October 14, 2020

Thousands of Articles Restored From Downed Website of Jailed Uyghur Scholar Ilham Tohti

RFA 2020-10-08 The former website of jailed Uyghur scholar Ilham Tohti containing thousands of articles has been restored seven years after it was shut down by authorities in China ahead of his 2014 arrest and sentencing to life in prison for “separatism,” according to a group that advocates for his release. The Uyghur Online website, formerly at uyghurbiz.net, was established by Tohti in in 2006 as an advisory platform for him and other Uyghur intellectuals to promote voices from within their community to the people of China and the wider world. The website was used to draw attention to the discrimination facing Uyghurs in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) under Beijing’s rule—restrictions on practice of religion and use of native language, and other curbs on cultural practices—as authorities sought to assimilate the ethnic group. China’s policies toward Uyghurs’ in the XUAR have gotten progressively more harsh in the six years since Tohti’s jailing, with a re-education program launched in 2017 putting as many as 1.8 million people through a vast network of internment camps, and many inmates now pressed into forced labor. Uyghur Online was closely monitored by the government, which shut it down several times prior to Tohti’s arrest on Jan. 15, 2014, citing the politically sensitive nature of the content posted there. The former professor of economics at the Central University for Nationalities in Beijing was sentenced to life in prison for “separatism” by the Urumqi Intermediate People’s Court in the XUAR on Sept. 23, 2014, despite having worked for more than two decades to foster dialogue and understanding between Uyghurs and Han Chinese. In a statement posted to Facebook on Monday, the Germany-based Ilham Tohti Institute (ITI) said that after a year and a half of work by a group of young volunteers, it had […]