The Uyghur Diaspora’s Desperate Search for Family Members in China

Every exiled Uyghur carries a load: the “enormous pain, the hole in your heart, the burden on your shoulder and the nightmare in your sleep,” in the words of Yalkun Uluyol. Uluyol’s father is serving a 16-year prison sentence; an uncle has been condemned to life; and 30 or so other family members are serving long jail terms. Those not imprisoned have become coerced laborers or have simply disappeared.
The pain of separation never recedes; in fact it increases with the passage of time, he told The Diplomat. “Every exiled Uyghur feels like this to some extent or another.”
Seven years have passed since mass roundups, internments, and extrajudicial jail terms were foisted on the 15 million or so Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples in his homeland, East Turkistan. Chen Quanguo, fresh from quelling dissent in Tibet was appointed as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region’s new governor in August 2016; his remit was to do the same in East Turkistan (Xinjiang).
Under Chen, and on the orders of top leader Xi Jinping, more than 1 million Turkic peoples were swept into several hundred purpose-built, so-called vocational training camps scattered around the region, where “wayward” residents – mostly Uyghurs – were sent for “re-education” and to be “cured” of “ideological viruses” and the “mental illness” of Islam.
While the camps have mostly emptied since then, in their place a forced labor policy has been rolled out across East Turkistan, channeling camp “graduates” and scooping up 2-3 million “surplus rural laborers” deemed to be “idly” kicking their heels and thus “easily exploited by evildoers.”
Uluyol, 30, is an Istanbul-based foreign policy researcher and founder of the Uyghur Rights Monitor, a group set up in November 2023 to investigate Uyghur rights issues. The pain of losing his father has not eased despite the passage of time. “The world forgets,” said Uluyol, “but our relatives and friends are unforgettable.” In fact, he calls them the “unforgettable forgottens,” because while the rest of the world has largely moved on, those with missing or detained relatives cannot.
“People tend to believe that by time passing we can forget them and things become less painful. No! They do not,” he said emphatically.
Most diaspora Uyghurs have lost contact with loved ones in their homeland since 2017, when communication with overseas relatives could land you in jail. The majority were deleted from personal WeChat accounts, China’s main social media platform, leaving them with few options for contacting loved ones still within China. With no legal process or paper trail for the disappeared, Uyghurs abroad follow rabbit trails and an unreliable rumor mill as they search for the fate of family and friends left behind in East Turkistan (Xinjiang).
https://thediplomat.com/