There’s no place that’s safe for Uighurs anymore

urt us both.”

Mr Yalkun was unsurprised by the tactic behind the call, or the presence of a silent third party throughout the conversation. Since the start of Beijing’s renewed repression of the mostly Muslim Uighur population in Xinjiang in 2017, activists among the diaspora in Europe and North America have found themselves the targets of an intensifying campaign by the Chinese authorities to stifle dissent, involving threatening phone calls, emotional blackmail, texts and the recruitment of spies from within Uighur communities living abroad.

The use of family members in China to call up activists in exile, in conversations controlled by the security agencies — a tactic human rights organisations refer to as “hostage diplomacy” — is now widespread and there is a growing sense among Uighurs that no corner of the world is free from state repression. […]

The more attention has turned to the Uighurs’ plight, the greater the efforts to silence activists abroad. At the EU-China summit in Brussels on April 9, 2019, Chinese officials photographed the faces of Uighurs and Tibetan protesters. A Chinese consular car with blacked-out windows was seen trailing protesters at a demonstration in the Belgian capital in 2018.

Uighurs living in Germany, Sweden, Finland and Belgium have been asked by officials in Xinjiang to spy on their neighbours and friends in Europe or to reveal sensitive personal information such as their home addresses, employers or national ID numbers. […]

Rights organisations say the Chinese campaign abroad is intensifying. “There’s a trend and it is increasing,” said Peter Irwin, senior advocacy and communications officer at the Uighur Human Rights Project. “It tracks the attention to the internment camps. The more the attention from the press and from governments, so the more the intimidation from the Chinese.

“The aim is to create a chilling effect on the speech of Uighurs abroad. What they are trying to do in some ways is replicate the system of control that exists in Xinjiang today on foreign soil. So it seems there’s no place that’s safe for Uighurs anymore.”