- Uyghur cop’s daughter serving 10 years in Xinjiang prison for viewing Turkish films
By Shohret Hoshur for RFA Uyghur
2022.05.31
Uyghur cop’s daughter serving 10 years in Xinjiang prison for viewing Turkish films
Almire Erkin was arrested in 2017 for watching the foreign movies on her cell phone.By Shohret Hoshur for RFA Uyghur
2022.05.31
Reuters
The daughter of a Uyghur police officer who has won commendation for detaining Uyghurs in “re-education” programs in China’s Xinjiang region is serving a 10-year prison sentence for watching Turkish movies on her cell phone, the woman’s father and a Uyghur knowledge of the situation said.
Almire Erkin, 32, a former hospital nurse, is the daughter of Erkin Tursun, a Uyghur police officer in Kashgar (in Chinese, Kashi), who confirmed that she was jailed in 2017.
“A problem was discovered from her phone and she was taken to re-education,” he told RFA.
A Uyghur source who knows the family told RFA that Almire is serving her sentence in a women’s prison in Urumqi (Wulumuqi), capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).
Although Tursun has close relatives who are top Chinese government officials in local government, he said he was not able to spare his daughter from a prison term for the “crime” of watching Turkish movies.
Almire’s aunt is an official in the Kashgar government, and her uncle, Enwer Tursun, is mayor of Makit (Maigaiti) county in Kashgar prefecture.
Tursun recalled that Enwer told him it was “not a big deal” that Almire had watched Turkish movies and that authorities would release her.
When RFA contacted Tursun at a phone number provided by the anonymous source, he confirmed that his daughter, his oldest child, had been sentenced to 10 years in prison and was serving her term in Urumqi.
Tursun also said that he had received awards from the municipal government for outstanding performance as a police officer in the past 10-12 years, including one for taking in 2,000 people for “re-education.”
Since 2017, Chinese authorities have detained an estimated 1.8 million of mostly Muslim Uyghurs and other native Turkic peoples in a vast network of internment camps for “re-education,” purportedly to prevent religious extremism and radicalism. But evidence quickly emerged that inmates had been deprived of their freedom under the pretense of political education.
