From: Magnus Fiskesjö <magnus.fiskesjo@cornell.edu>
See also “Ilham Tothi’s daughter speaks”: http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-china-blog-29373206; and: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/05/opinion/a-uighur-fathers-brave-fight.html
Source: NYT (9/26/14): http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/27/world/asia/3-Missing-Chinese-Students-Surface-to-Denounce-Uighur-Tohti.html
3 Chinese Students, Missing for Months, Surface to Denounce Uighur Scholar
By EDWARD WONG
URUMQI, China — The three students appeared one after another in video images broadcast to millions of Chinese, sitting behind bars and denouncing Ilham Tohti, the man they had once called their mentor.
One of the students said that Mr. Tohti, an ethnic Uighur professor persecuted by officials, had used a news website where they worked to “hype” ethnic tensions. Another said the professor had threatened to “bury” the student if he did not continue to do design work on the site.
Televised jailhouse confessions by people entangled in the Chinese legal system are increasingly common, but these three testimonies, broadcast late Thursday by the state’s China Central Television, were notable for what was at stake for the professor, and for what they revealed about the plight of the students. Seven of them vanished in Beijing around the time in January when Mr. Tohti was detained by the police. Until Thursday, none of the students’ families had seen any of them or heard their voices.
The videos were presented by prosecutors in a two-day trial of Mr. Tohti on separatism charges last week here in Urumqi, the capital of the western region of Xinjiang, where violence between Uighurs and members of China’s Han majority is surging.
Mr. Tohti’s sentence of life imprisonment, announced on Tuesday by officials at the Intermediate People’s Court in Urumqi, was the harshest against a political dissident in recent years. It was widely condemned by foreign governments and human rights advocates.
Now the fate of the seven students, whom Mr. Tohti taught at Minzu University in Beijing, hangs in the balance. Relatives say they are being held in Xinjiang.
“Those things he said on TV, they don’t mean anything,” said a relative of one of the three who appeared in the video — Perhat Halmurat, an ethnic Uighur.
“We still haven’t heard anything from the authorities,” the relative said. “I’ve been talking to the parents of other students, and we’re going to talk more and decide whether to hire a lawyer.”
Family members spoke to a foreign reporter on the condition of anonymity because they fear retribution by the authorities.
Li Fangping, one of Mr. Tohti’s lawyers, said he expected the students to be put on trial, perhaps in secret.
It was unclear under what conditions the three students, seen one at a time in the video wearing orange prison vests, made their comments. Confessions given under duress, including after torture by the police, are common in China.
“We are seriously concerned about whether any of these young men have had any access to any of the most basic protections guaranteed under domestic and international law,” said Sophie Richardson, China director for Human Rights Watch.
On Sept. 17, the first day of Mr. Tohti’s trial, three relatives of the detained students — an older couple and a man in a black jacket — sat together on a wooden bench one block from the rear entrance of the courthouse here. They said they learned from people at Minzu University in January that the students had been detained, but could not persuade the authorities in Urumqi to allow them to see the students. The families then got in touch with one another and traveled from different parts of Xinjiang to the courthouse in the hope of learning more.
“All we wanted was for our son to be a useful person,” the mother of one student said in a low voice as plainclothes police officers strolled nearby. “My son hasn’t done anything illegal.”
She added, “He never said anything bad about his teacher.”
The woman was here with her husband. The man sitting next to them, the older brother of another student, showed a photograph on his cellphone of a gray concrete building, and he said it was the prison where the students were being held.
Two of the detained students are a couple, Mutellip Imin and Atikem Rozi, according to a report earlier this year by Radio Free Asia, which is financed by the United States government. Mr. Imin, a former student at Minzu University who was studying for a master’s degree at Istanbul University in Turkey, came home to China for vacation last summer to see Ms. Rozi and was interrogated by the border police.
Later he was detained by the police for 79 days. He wrote about that earlier period of detention on his blog last December and demanded “human rights for all the victims of enforced disappearances, including me.”
Nothing has been heard from Mr. Imin or Ms. Rozi since they were detained in January.
In the video presented at the trial, Mr. Halmurat spoke of how Mr. Tohti had asked him to write an article for his website, Uighur Online, about a fight between a Uighur student and a Han student on the university campus. “Anything that happens between Han and Uighur, Ilham wants to put it on the website and hype it up, little by little,” Mr. Halmurat said. “He hypes up one thing after another. His unspeakable goal is to separate the country.”
The first student in the video, a Uighur graduate student of journalism whose name was given in Chinese as Xiaokelaiti Nijiati, said Mr. Tohti had told him that every article posted to Uighur Online had to represent a “position that was different from that of the government.”
“If the government says it is white, then we must say it is black,” he said.
The third student shown in the video, Luo Yuwei, an ethnic Yi, said Mr. Tohti had threatened to withhold his degree if he did not continue doing design work for the website. Mr. Luo said Mr. Tohti told him, “I can drag you into the desert and bury you right there, and no one would know.”