Jewher Ilham
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Jewher Ilham: My Father, My Country
Dec 06, 2017 Huffpost This week, Chinese President Xi Jinping will arrive in Washington D.C. to meet with President Barack Obama. It will be President Xi’s first state visit to the U.S. and an impressive—and tight—itinerary of bi-lateral talks, meetings, banquets and receptions await him. The visit will certainly underscore the need for open and clear lines of communication between China and the United States in order to reach understanding on the issues of disagreement dogging Sino-American relations. I support this effort to have a fruitful dialogue between these two countries, and have never been swayed by early calls for the state visit and its attendant discussions to be cancelled. But ironically, while China’s president is enjoying the hospitality of his hosts in this country, engaging in dialogue with those who disagree with him on many issues, scores of well-known dissidents and an unknown number of lesser known writers, artists, intellectuals, and activists will be languishing in the prisons that his government oversees for seeking to do nothing other than what he himself will be doing this week. One of those imprisoned writers is my father, Ilham Tohti. At this very moment he sits in prison in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the area where most of our Uyghur compatriots reside. September 23 will mark a year since he was sentenced to life in prison. His crime? Writing, teaching, and operating a blog intended to bring Han Chinese and Uyghurs—a Turkic Muslim minority group in China—together peacefully to understand the issues and discontents that have caused so much misery and repression among Uyghurs. His work has been honored with numerous international awards, including the 2014 PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award. Now, in sharp contrast, he sits every day in shackles and is subjected to a […]