In Saudi Arabia, four Uyghurs face extradition to China

Published on: 04/14/2022 – 19:45 Saudi Arabia is accused by several NGOs of having arbitrarily arrested four Uyghurs and of wanting to extradite them to China, where their fate is extremely uncertain. These are two men who had traveled to the country to make a pilgrimage to Mecca in November 2020, and a mother and her 13-year-old daughter, arrested on March 31, 2022 according to several sources. Videos of cries for help are circulating on social networks. According to several human rights associations, including Amnesty International, a mother and her 13-year-old daughter, as well as the two men, risk imminent extradition to China, a country accused of carrying out a policy of repression against this minority. Muslim from the west of the country. On April 9, Buheliqiemu Abula, the mother, recorded a video calling for help in the back of a police truck taking her and her daughter to Riyadh. 4 Uyghur pilgrims including 1 mother & her 13-year-old daughter are about to be deported by ?? to concentration camps ??. I call on all Muslims worthy of the name, to a pilgrimage boycott! Ask @arabiesaouditefr #Saudi ArabiaCollabo #BoycottHajj pic.twitter.com/Udb4tpL8Ya— Dr. Dilnur Reyhan ??? (@DilnurReyhan) April 10, 2022 Buheliqiemu Abula. sent this video on the evening of April 9 to a member of the NGO Human Rights Watch, with whom she was already in regular contact. Tweet by Dilnur Rehyan, President of the Uyghur Institute of Europe. “I called on French Muslims to boycott the pilgrimage, because it is one of the important financial resources of this country (…) we really want to reach an agreement with this country, we have to hit it where it is evil.” she told our editors. “We are in a police car. Save us, we are on our way to death. They are taking us to Riyadh to send us [en Chine]”, she implores in Uyghur in this video relayed since April 9 by activists and human rights defense associations on Twitter, to alert to their fate. In the images, we can briefly see the face of ‘a young woman wearing a hijab, presented as her 13-year-old daughter, as well as the interior of the vehicle, with a map on a small white grid. The noise of the road can be heard in the background. Arbitrary arrests This video was sent on April 9 by Buheliqiemu Abula to a member of the British NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) with whom she was in contact.According to Laura Harth, of the NGO Safeguard Defenders, also mobilized to help them, Buheliqiemu Abula and her daughter were arrested, without cause, on March 31 in Mecca, then taken to Jeddah, before being taken on April 9 to a detention center in Riyadh. [le 13 avril], it is difficult to have more news. At the last contact we had with her, she said that her departure for China, in Guangzhou, was imminent.” Buheliqiemu Abula has been in Saudi Arabia for at least two years. Her ex-husband, also a Uighur, has been detained for November 2020 with a friend of hers in Saudi Arabia.They had come to make their pilgrimage to Mecca (umrah) in February 2020.Because she was in Saudi Arabia, their marital bond allowed her to stay in touch.So it was the only person who could give regular news of the two men. Their last telephone conversation dated back to March 20. The fate of these four Uighurs, once on Chinese territory, is very worrying. Hundreds of thousands of Uighurs are believed to be locked up in camps and forced to assimilate Chinese culture, arbitrarily imprisoned, put to forced labor, and for some, subjected to acts of torture.Inhuman treatment documented by numerous testimonies, NGO reports and investigations are journalistic and described as genocide by several parliaments, including the French National Assembly, but denied outright by Beijing.”We haven’t heard my father’s voice for almost two years”Buheliqiemu Abula’s ex-husband had been arrested along with his friend, Aimidoula Waili, a cleric. The daughter of the latter is 21 years old and studies in Istanbul. She had tried to sound the alarm in several videos posted on her Twitter account. The editorial staff of France 24 Observers was able to discuss with her. She left China with her father and sister in 2016, just before the situation deteriorated in Xinjiang. My father went to Saudi Arabia for the pilgrimage [de La Mecque] in February 2020. He was going to return to Turkey, but it became complicated because of the closure of the borders linked to the coronavirus. Then he was arrested by the Saudi government in November 2020 with his friend without any justification. Since then, we have not been able to communicate with my father. We haven’t seen him or even heard his voice for nearly two years. Merhaba! Böyle bir üzücü haberi sabahın bu saatinde paylaşmak istemezdim. Ama durumun aciliyeti ve ciddiyeti sebebiyle paylaşmak zorundayım!
İki kişi göz göre göre Çin’e gönderilmek üzere, ölüme gönderilmek üzere!
Buna sessiz kalmayın! Burada iki kişinin hayat-memat meselesi! pic.twitter.com/eHzznJsqKx— Sumeyye~Hamdullah (@SF_Ayturk16) March 18, 2022 Call for help from Aimidoula Waili’s daughter broadcast on her Twitter account on March 18, where she shows her father’s Chinese passport and that of his friend and asks for their release. She has been making videos like this since December 2020. I dare not even imagine what will happen if they are sent back to China. I fear that they will be executed or imprisoned, that they will suffer all kinds of torture. (…) He did nothing wrong. We only have a few hours left to save them.”I have tried several times to convince her to return to Turkey”Abduweli Ayup, a Uyghur living in Norway who is trying to alert members of his community to the danger of surrendering to Saudi Arabia to make their pilgrimage, has documented around 30 cases of extraditions to China of Uyghurs from three Muslim countries, including Saudi Arabia. I have been in contact with Buheliqiemu for almost two years, in particular because she is the only one who could give news of the two Uyghur men detained in Saudi Arabia. During the last exchange I had with her, she told me that she had cried, that she was very scared. I tried several times to convince her to return to Turkey, where she had a work permit. I told him that I had already followed about thirty similar cases and each time, I was powerless and could do nothing to avoid deportations. I told her that if she was arrested, all I could do was tell her story to journalists and NGOs. But she told me that she did not want to abandon her ex-husband, that she was the only one who could help him. Buheliqiemu Abula and her daughter that they had to prepare for an overnight departure to Guangzhou, China. According to the latest information provided by Safeguard Defenders to our editorial staff on April 14 at 2 p.m., the four Uighurs are still in Riyadh. Uighurs extradited by Muslim countries Each year, between one and two million Muslims travel to Mecca for the pilgrimage, the umrah or the hajj, the fifth pillar of Islam. Saudi authorities oversee and charge for this essential pilgrimage for practitioners around the world, including Uyghurs. Amnesty International stressed that the forcible return of these four Uyghurs would constitute “an unacceptable violation of Saudi Arabia’s obligations under international law”. Earlier, in an April 1 statement, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees ( UNHCR) had also called on the country not to extradite Uyghur Chinese nationals. Saudi Arabia is a key ally of China and has repeatedly supported the country’s official policy in Xinjiang. During a visit by Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman to Beijing in February 2019, he notably defended China’s right to take “anti-terrorism” measures, according to Chinese media. Contacted by our editorial staff, the Saudi Interior Ministry did not respond to our requests. Several other Muslim countries have been accused of being silent or even complicit in China’s policy towards the Uyghurs. Between 2017 and 2019, Egypt was also accused of returning nearly 20 Uyghur nationals to China. In Morocco, justice confirmed the extradition in December 2021 of Idriss Assan, a 34-year-old Uyghur arrested on his arrival in Casablanca, at the request of China, in the name of bilateral agreements between the two countries.