British Uighur Muslim Calls On UK To Pressure China Over Brutal Crackdown

Two months earlier, Elkun tried to contact his mother Hepizem, to be told she could no longer answer his calls.

“My mother has seen a lot in her 78 years. She witnessed famine in her early teens during the war to support North Korea against American imperialism,” he said.

“She saw many other revolutions and campaigns: the ‘Great Leap Forward’ of the late 1950s when we were supposed to overtake capitalist England in steel production, and Mao’s great Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.

“When I called her after my visit she told me ’My dear son, this is going to be very difficult for you. If don’t tell you this, we will be in trouble, but if I do tell you, I know you’ll be very sad, but I have to tell you.

“Please can you stop calling us for a while? Over the last few weeks, whenever you call us, within an hour two or three policemen arrive in our home.

“They first ask about the content of our conversation on the phone, then they say I must stop speaking to you’.”

Elkun’s mother said she had been ordered to stop answering his calls, two years after being ordered by police to report every communication to them.

“I kept telling the police about your telephone calls but now this seems to be not enough,” she told her son.

Elkun, secretary of the International PEN Uighur Centre in London, a collaboration of writers aiming to raise awareness of the cause, added: “I passed a long and anxious week after that call. On the following Saturday, I called my parents’ number, but there was no answer.

“Then I tried my mum’s mobile, but the result was the same: no answer. I listened to a Chinese language Red Song coming from her mobile for a while, then the mobile signal slowly died away.

“It was pretty clear my mother was obeying orders and had left my call deliberately unanswered. I never spoke to her again, except for a very brief chat when my father died and since then I’ve lost contact with her altogether.”

Up to a million Uighur Muslims have been arbitrarily detained in re-education centres, where they are forcibly undergoing indoctrination programmes, which involve studying communist propaganda and renouncing fundamental pillars Islam.

Uighurs can be prosecuted for the most benign demonstration of their faith, such as wearing headscarves, growing “abnormal” beards and reading the Quran.

Their details, collected from facial recognition, identity cards and DNA samples, are fed into a database to determine their loyalty to communism.

Uighur Muslims find themselves the prime target of the ‘sinicization of religions’, a policy which the Communist Party secretary of Xinjiang, Chen Quanguo, previously modelled in Tibet to accelerate the political and cultural transformation of local people into Chinese culture.

“The Chinese think we are a threat to its social order because we have a faith that does not fit with Chinese  communist ideals,” said Elkun, who lives in London with his wife Rachel and their children.

“Right now I have no idea where my mother and cousins are. In fact, my whole village of about 3,000 is missing and nobody knows for sure where they have been taken.

“I have written to MPs here and met some in Westminster asking for help in locating my family and friends in China but they are just giving me empty words.

Elkun said he arrived in London when he was nearly 30 years old, “an ambitious young man full of optimism and hope for the future”.

“I wanted to defend and campaign for the rights of the Uighur people,” he added. “I expected that the situation of the Uighurs would change for the better, but year after year I only saw worse things happening to my people.

“Now I feel sad and depressed and can hardly sleep at night with worry. Why doesn’t anybody care?”