34 2GM Monday July 27 2020 | the times
Wo r l d
Red Bull distances
itself from Thai heir
Thailand The company behind
Red Bull has distanced itself from
one of the heirs to the family
business. Vorayuth Yoovidhya,
whose grandfather co-founded
TCP Group, was accused of
killing a police officer in 2012
when he crashed his Ferrari. A
police decision to drop all charges
against him provoked outrage.
The company said Mr Vorayuth
had no management role. (AFP)Taliban accuse Kabul
of prison deal betrayal
Afghanistan The Taliban have
accused the authorities of going
back on a prisoner swap meant to
facilitate peace talks. Suhail
Shaheen, a Taliban spokesman,
said that security forces were
arresting insurgents on their
release from prison. Javid Faisal,
of the National Security Council,
denied the claim, saying it was
the Taliban’s “way of sabotaging
the peace efforts”. (AFP)Security forces sent to
Darfur after 60 killed
Sudan More than 60 people have
been killed and another 60
wounded in fresh violence in the
West Darfur region of Sudan, UN
officials said. Abdalla Hamdok,
the prime minister, said earlier
that he would send in security
forces. The move came two days
after gunmen killed at least 20
civilians, including children, as
they returned to their fields for
the first time in years. (AFP)Texas tropical storm
threatens flood peril
United States The first Atlantic
hurricane of the year was
downgraded to a tropical storm
after bringing flash floods and
storm surges to south Texas and
northeast Mexico. Storm Hanna
made landfall 70 miles south of
Corpus Christi, a coronavirus
hotspot, and is due to bring a
life-threatening 1.8m storm surge
and up to 45cm of rain. No
casualties were reported. (AFP)Fears for 24 Rohingya
refugees on lost boat
Malaysia A Rohingya Muslim is
feared to be the only survivor
from a migrant boat carrying
25 people that disappeared after
running into trouble off the
island of Langkawi. No bodies
have been found. Malaysia has
increased maritime patrols since
coronavirus broke out and many
boats from Burma have been
turned back, provoking criticism
from human rights groups. (AFP)Putin hails ‘unequalled’
nuclear naval weapons
Russia The defence ministry is in
the final phase of testing to fit the
navy with hypersonic strike
weapons and underwater nuclear
drones, President Putin has
announced. He says that he does
not want an arms race but has
often spoken of a new generation
of unequalled nuclear arms that
can hit almost anywhere in the
world. They include a drone
carried by submarine and a
ship-launched cruise missile that
can travel at more than five times
the speed of sound. Mr Putin told
a naval parade at St Petersburg
that the force would get 40 new
vessels this year. He said that
the new weapons would bring
unique advantages. (Reuters)Some have been here for decades,
drawn by linguistic and cultural ties,
but most, like Mr Parac, arrived after
2013, as the Chinese state began in-
creasing its crackdown in Xinjiang
province.
Some were brought in by people
smugglers, using fake passports; others
arrived on Beijing-sponsored student
visas and ignored the calls to go back, or
travelled with organised holiday tours
and slipped their minders.
But since 2016, when the intern-
ments began, the doors have slammed
shut for the Uighurs still trying to leave
China — and for those in Turkey the
lines of communication have been cut.
“Families have been separated and
small kids have been left alone. TheFreedom weighs heavily on Abdure-
him Parac, a Uighur poet in exile. His
escape from Xinjiang province has
brought unknown punishments for the
loved ones he left behind, and in
Turkey, where he sought sanctuary,
Beijing’s shadow stalks him.
Mr Parac, 46, who fled China in 2013
after a decade and a half of imprison-
ments and surveillance, had planned to
bring his family after him once he
reached safety.
He arrived in Istanbul in the summer
of 2015 but when he contacted his wife
using QQ, a Chinese messaging app, he
learnt that she had been arrested. So
too had his father and five younger
brothers, while his 14-year-old daugh-
ter, the eldest of his six children, had
been sent to a Mandarin language
school, a precursor of the “re-education
camps” in which more than a million
Uighurs are now interned.
Now it is as if the Parac family had
never existed in China. A reporter who
asked after them in their hometown in
2018 was told that no one of that
name had ever lived there.
The only news Mr Parac
has received from home is
through friends who es-
caped to Turkey after him.
The last scrap to reach him
was that one of his children
had died in an accident and
another had been critically
injured, and he has spent the
three years since wonder-
ing which ones they
were.
He has also
heard that
his wife has
died in pris-
on. “It is worse than knowing for sure
that they have died,” he said.
“We are living in the age of
technology and communica-
tions, but that does not apply
for Uighurs. The Chinese
government is committing a
genocide, that is clear. To
hide this they have to cut the
communications, and that
is what they have done.”
About 30,000 Uighurs
live in Turkey, mostly in Is-
tanbul and the Anato-
lian city of Kayseri.Mute protest: a
Uighur activist
makes his pointGlobal reach Lamps, fairy lights and windmills decorated paths in Xingan county, southeast China, as part of a festival to promote rural tourism and development
China has forced Turkey to turn
against Uighurs, says exiled father
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 who had been imprisoned in Thai-
land in July 2015. On the eve of a visit to
China in the same month President Er-
dogan 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 Turk-
ish economy, including large invest-
ments 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
had published a book of poetry. Like
many others he is now unable to renew
his Turkish residency and is living with-
out 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 in Xinjiang.
“I always think a lot about this, I can’t
sleep,” he said. “If I go back and it is just
death waiting for me it is no problem.
But the thing is the torture, it is unimag-
inable. For people like us, without
papers, deportation is easy. All the time
I am in fear.”Analysis
C
alls for
autonomy in
Xinjiang,
Tibet and
Hong Kong
terrify the regime in
Beijing, which fears
they could fuel a
desire for democracy
across the country
(Didi Tang writes).
Even the name
Xinjiang, which
means “new frontier”
in Mandarin, the
language of the Han
Chinese majority,
shows the difficulty in
making the land
“Chinese”. State
historians and
western scholars have
disagreed over
whether China can
claim ownership of
Xinjiang, and if the
Turkic-speaking
Muslim Uighurs whohave lived there for
generations, and have
enjoyed brief periods
of independence, have
any legitimate claims
to the land.
Many Uighurs say
all they want is real
autonomy, as granted
to them by the
Chinese constitution,
including respect for
their language,
religion and culture.
China has two
Muslim populations:
12 million Uighurs in
Xinjiang and
10 million Huis,
mostly in the
northwest region of
Ningxia. Policies
toward the Huis are
much more lenient,
partly because they
are better assimilated
into Han society and
have rarelychallenged Beijing.
They speak the
Chinese language,
dress like the Han,
and usually have Han
names. The Uighurs
are distinct in their
appearance, language
and culture.
After the
September 11 attacks
in the US, Beijing
rode on the global
sentiments against
Islamist terrorism to
portray unrest in
Xinjiang in the same
light, despite a lack of
evidence. It
responded to any
challenge with “strike
harder” policing
campaigns. It remains
to be seen whether
that policy has paid
off for the leadership
or whether worse
violence will ensue.Activists who fled to
Istanbul are hounded
by Erdogan, writes
Hannah Lucinda Smith
SPLASH NEWS