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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By U.S. Mission Kazakhstan | 7 April, 2020 | Topics: Human Rights | Tags: human rights
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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By U.S. Mission Kazakhstan | 3 April, 2020 | Topics: History, Human Rights | Tags: human rights
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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By U.S. Mission Kazakhstan | 23 March, 2020 | Topics: Human Rights | Tags: human rights
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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By U.S. Mission Kazakhstan | 20 March, 2020 | Topics: Human Rights | Tags: human rights
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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By U.S. Mission Kazakhstan | 15 March, 2020 | Topics: History, Human Rights | Tags: human rights
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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By U.S. Mission Kazakhstan | 9 March, 2020 | Topics: History, Human Rights | Tags: human rights
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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By U.S. Mission Kazakhstan | 29 February, 2020 | Topics: History, Human Rights | Tags: human rights
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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By U.S. Mission Kazakhstan | 21 February, 2020 | Topics: History, Human Rights | Tags: human rights
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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By U.S. Mission Kazakhstan | 5 February, 2020 | Topics: History, Human Rights | Tags: human rights
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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By U.S. Mission Kazakhstan | 31 January, 2020 | Topics: History, Human Rights | Tags: human rights
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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By U.S. Mission Kazakhstan | 24 January, 2020 | Topics: History, Human Rights | Tags: human rights
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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By U.S. Mission Kazakhstan | 15 January, 2020 | Topics: History, Human Rights | Tags: human rights
