Author: Hanna Burdorf

Her Biggest Worry Now is that Her Children Might be Taken Away From Her

Published by Hanna Burdorf

The following is an eyewitness account from Hanna Burdorf, a PhD candidate at Newcastle University, who visited the victim while in Ürümchi and spent around two hours with her. The visit took place about three months after Horiyet and her children were taken from the Belgian embassy in Beijing and forced to return to Ürümchi, following an unsuccessful attempt to obtain a family-reunification visa to reunite with the father in Belgium. Her husband has lost contact since 3 Dec 2019. Earlier this year a journalist was able to visit her and learned that she and her children are together at home. In the early afternoon of September 11, 2019, I went to the address that Ablimit Tursun had given to me, in order to visit his wife Horiyet Abdulla and the couple’s four children. They live in Ürümchi, near the Grand Bazar. The entrance to the residential complex (小区) in which they live was accessible from the main road, although blocked by gates. The entrance gate for pedestrians was on the left – a big …

A Police State Going into Hiding

Published by Hanna Burdorf

Uyghur music played in the center of the Grand Bazaar in 2019 Over the past two years, multiple news reports, academic research, and eyewitness accounts have pieced together a picture of the tight surveillance in the police state the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region has become. I experienced some of this surveillance myself during a trip to Urumqi and Xinjiang’s south in the spring of 2018. One year later, in 2019, I was prepared to encounter even more restrictions during a second trip to Ürümchi and two southern cities, where surveillance has been reported to be most severe. To my surprise, I noticed soon after my arrival that much of the visible surveillance measures had been reduced noticeably compared to 2018. This created an illusion of a more relaxed atmosphere, at least on the surface. However, as I was to discover during my travel, surveillance had not decreased but emerged in more discrete ways. Despite still being many, the overall number of surveillance cameras seemed to have declined, at least it didn’t look like that there …