Has Kazakhstan Failed Xinjiang’s Ethnic Kazakhs?

China’s brutal repression campaign against the Uighurs in Xinjiang, labeled a genocide by the United States, has also implicated the region’s nearly 1.6 million ethnic Kazakhs. Kazakhstan, which shares a long border with Xinjiang, was an epicenter of activism in the early months and years of the crackdown—many of the first victims who testified on the world stage were ethnic Kazakhs who had witnessed the camps and fled to Kazakhstan. This left Kazakhstan’s government, led by authoritarian strongmen but weak in comparison to China’s Xi Jinping, walking a fine line: heeding its compatriots’ calls to support Kazakhs and fellow Turkic Muslims in China without risking China’s immense economic investments in Kazakhstan. But this economic dependence, now at its strongest point in history thanks to Kazakhstan’s central role in the Belt and Road Initiative, has crippled Kazakhstan’s ability to stand up to China, even when advocating against mistreatment of its own compatriots. While at several points in 2017 and 2018 it appeared that the Kazakh government was willing to take a stand against China’s policies in support of ethnic Kazakhs, the past two years have made clear that that trend is definitively over. Far from the safe haven activists hoped it could become, Kazakhstan is now a hostile place for Xinjiang victims.

Beginnings of the Crackdown

Since 2017, China has carried out a brutal campaign of repression in Xinjiang, a majority-Muslim region in the west of China, bordering Central Asia. Uighurs, a Turkic minority ethnic group, make up the majority of Xinjiang’s population with 11 million people, but the region is also home to 1.6 million ethnic Kazakhs and 200,000 ethnic Kyrgyz. (Kazakhs and Kyrgyz are also Turkic Muslims, related to Uighurs in language and culture.) The Chinese government claims that its actions in Xinjiang are combating separatists and promoting “deradicalization,” but the campaign has gone far beyond that. According to some estimates, up to 2 million Uighurs have been detained in “political reeducation camps” in the region. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has detained Muslims for wearing beards or headscarves, bulldozed centuries-old mosques and cultural sites, and mandated the use of only Mandarin language in public places. Reports from survivors of the camps have revealed exploitative labor practices, widespread torture and sexual assault.

In the early days of the crackdown, news about the extent of the human rights abuses was slow to escape China. Foreigners were expelled from Xinjiang in large numbers in 2017, internet censorship and surveillance intensified, and one of the first “reforms” implemented by the PRC in Xinjiang was to restrict movement and confiscate citizens’ passports. The beginnings of the crackdown came in the form of detentions for transgressions as simple as traveling abroad or corresponding with those outside of the country on WhatsApp (banned in China in 2017) or WeChat, as China viewed those with foreign connections as threats. The Xinjiang “Strike Hard Campaign” (the PRC’s “branding” of security restrictions in the early days of the crackdown) made foreign ties to a list of 26 “sensitive” countries, including Kazakhstan,  a punishable offense. Those who had visited Kazakhstan or merely communicated with people there were more likely to be interrogated, detained, and sent to a reeducation camp or to jail.

These policies affected ethnic Kazakhs in Xinjiang especially, as many lived in cross-border extended families and traveled regularly between China and Kazakhstan. This is partially due to Kazakhstan’s policy—in place since the days of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic but codified in the 1990s—of opening its doors to all ethnic Kazakhs living abroad, who are known as “oralmen.” Kazakhstan has especially encouraged oralmen to return “home” in the decades since the fall of the Soviet Union, and it has repatriated nearly 1 million oralmen from across the former Soviet countries and China, fast-tracking them for citizenship once they enter Kazakhstan. This policy left many families divided between Kazakhstan and Xinjiang, as some family members emigrated to Kazakhstan in the 1990s and early 2000s, leaving others behind. Many Kazakh communities in Xinjiang, then, maintained close contacts with former oralmen who had since returned to the homeland.

As the Chinese government began detentions and curbing freedoms in Xinjiang, Kazakhs across the border heard of the arrests of friends and family—or dropped out of contact with them altogether as they were “disappeared” into the system of reeducation camps. Some Kazakh citizens were also swept up in detentions—arrested while in Xinjiang visiting relatives and forbidden from leaving. Many had been born in Xinjiang but repatriated to Kazakhstan—the PRC declared that they had insufficiently renounced their Chinese citizenship and were thus still subject to PRC control.

Resistance Inside Kazakhstan

As news about arbitrary detentions and torture of oralmen living in China began to reach Kazakhstan, independent activists and local leaders put pressure on the Kazakh government to take action. 

In mid-2017, news reached Kazakhstan of two ethnic Kazakh imams who had been detained in Xinjiang. One imam was sentenced to 10 years in prison for performing traditional Islamic funerary rights, and the other was detained for unknown reasons and died in police custody, purportedly by suicide. In response to these and other stories, civil society groups began to put pressure on the Kazakh government. In June 2017, the Press Club of Kazakhstan held a meeting of well-known Kazakh writers to petition then-President Nursultan Nazarbayev to take a stronger stance.

The largest campaigner for victims of Xinjiang oppression in Kazakhstan was Atajurt, a volunteer group formed in early 2017. Atajurt, led by Serikzhan Bilash, has been recognized as “one of the most influential efforts detailing China’s internment of Muslim minorities” and the “Become a supporter of IT Security News and help us remove the ads.