"Kazakhi? Come with us!!"

A board in the Atajurt Eriktileri office with information about Kazakhs detained in China. Atajurt is a grass-roots organization in Almaty helping families with missing relatives in neighboring Xinjiang. (Izturgan Aldauyev/For The Washington Post)  

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/chinas-expanding-war-on-islam-now-theyre-coming-for-the-kazakhs/2019/03/01/16ebbe76-38ff-11e9-a2cd-307b06d0257b_story.html?

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Patihan Arsan was the kind of Muslim that the Chinese authorities used to like. In 2015, the government awarded the ethnic-Kazakh imam “Xinjiang’s Model Citizen” award.  He often gave interviews to state media praising the Communist Party and condemning its ultimate bane:  separatist ideology.

But this wasn’t enough to help Arsan, 53, escape the dragnet terrorizing China’s Muslim populations.  Last October he and his wife were arrested and sent to one of Xinjiang’s many so-called re-education camps, along with an estimated 1 to 1.5 million others, according to testimony given by his friend to Ata-Jurt, a Kazakh human rights organization whose videos I help process for the Xinjiang Victims Database. 

As chief imam in the Barkol Kazakh Autonomous County in Hami Prefecture, Arsan had an important public position.  It must have been especially gratifying to China’s ideologues when he told a government newspaper, in 2015, that he believed his job was to “encourage the faithful to submit to the principle, ‘citizen first, believer second.’”

“Extremists misrepresent the true nature of Islam and subvert religion’s relationship with the law, putting religion superior to the nation,” he continued. “Law is the highest form of expression of the will of the nation and its people, and every organization or individual should operate within it: no action or discourse should contradict the law.”  Xinjiang Party Secretary Chen Quanguo, under whose leadership the oppression has reached unprecedented levels, couldn’t have said it better.

Patihan Arsan (Chinese state media)

A news story published shortly after Arsen received his award reported that his sermons always praised the Communist Party for its efforts to fight poverty.  He also, the article noted, called on his followers to be more patriotic.  His charity was well-documented. Yet the Muslim religious leader committed a crime in the eyes of the state:  he kept a Koran at home.https://eurasianet.org/perspectives-china-imprisons-kazakh-imam-it-had-praised-for-his-patriotism