Thread by @WilliamYang120

By @catecadell: " @ziba116 is one of eight #Uyghur people who told Reuters they have spent years searching for information on relatives who were detained and have since been charged and imprisoned in #Xinjiang." saltwire.com/halifax/news/o…

At media conferences in Beijing this year, spokesmen for the Xinjiang government have repeatedly said China will help Uyghurs living abroad who are unable to contact their relatives, urging them to reach out to Chinese embassies and consulates for assistance.

Almost five years after the internment campaign began, relatives interviewed by Reuters say such requests have fallen on deaf ears. Reuters was unable to independently confirm all aspects of their accounts.

"If all we have to do is call the consulate then pick up the phone when we call,” said Murat. She shared with Reuters a copy of a letter she sent to the Chinese embassy in Washington on August 5, 2020, ...

... appealing for information on her mother’s whereabouts that she says went unanswered. China denies it has hampered efforts by relatives to find information on detained relatives.

“Some of these Xinjiang natives abroad are bewitched or coerced … and deliberately made up lies about these so-called lost contacts,” Xinjiang government spokesman Zulhayat Ismayil told a media conference in Beijing in February.

Murat says the only official confirmation of her mother's arrest is a one-line statement made by a Chinese Foreign Ministry official at a 2020 media conference in Beijing, who said Abbas had been sentenced on crimes of terrorism and "disrupting social order".

Murat said they had earlier received credible information from a non-official source whom she declined to identify that Abbas had been sentenced to 20 years.

China has not publicly confirmed the sentence length and China’s foreign ministry and the Xinjiang government did not respond to requests on the sentence length.

When Reuters visited the former family home still owned by her mother in Urumqi in May, the door was still sealed shut with police tape that bore the name of a police bureau in Artux, a region near the Kazakh border over 1,000 km (600 miles) from Urumqi.

"Report to the community office if you ever return," read a notice on the door.

@RayhanAsat whose brother Ekpar Asat was detained in 2016, said it took four years for her family to receive information from an official source confirming her brother was detained in Aksu, around 670 km (400 miles) from Urumqi.

“We did everything we could, reached every police station, every state organ to try and find out what happened," said U.S.-based Asat, whose parents still live in Urumqi.

“We were so confused. Why would he be in Aksu? ...I think it is a desire to further uproot people and break their spirit,” she said.

This year, for the first time, her parents were permitted three video calls between three and 10 minutes long with their son, calling from a Chinese police station, said Rayhan Asat.

Prison officials told the parents Ekpar has been in solitary confinement since January 2019 for undisclosed reasons, she said.

Rayhan Asat, a Harvard-trained lawyer, said multiple efforts to correspond with the Chinese embassy in Washington have been fruitless. In 2020, she sent a copy of an open letter appealing for Ekpar’s release, signed by 70 student organisations at Harvard University.

“They opened it, put it in a new FedEx package and sent it back to me,” she said. The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment on the letter.

Some relatives say China’s public attempts to discredit Uyghur claims of rights abuses have become a key way to learn more about their relatives detained in Xinjiang.

Officials have released dozens of videos this year including footage of jailed Uyghurs reciting pro-government statements and clips of family members criticising their Uyghur relatives abroad or pleading with them to return to China.