A Voice From China’s Uighur Homeland, Reporting From the U.S.
JULY 31, 2015
WASHINGTON — IN December 1994, Shohret Hoshur, then a 29-year-old journalist in a remote corner of the far western Chinese region of Xinjiang, said goodbye to his homeland. After writing two articles in his native Uighur language that incensed the local authorities, he escaped using a false passport he bought for about $600.He was safe, but the large family he left behind was not. Last year, his three brothers were arrested. Their crime, according to human rights groups and two United States senators: a blood relationship to Mr. Hoshur, whom the Chinese government considers one of the most dangerous reporters on the planet.
Now a distinguished-looking 50 years old with gray invading his dark hair and mustache, Mr. Hoshur continues to report on Xinjiang from afar for Radio Free Asia, the news service funded by the United States government that broadcasts in Uighur on shortwave radio and publishes stories written in the language’s Arabic script on its website.
His accounts of violence in his homeland are among the few reliable sources of information about incidents in a part ofChina that the government has sought to hide from international scrutiny. The authorities singled out his reporting, saying that it instigated deadly riots in the regional capital, Urumqi, in July 2009 that killed nearly 200 people. It was about then that Chinese officials also began threatening his relatives in Xinjiang, telling them they must persuade him to quit his job at R.F.A.
Mr. Hoshur refuses, saying he feels an obligation to the sources he has cultivated inside Xinjiang, people who take enormous risks to inform the world of what is happening there.
“I cannot leave,” he said, speaking in halting English and sitting in a conference room at R.F.A.’s headquarters in Washington, a map of China on the wall behind him. “They took such risks. In such a situation, how can I?”
Mr. Hoshur declined to discuss his immediate family out of concern for their safety.
Mr. Hoshur’s native land is officially called the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. But for the 10 million ethnicUighurs living in the territory, which shares a border with Afghanistan, the idea of attaining real autonomy is increasingly distant. The government of President Xi Jinping has imposed what amounts to a regional lockdown on the ethnic Turkic group, with mass arrests and restrictions on the practice of Islam, as it attempts to quell what the central government sees as a budding separatist movement. Some Uighurs, in striking out at the authorities, have used jihadist-style tactics, including deadly attacks against civilians in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 2013 and in a train station in the southwestern city of Kunming last year. The security measures in Xinjiang are usually paired with a news blackout. The official Chinese news media often avoids reporting on the continuing violence inside Xinjiang, including clashes between the police and Uighurs that produce body counts in the double digits. Such violence would garner extensive coverage had it occurred in the United States or Europe, but many of these cases would go undocumented if not for Mr. Hoshur’s efforts.
After fleeing Xinjiang in 1994, Mr. Hoshur spent time in Turkey, studying for a master’s degree in Turkish literature. In 1999, he came to the United States, working for a courier company and running a small home rental and contracting firm in Northern Virginia before joining R.F.A. in 2007.
IN his years of reporting on Xinjiang, both as a young man in Qorghas County, near the border with Kazakhstan, and for R.F.A. in Washington, he built an extensive network of sources and perfected a telephone interview style that allows him to break through China’s information firewall.
People inside Xinjiang risk their freedom to pass information to him. Some circumvent China’s Internet controls and post messages to his account on Facebook, which is generally inaccessible in China. Others travel outside the region, sometimes as far away as Beijing or Shanghai, and call him in Washington from a public phone, he said.
Then comes the task of verifying the tips he receives, often involving incidents in remote parts of Xinjiang. He searches online for the phone numbers of local businesses and starts calling, systematically varying the last few digits of the phone numbers he finds to reach other residents. It is not unusual for him to call as many as 100 people as he seeks to corroborate the news and nail down details.
Colleagues describe a workaholic. “I come in in the morning and see him just leaving,” said Dan Southerland, R.F.A.’s executive director. “I say, ‘Shohret, you’ve got to get some sleep.’ ”
Mr. Hoshur, now a United States citizen, often quotes local police officials by name, lending his reports more credibility. Such was the case in mid-June, when he cited a local official in the city of Kashgar confirming a knife and bomb attack on a police checkpoint that killed at least 18 people, including three police officers or deputies.
TO get the police to talk, Mr. Hoshur said, he identifies himself as a reporter but speaks with authority — in Mandarin Chinese or the Uighur language — and orders the officers who pick up the phone to confirm details. The technique works, he says, because reporters from China’s state-run news media are part of the Communist Party’s propaganda apparatus, and local police officials will often act deferentially toward them. Some officials, because of intense censorship, may never have heard of R.F.A.
“That’s why, when I call, my voice is like a boss,” Mr. Hoshur said. “I don’t say, ‘Please give me that information.’ I say, ‘I am an R.F.A. reporter. Give me that information.’ Then they speak to me.”
They speak to very few other journalists, making Mr. Hoshur’s reports extremely important to efforts by human rights groups to document the crackdown in Xinjiang.
“People like him are very few, and there’s only a few channels of information, even fewer information channels that are subjected to some sort of journalistic standards,” said Nicholas Bequelin, Amnesty International’s regional director for East Asia, who closely follows events in Xinjiang. “But clearly the Chinese police have come to the same conclusion,” Mr. Bequelin added. “And they are now trying to use very tried and tested methods to silence him and to prevent this from continuing.”
One of Mr. Hoshur’s younger brothers, Tudaxun Hoshur, was among dozens of Uighurs arrested in May 2014 in police sweeps in Xinjiang. He was charged with endangering state security in a mass trial and sentenced to five years in prison. Mr. Hoshur’s other two brothers expressed anger over the sentence in a phone call with him in June 2014. The Chinese authorities appear to have monitored the call. The following month, the state-run Global Times newspaper published an article reporting that a “certain R.F.A. Uighur reporter” was encouraging his relatives to “wait for an opportunity” to conduct “violent terrorist acts.”
Mr. Hoshur said he believed the article was referring to him, but he denied saying any such thing in the call.
The police detained his brothers in August, and they are now awaiting trial. According to R.F.A., the police have told Mr. Hoshur’s relatives that his brothers will be released only if he stops reporting on Xinjiang. Between them, Mr. Hoshur’s three imprisoned brothers have 11 children.
THE State Department and advocacy groups such as the Committee to Protect Journalists, based in New York, havecalled on Beijing to release Mr. Hoshur’s brothers. Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, and Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, have also urged Secretary of State John Kerry to bring up Mr. Hoshur’s case with Chinese leaders.
“The fact Mr. Hoshur is being targeted through his family while living and reporting from the United States makes this case particularly disturbing,” the two senators wrote in a July 1 letter to Mr. Kerry. “We want to advance positive bilateral relations with China, and we also want to be clear that in a healthy bilateral relationship there is no room for this kind of intimidation.”
Mr. Hoshur said his relatives remain steadfast in their support for his work despite the pressure on them. Before they were detained last year, the two brothers awaiting trial told him to keep reporting on the plight of Uighurs in Xinjiang, he said.
“There is not anyone in the world caring about us,” Mr. Hoshur said, recalling what one of them said in the phone call that appeared to have been monitored. “Why don’t you report this?”
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