Ilham Tohti
Ilham Tohti disappeared almost six months ago Photo: AFP/GETTY
Nearly six months after her husband disappeared into the custody of China’s security services, the wife of respected Uighur academic Ilham Tohti issues an emotional plea for information on his whereabouts
By Tom Phillips, Shanghai1:31PM BST 19 Jun 2014
The wife of a respected Chinese academic who disappeared into police custody almost six months ago has issued an emotional plea to Beijing amid rumours that he has been secretly put on trial as part of a Communist Party crackdown on critics.
Ilham Tohti, a Beijing-based Uighur professor known for his moderate criticism of government policy in the western province of Xinjiang, was dragged from his home by dozens of police officers on January 15 and subsequently charged with as yet unspecified crimes related to “separatism”.
Prof Tohti is believed to have been taken from Beijing to Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital, but his precise location is unclear. Li Fangping, his lawyer, has been unable to visit his client and this week said he had received unconfirmed reports that Prof Tohti had received a “heavy” sentence following a secret trial.
In an interview with The Telegraph, Guzaili Nu’er, the academic’s wife, said she had been allowed no contact with her husband since he was wrestled into custody in front of his children.
“Why are they doing this? Does China not have laws?” she said. “Why won’t they tell his family what is happening?”
“It has been more than five months since Ilham was taken away and I have not heard a single word from him. All I can do is wait.”
Prof Tohti, a 44-year-old economist who worked at Beijing’s Minzu University, was born in the city of Artux in China’s far west.
He became the most prominent critic of Beijing’s policies towards Xinjiang’s Uighurs, the Turkic-speaking and predominantly Muslim group to which he belongs.
In 2005 he founded a website called Uighur Online which explored issues facing the Uighur community including discrimination, religious persecution and unemployment and was frequently scathing about what it described as Beijing’s heavy-handed policies.
That criticism appears to have made Prof Tohti a target for the Communist Party, which has become increasingly sensitive about opposition to its rule in Xinjiang in the wake of a recent spate of violent incidents and terrorist attacks that it has blamed on Islamic extremists and separatists from that region.
Dozens of civilians have been killed in at least four major attacks since last October, when a car ploughed into crowds in Tiananmen Square killing two bystanders and its three occupants. On Monday, three Uighurs were given the death sentence after being found guilty of helping plan that attack.
Prof Tohti came under growing pressure in the months leading up to his detention and claimed that on one occasion last November security agents had rammed his car before telling him: “We want to kill your whole family.”
“I am almost confident that the Chinese government is trying to get rid of me this time,” he wrote in a statement handed to a journalist from Radio Free Asia before he was detained.
The professor’s detention and disappearance have triggered an international outcry.
His treatment made “a mockery of China’s claims to be a country based on the rule of law,” Amnesty International said this week.
“Ilham Tohti has done nothing more than exercise the rights guaranteed to him by his country’s own laws,” a group of leading writers including Salman Rushdie said in a letter to the Guardian in April.
Prof Tohti’s website had served as a “critically important counterpoint to the aggressive measures that Xi Jinping’s administration has imposed against the Uighur people in the name of stability,” the writers added.
Gardner Bovingdon, a Xinjiang expert from Indiana University, said Prof Tohti had “been facing state suspicion and occasional house arrest for years”.
However, his current detention was a dramatic escalation underlining how Beijing no longer believed it could convince the majority of Uighurs that Communist Party rule benefited them, Prof Bovingdon said.
“I think basically the government has made a determination that it is going to squelch even moderate voices of criticism… and even more violently repress people who go out on the streets but at the same time engage in other strategies, such as cracking down on religiosity in Xinjiang, such as continuing to promote Han immigration to the region, that really sideline a substantial portion of the Uighur population.”
William Nee, China Researcher at Amnesty International, said Prof Tohti appeared to have been targetted for “trying to explain what Uighurs are feeling” to the world.
“He was firmly committed to non-violence and he was always committed to dialogue. He was committed to trying to be a bridge between Han intellectuals and the Uighur community,” said Mr Nee, describing the academic’s treatment as “completely unfair and ridiculous”.
“It’s a little bit unclear what is happening,” added Mr Nee. “It doesn’t look good.”
The recent spate of attacks on civilians had enabled Beijing to avoid greater scrutiny over increasingly repressive crackdowns in Xinjiang and over Prof Tohti’s plight, Prof Bovingdon said. “His story has unfortunately been completely submerged by all this eye-grabbing and terrible violence.”
Guzaili Nu’er, Prof Tohti’s wife, said her two young sons had been left traumatised after witnessing their father’s detention. “They don’t even dare to go out and play now because they say it is not safe.” The couple’s eldest son, who is 8, suffers recurrent nightmares.
She vowed to speak up for her husband, despite Beijing’s efforts to silence him.
“I fear nothing. I just worry for him,” she said. “What has happened to him? Where is he now?”
