'I Thought It Would Be Safe': Uighurs In Turkey Now Fear China's Long Arm
Abdurehim Imin Parach often looks over his shoulder when he walks around Istanbul. He worries that he is being followed, just as he was last year when two Turkish plainclothes policemen escorted him out of a restaurant in the city and told him he was under arrest.
"They didn't say why they were arresting me," says Parach, 44, an ethnic Uighur who landed in Turkey more than five years ago after fleeing his home in China's Xinjiang region. "At the police station they tried to get me to sign a statement saying I was a terrorist. They beat me, but I wouldn't sign it. Then they sent me to a deportation center."
It was a cold, dark building hundreds of miles away from Istanbul. Parach says he met at least 20 other Uighurs there, all expecting to be deported.
Then, after three months, he was released without explanation. Turkish authorities urged him not to speak out against China.
Parach suspects China was behind his arrest. He has criticized China's treatment of his people for years and had to flee the country after repeated detentions.
"When you stand against China," he says, "you are a threat wherever you are."
China's government considers many members of the Uighur ethnic minority to be "terrorists" and "separatists." It has imprisoned them on a mass scale and has turned Xinjiang into one of the world's most tightly controlled police states.
As a result, many Uighurs have fled to Turkey, which they have traditionally viewed as a refuge and an advocate for their rights. Now, many Uighurs in Istanbul tell NPR they fear China is pressuring Turkey to threaten them.
Parach believes he was targeted after he published a book of poetry describing China's oppression of Uighurs. In a quiet corner of a spicy-noodles diner, he unzips his backpack and pulls out the book, Breathing in Exile. The book's cover includes a moody drawing of Tian Shan (or in Uighur, Tengri Tagh) the Central Asian mountain range that's known as the "mountains of heaven."
He flips to
