he became the head of Zhiek. On November 20 of the …
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A café, empty and closed. Orynbek pauses often to make sure no one is listening behind the door. I don’t want to spend a long time talking to you. I was born in 1980 in a village in the district of Chuguchak. That’s the old Mongolian name; the Chinese call it Tacheng. It’s in the …
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Bilimbek comes from the village of Shunkyr, in the Altai Mountains, near Mongolia. There, he studied water engineering. In Kazakhstan, he is a herder. My wife was a schoolteacher, teaching Chinese calligraphy to Kazakh children. Most of her work was in China, so she kept her citizenship when we moved here with our daughter. She …
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Kulzhabek is wearing a blue takiya embroidered with swirls of gold. Beneath it, the face of a worried father. When my daughter was arrested, my niece told me not to call her. I’ll call you, she said. I was living here in Kazakhstan. My niece was in the village where it happened—the same village I come from, …
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My mother worked as a physics teacher in China her whole life. She retired and came here to help us with childcare when my wife went back to work. She kept visiting China once a year, though, for her pension. She went dutifully every year. On her most recent visit, authorities took her passport. Months …
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Magira is the oldest of three children. Her mother died a month before the family immigrated to Kazakhstan. Her father later remarried, but the stepmother is afraid to look for him. The task falls to Magira. We don’t have anything left in China. We gave up our land, our animals, everything to come to Kazakhstan. …
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That’s my family in the pictures. My wife and our three children. It’s been two and a half years. Here, this is our daughter Ulnur. She’s thirteen. She likes—I remember—she likes painting. She did well in school painting this and that. This is my daughter Gulnur, born in 2008. She was talented in mathematics. I …
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I’ll tell you a story that describes my father well. I met and fell in love with a girl from Kazakhstan. We planned to move there together and get married. I was living in China and we were both teaching at the music school in Ürümqi where we’d met. She was famous, actually, a famous …
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How did we meet? It was in a café in Almaty. March 8—International Women’s Day! [Laughs] He’d been living in Kazakhstan for a year. We introduced ourselves and exchanged numbers, and later he called me for a date. I was a college student at the time. I studied engineering at the Almaty University of Power …
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ZHEMISGUL: I’m a hairdresser in Taldy-Kurgan. Makeup, hair, skincare. SUNGKAR: I’m in college in Almaty. I’m a philosophy student. But I was still a schoolboy when our parents went to China. It was March 2017. I was in eleventh grade. Our family had some land that had been given to us by the government. My parents farmed …
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Shalkar hasn’t been to China since his parents brought him across the border, in 2003. But many of his relatives are there. He shows me appeals he has written to the European Court of Human Rights and the Kazakhstan Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Nothing has worked. In Kazakh we say “sister,” not “aunt.” The truth …
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Zharkynbek was in a camp for eight months. His escape still seems to surprise him. “I thought they were going to dangle my freedom in front of me forever,” he says. It was in some mountainous place. We drove out in a windowless van with a metal grate inside. I couldn’t see anything. Before, at …
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As Gulshan speaks, she grips a crumpled pack of tissues. Mostly men are taken to the camps. What happens then? The authorities send loyal Chinese families from the coast to live with the women in the homes of the disappeared. A Han Chinese man is sent to Xinjiang and placed in the house where the …
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Yerzat is an artist. He paints saturated landscapes of mountains and yurt-dotted meadows peopled by the nomadic warriors of centuries past. The village of his birth lies in the northernmost corner of Xinjiang, near the mountains that cross into modern-day Mongolia and Russia. There was no reason. You have to understand—none. My brother never committed …
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One wall of Atajurt’s office is covered with photographs of the known missing: hundreds of faces, maybe a thousand. Khalida, a small, persistent woman in her sixties, pulls me over to a corner to show me her family members. “Here,” she says. “And here, and here, and here, and here…” A small hamlet called Karagash is …
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A TYPICAL MUSLIM Zhumugali sits between his two sons. Every so often, he reaches out to touch the younger one. The older one is brooding. On Zhumugali’s T-shirt, a phrase in English: Head for the Hills. My wife is a housewife. She’s never worked. I think the only reason they’re holding her is to get to …
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In today’s splintered world, it would be easy to think that there is nothing upon which all nations can agree and all cultures can embrace as an integral part of their communities. But International Human Rights Day, celebrated on December 10, reminds us that it wasn’t so long ago that the world came together to …
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KAZAKHSTAN 2016 INTERNATIONAL RELIGIOUS FREEDOM REPORT Executive Summary The constitution defines the country as a secular state and provides for freedom of religion. In September the government created a new Ministry of Religious and Civil Society Affairs (MRCSA), taking responsibility for religious issues and the Committee for Religious Affairs (CRA) from the Ministry of Culture …
Read More» STATEMENT BY THE U.S. DIPLOMATIC MISSION IN KAZAKHSTAN Conviction of Kazakhstani Civil Society Activists Maks Bokayev and Talgat Ayan The decision of the Kazakhstani regional court in Atyrau to convict and sentence Kazakhstani citizens Maks Bokayev and Talgat Ayan to five years in prison each for their alleged roles in organizing peaceful demonstrations in the …
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