Kazakh family members plead for the release of loved ones

Kingsnor Ayatikhan and his two sons
(Photo: ChinaAid)

ChinaAid


(Bole, Xinjiang—April 14, 2018) Two Kazakh citizens are pleading for their spouses, who have been detained in China as part of a larger crackdown on ethnic minorities in the region.

On April 7, Matina Camila, a Kazakh citizen, posted a video online saying that her husband, Wospanihari Ahezori, was summoned by the national security bureau in Bole, Xinjiang for “a conversation” and arrested upon his return to China. Camila said her husband’s family recently learned that he is being detained in the Bole Detention Center. The police refused to reveal his charges and the reason behind his arrest, and ChinaAid’s calls to the Bole’s public security bureau went unanswered.

Camila said that she called friends still living in Xinjiang in hopes of finding more information about her husband, but no one had heard from him. Camila currently lives with her two sons in Kazakhstan, and she sought the help of Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She became a Kazakh citizen in 2003.

Matina Camila
(Photo: ChinaAid)

In a similar video posted on the same day, Kingsnor Ayatikhan urged Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and international society to intervene on behalf of his wife, Kingshaz Gudarnu. The couple had grown up in Xinjiang, but Gudarnu went to school in Kazakhstan starting at age 10. On June 15, 2016, she was arrested while visiting family members in China, and no one has heard from her since.

Recently, Ayatikhan received information that his wife is in a “political training center,” the official name for the detention camps in Xinjiang where mostly Uyghur and Kazakh citizens are detained in order to teach them Communist propaganda. Ayatikhan is now raising the couple’s two children himself.

He said, “When she left, the older child was two, and the younger one was only eight months. They often ask for their mother. We live in Kazakhstan now. I have to lock them at home when I leave for work at 8 a.m. My children have to starve and wait for me the entire day. I’m worried that something may happen to them I hope that Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs can help reunite me with my wife.”

According to a Kazakh who formerly lived in China, Xinjiang police mostly detain Kazakh people who have a Kazakhstan green card or have applied for immigration, and they use all possible means to lure back former Chinese citizens who have already immigrated to Kazakhstan so that they can arrest them as soon as they return to China. Sometimes, the police threaten to cancel retirement pensions in order to summon retired residents back to China. They are held at “political training centers” if they come back.

Recently, 20 Kazakh inmates at a “political training center” had to be hospitalized after suffering mental breakdowns from torture.

ChinaAid exposes abuses, such as those experienced by Kazakhs in Xinjiang, in order to stand in solidarity with the persecuted and promote religious freedom, human rights, and rule of law.


ChinaAid Media Team
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Kazakh family members plead for the release of loved ones

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