More than 20 Uyghur teachers at a college in Xinjiang were detained by Chinese authorities in 2017
Beijing: According to college officials cited by Radio Free Asia, more than 20 Uyghur instructors at a Xinjiang college were arrested by Chinese authorities in 2017 and are now incarcerated.
As part of efforts to counter what China called terrorism and religious extremism, authorities in the northwest region launched a broad crackdown on Uyghur scholars, teachers, business leaders, and cultural figures eight years ago, detaining them and sending many of them to re-education camps, according to the report.
Historian Ghojaniyaz Yollugh Tekin, 59, who worked at the Aksu Education Institute in the city of Aksu, was arrested in 2017 and sentenced to 17 years in prison in late 2018 for his research, writings, and beliefs that view Uyghurs as belonging to the Turkic world rather than China, according to a recent RFA Uyghur report.
RFA’s followup research revealed that 25 other teachers from the same school were also arrested in 2017.
According to RFA, the institution was established in 1985 and now has 3,000 students enrolled, with around 220 faculty members—more than half of them are Uyghurs.
According to the study, Uyghur activist Tuyghun Abduweli, who is originally from Aksu but now lives in Canada, indicated that the number of Uyghur instructors was believed to be between 100 and 150 in the early 2000s.
In 2017, more than 20 instructors from the institution were removed in several groups, according to an institute official who asked not to be named for security concerns.
The RFA report claims that security officers from the Aksu prefecture started the charges against them, and the person claims that the institute’s political affairs department and local police worked together to make the arrests and question the suspects.
Significant worldwide attention has been paid to the issue involving China’s Uyghur community, which is mostly concentrated in Xinjiang. Numerous human rights violations, including forced labor, arbitrary detentions in alleged “re-education” camps, and monitoring, are reported.
