Uighur professor Rahile Dawut is serving a life sentence in China. The American human rights organization Dui Hua has this announced this week. Dawut wrote a lot about Uyghur traditions, which many believe the Chinese government wants to wipe out.
Dawut has been missing since 2017. She told her family that she was going to Beijing, writes the action group Scholars At Risk, and then said nothing more. University sources later said the 57-year-old academic had been quietly convicted. A Chinese government source now confirms to Di Hua that this is a life sentence for “splittism”, which amounts to separatism.
It is the same charge as that against Ilham Tohti, another Uyghur professor who, like Dawut, received a life sentence. In 2019, Tohti received the Sakharov Prize, a human rights award from the European Parliament. Tohti and Dawut are by no means the only sufferers: almost 1 in 25 people in the Uyghur region of Kashgar are said to be in prison.
Human rights violations
It is well known that China is committing human rights abuses against the Uyghurs, the Muslim minority living in the western region of Xinjiang. Human rights organization Amnesty wrote in 2021 that the Chinese government is using “severe violence and intimidation” to eradicate the Islamic religion and cultural practices. United Nations investigators later spoke of a “system of arbitrary detention.” A self-appointed people’s tribunal in London convicted China of genocide in a symbolic trial.
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