Uighurs Can’t Escape Chinese Repression, Even in Europe

BRUSSELS—In the comfortable living room of a family home near Antwerp, photographs from not so long ago recall the faces of the missing. A business man sits proudly behind the desk of the company he owns. A party of women smile and laugh as they share a cup of tea. Four brothers in sharp suits, with their arms spread across one another’s shoulders, grin at the camera.

One of them is Ibrahim Ismael. He and his family fled their home in Hotan, Xinjiang, in 2011. They are ethnic Uighurs, a minority in China but the biggest group in Xinjiang, China’s largest and westernmost region, which borders eight countries. They cannot go home, where at least 1 million Uighurs in camps that Beijing says are for “reeducation” (human-rights groups label them “concentration camps”). Nor can they freely campaign for Uighur rights in Europe. Conversations with Uighurs in Belgium, Finland, and the Netherlands reveal a systematic effort by China to silence Uighurs overseas with brazen tactics of surveillance, blackmail, and intimidation. Many of the Uighurs I spoke with did so on condition of anonymity out of concern for their families in