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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.”

href=”http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2020/07/27/2020072701670.html”>Chosun Ilbo – a defector does seem to have returned recently to the North, to escape investigation of sexual assault in the Seoul suburb of Gimpo where he lived. But to cross over the border he would have needed to undertake an arduous swim of several hours, which would seem to rule out any Covid-19 infection.

Most likely, the pretense that the North is coronavirus-free is becoming increasingly hard to maintain. Blaming an outbreak now on South Korea and a returning defector would be a typical Pyongyang move.

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ent" by the Burmese government, then you can be sure they'll use it. China in particular. They won't want any unpleasant talk of genocide in the world of international justice, given their treatment of the Uighurs. 

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[Photos © José De Rocco]

De Rocco previously – Street patterns.

al incentives [to encourage people to have more children] the state has given out in a long time.“ 

Yet, he pointed out that “many households are unhappy that the stipends are so small in value” and that “the stipend is enough to purchase 1.8 kilograms of rice, so it will only help families feed themselves for a couple of days.”

A stipend enough to buy 1.8 kilograms of rice? How generous.

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.”

. Guerniz district. Fez. 1984. © Bruno Barbey | Magnum Photos

Mausoleum of Moulay Idriss where the poor gather. Fez. Morocco. 1984. © Bruno Barbey | Magnum Photos

The walls of the old city. Chechaouen. Morocco. 1972. © Bruno Barbey | Magnum Photos

These images, and more, can be found in Barbey's 2003 book My Morocco – currently available from Amazon at the eye-watering price of £564.

The top image of Tangiers is now available as a limited edition 8×10″ Magnum stamped print from the Magnum shop.

Amusing but sadly accurate from Philip Collins in the Times, in a piece arguing that Keir Starmer should make a definitive break from the Corbyn era by kicking the bearded buffoon out of the Labour Party:

The chaos of the Corbyn leadership is what happens if you take the most stupid person in the building and put him in charge. Public life can only bear so much stupidity. Bereft of intellectual weight, with nothing much in his head and painfully conscious of the deficiency, Mr Corbyn’s options were to lean heavily on unctuous self-righteousness or, when that failed, to lash out. Unable to provide good reasons, or any reasons, for his decisions, he simply acted with erratic impunity and got instantly testy if anyone questioned his authority. He was always a rather pathetic figure, if briefly quite a dangerous one. Meanwhile his entourage of sycophants, the Milnes, Murphys and McCluskeys, went out to argue for a man they always regarded as a useful idiot.

To quote myself from August 2015, just before he became Labour leader:

There's what I'm tempted to call a category mistake at the heart of Jeremy Corbyn's campaign for Labour leadership. Corbyn is an eternal rebel; a thorn in the side of the establishment. He could never have survived if his constituency – my constituency, Islington North – wasn't solid Labour. Labour's success, and the particular make-up of the North Islington population, has given him the platform to parade his virtue simply because he's never had to get his hands dirty through the actual business of wielding power. No Labour government in the past would have dreamed of giving him any kind of cabinet responsibility. As it is he's been free to indulge himself in every "progressive" cause, no matter how absurd. Cuba, Venezuela, the IRA, out of NATO…he's never yet met an Islamist he didn't want to share a platform with. It's a politics that hasn't grown up.

He should perhaps have gone over to George Galloway's Respect; that's where his views would have been most at home. But then, of course, he would have lost his seat. You could argue, I suppose, that it's better for him to remain in Labour (inside pissing out…): the party needs contrarian voices, etc. etc… Well…maybe. I can even see why he threw his hat into the leadership ring – to liven things up, and spark off some debate.

But an actual leader? That's not the kind of politician he is. He'd be a disaster. And I can't help wondering how much he himself is alarmed at the very real prospect of gaining power. It's just not his style.

As I say, it's a category mistake. The man's a student politician, a self-indulgent campaigner for any and every "progressive" cause. He's not someone to lead a political party that is seriously aiming for power.

I've seen Corbyn out on his bike twice in the past week. I was tempted to hurl abuse but it's not really my style, and anyway he looked a bit sad and, yes, pathetic.

39;s very odd how he comes up with this vile antisemitic garbage, and then claims accusations of antisemitism against Farrakhan are trickery. Does he perhaps not understand what the term 'antisemitism' means?