Uyghur activist says her work led to sibling’s detention in China

Rushan Abbas tells of 61-year-old family member’s arrest days after she spoke publicly in the US about mass imprisonment of Uyghurs in East Turkistan, she lives with the belief that, because of her activism in the West, her sister, Gulshan Abbas (61), is in detention in China and denied contact with the outside world.

Abbas lives in the United States and is a US citizen, but was born in East Turkistan. A massive 1.6 million sq km in size, East Turkistan was seized by the Chinese Communist Party in 1949 and incorporated into the People’s Republic of China. It has a population of approximately 25 million, most of whom are ethnic Turks and Muslims, but an increasing proportion of whom are Han Chinese, the majority ethnic group in China.

The stories of her childhood told to Abbas include being “grabbed from my mum’s arms when the Red Guards came to take my mother, how my father was in so-called re-education detention, and how my grandfather was in jail, because he was labelled as nationalist”, she told a meeting in UCD this week.

She was there to speak about the “Strike Hard” campaign launched by President Xi Jinping’s Beijing regime in East Turkistan in 2014, but began by saying that the campaign, which involves detention camps, mass electronic surveillance, children being separated from their families, and clampdowns on language, religion and Uyghur culture generally, is just the latest in recurring waves of repression that go back to 1949.

In the 1950s leaders of the Uyghur community were labelled nationalists, she said. During the 1960s they were called counter-revolutionaries. Then, in the 1980s, after the communist regime in Beijing opened links with the West, there was a thaw. This was when Abbas studied in Xinjiang University and took part in student activism on the Uyghur issue.

But when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and countries such as Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan got their independence, the Uyghurs were labelled as separatists. And later again, after the 9/11 attacks on the US, she said, “the Uyghurs became terrorists”.

By then Abbas was married and living in the US. Her sister, Gulshan, a retired doctor who lives in East Turkistan but has daughters living in the US, visited her in the spring of 2016, at a time when the Uyghur diaspora already knew about the “Strike Hard” campaign in their homeland.

“She left [for Xinjiang] in early August. Rushan Abbas begged her sister to stay but Gulshan believed in the system, so she returned. I am not a political person. ”I have been obeying all the rules and regulations, so I should be fine”, She said.

Soon after this, Abbas said, members of her husband’s family started to go missing in East Turkistan. “My parents-in-law, three sisters-in-law, their husbands, a brother-in-law and his wife, and 14 nieces and nephews.” By early 2017 Abbas was hearing that up to a million people were being detained in detention camps. She stopped contacting her sister directly; at least it got her into trouble.

It was because of what happened to her husband’s family that Abbas started to speak publicly in the US about the events in East Turkistan. On September 5th, 2018, she took part in a public talk in Washington DC that was posted on YouTube. Six days later “they took my own sister”. Despite this, she decided to double down on her activism and founded the US-based Campaign for Uyghurs. Her advocacy “is at the cost of my own sister’s freedom, so it is very personal to me”.

The use of enforced labour in East Turkistan is part of the Chinese Communist Party’s plan to “make genocide a profitable business”, she said, and she asked the Irish public not to buy Chinese products that might have links to Uyghur forced labour and "slavery”.

During her talk in UCD, Abbas called for the closure of the Confucius Institute, a joint venture on the campus between UCD and a Chinese university that is part of an international network of such institutes. Abbas said the institutes are used by the Beijing regime to spread disinformation about not just East Turkistan but also about repression in Tibet, Hong Kong and south Mongolia.

Uyghur women are being subjected to forced abortions and sterilizations. Young women are being pressured to marry Han Chinese men or risk their entire families being detained, something Abbas said constituted “government-sponsored mass rape”.

Last year, the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights issued a report on East Turkistan that said “the extent of arbitrary and discriminatory detention of members of Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim groups, pursuant to law and policy, in the context of restrictions and deprivation more generally of fundamental rights enjoyed individually and collectively, may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”

Both the Trump and Biden administrations have referred to what is happening as “genocide”. At the UCD meeting, associate professor at the School of Politics and International Relations, Alex Dukalskis, said Beijing’s aim seemed to be “to destroy independent Uyghur identity, which is seen by the government as a political threat”.