All posts tagged: Turkey

The Imprisonment of the ‘Model Villagers’

Published by Darren Byler

For the family of sisters Nursiman and Nur’iman, a local work brigade placed a small red plaque with five stars on it to the front gate of their house. The stars stood for “patriotism, honesty, education, hygiene, and harmony.” But in the end, that didn’t stop the sisters’ parents and brother from being sent to jail for reasons that remain murky to this day. The phone call from the Chinese Embassy in Ankara came on June 15, 2020. It was 4:31 in the afternoon, Istanbul time. After she picked up and realized who was calling, Nursiman caught her breath. She held a second phone up to the speaker on her smartphone and hit record. — 【大使馆工作人员】哎，我们这个接到的上面写的很清楚，因为，说实话来，咱们国内也是咱们是法制国家，那么，它这个也肯定是有依据的，这个里面它是说的2017年12月13号因为准备实施恐怖主义活动罪，判处，被判处13年有期徒刑， Embassy: It is written clearly in the file we received. Our country is ruled by law so they must have a reason. It is written that she was sentenced to a 13-year prison term on December 13, 2017, for the crime of preparing to commit terrorist activities. 哎，13年的是妈妈吗？ Nursiman: The one who was sentenced to 13 years is my mother? 【大使馆工作人员】对 Embassy: Yes. 就2017年12月13号，爸爸呢？ …

‘As If You’ve Spent Your Whole Life In Prison’: Uyghurs Starving & Subdued

Published by Darren Byler

When Chinese state authorities prepared to release Gulbahar Jelil (Gulbakhar Jalilova), an ethnically Uyghur woman born and raised in Kazakhstan, they told her that she was forbidden to tell anyone about what she had experienced over the one year, three months, and 10 days in which she had been detained. She was not to mention the stench and sickness that hounded her, and pervaded her crowded cell. But most critically, the prison workers stressed that she not talk about the food she had been served. They told her to get her story straight regarding her starvation diet: She was not to mention that she and others had received only about 600 calories per day — equivalent to two or three plain bagels— and that she had lost close to 50 pounds over the course of her detention. “You will eat more food now, since you will soon be released,” they said. They told her that the food she had been given and the filth that she had lived in — a cell with an open-air toilet and 30 unwashed bodies pressed together — were a thing of the past. It was a nightmare that she should put behind her. …