Burning Xi Jinping: Is Kazakh Rights Group Facing Its Final Days? |
Back in the summer, Guldariya Sherizatkyzy was sitting in the front room of her home outside Almaty, telling any journalist who would listen the story of how her truck driver husband traveled to the Chinese border for work and didn’t return.
As the year’s end approaches, Guldariya is confined to that same home and is fitted with an electronic tag around her ankle – her punishment for participating in a small but politically charged protest for his release.
The case of Alimnur Turganbay is one of thousands raised by the Almaty-based rights group Atajurt after China turned the dial up on its “Strike Hard” crackdown in the majority-Muslim region of Xinjiang almost a decade ago, leading to over a million arbitrary incarcerations in the space of a few years.
Yet now, Atajurt, which did so much to expose Beijing’s rights abuses, is facing the full force of Kazakhstan’s legal system over the protest, with 13 activists jailed and five other people, including Guldariya, under house arrest.
The group’s critics will contend that their decision to set fire to a portrait of Chinese leader Xi Jinping and the Chinese flag during a demonstration helped neither Alimnur’s chances of being freed nor Atajurt’s long-term viability.
But Kazakhstan’s China-friendly authorities began treating these activists as enemies of the state long before the November 13 demonstration that triggered charges of inciting racial hatred, a crime that could see them handed prison sentences of up to ten years.
And given that track record, it is no surprise that supporters of the unregistered and under pressure group now fear that it may become an banned group in the near future.
Kazakh Citizen, Claimed by China
Guldariya and Alimnur, like Atajurt’s founder Serikzhan Bilash, are Kazakhs who moved to their historic homeland from the country of their birth, China. In China, ethnic Kazakhs number around 1.5 million people, making up the second largest Turkic minority after the Uyghurs.
What differentiates truck driver Alimnur from so many of the people that Atajurt have advocated for in the past is the fact he has since 2017 been a Kazakh passport-holder, rather than merely a Chinese citizen with residency rights in Kazakhstan.
That status theoretically obligated Kazakh authorities to press Beijing for answers over his arrest on the Chinese side of the Kalzhat-Dulata border crossing on July 23, where he had traveled to load up with construction materials bound........