Associated Press in Beijing
guardian.co.uk, Monday 15 October 2012 04.55 EDT
Inner Mongolia: Chinese government fears spread of violent unrest that has hit its regions of Tibet and Xinjiang in recent years. Photograph: FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images
The wife of a long-imprisoned ethnic Mongolian activist in China has spent nearly two years in detention and house arrest on a fabricated charge to silence her family, she said on Monday.
Xinna told the Associated Press by telephone her husband, Hada, who had been detained for 17 years after being accused of separatism and spying in Inner Mongolia, , a Chinese region bordering the independent state of Mongolia, and has become “very depressed” in custody. Many ethnic Mongolians use only one name.
Xinna appealed for the international community to help secure Hada’s release. “He is in a very bad state,” Xinna said by telephone on Monday from the regional capital of Hohhot, adding she had seen her husband about once a month recently.
“I asked him to walk around, but he wouldn’t. The doctor suggested that he should be transferred to a mental health hospital, but they won’t allow that. They don’t even give him toilet paper,” she said.
Xinna, 57, said she and her son, Weilesi, 28, were detained in December 2010 – she on charges of illegally bootlegging CDs and he on drug charges – and that both have been under tight surveillance since her release in April.
