ze: 11pt”>“Families have been separated and small kids have been left alone. The families of the students who refused to return have been detained. Others have been forced to message their children and tell them to come back. It is totally controlled,” said Zulfikar Ali, a Uighur activist in Istanbul. “We never dreamt it could get so bad so fast. They started with the religious people, but they use Islamophobia to lie to the West and say that we are terrorists.”
Turkey initially took a supportive stance towards the Uighurs, accepting 173 escapees who had been imprisoned in Thailand in July 2015. On the eve of a visit to China in the same month President Erdogan said that he was raising concerns about the treatment of the Uighurs “at the highest level”.
But since 2017 China has offered a series of lifelines to the struggling Turkish economy, including large investments in infrastructure projects and the extension of a $400 million credit swap last month. Emine Erdogan, the president’s wife, embraces traditional Chinese medicine and has hosted a conference on the subject in Istanbul. In March, China shipped an unspecified Covid-19 drug to the Turkish health ministry.
As relations have warmed Mr Erdogan has stopped talking about the Uighurs’ plight, and many living in exile in Turkey have been arrested and threatened with deportation.
Mr Parac was detained for a time in November 2017, two months after he published a book of poetry. Like many others, he is now unable to renew his Turkish residency and is living without documents, in fear of being stopped again by the police. Having spent three years in prison in the late 1990s, he knows what fate awaits him back in Xinjiang.
“If I go back and it is just death waiting for me it is no problem. But the thing is the torture, it is unimaginable,” he said. “For people like us, without papers, deportation is easy. All the time I am in fear.”
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