But the Kazakh authorities deny they are doing China’s bidding
SERIKZHAN BILASH, an ethnic Kazakh from China who is a naturalised citizen of Kazakhstan, is a thorn in China’s side. The combative campaigner has helped expose the horrors of China’s gulag to the world: the network of camps in which perhaps 1m people have been interned in Xinjiang province, which borders Kazakhstan. Most of the detainees are Uighurs, Xinjiang’s main indigenous group. Others are Kazakhs and Kyrgyz.
When news of the “re-education camps” filtered out in 2017, China flatly denied their existence. It later changed tack, describing them as vocational centres teaching minorities useful skills, as a means to quell religious extremism. Xinjiang has witnessed some violent attacks, amid tensions between Han Chinese migrants and Uighurs, some of whom dream of forming their own separate state.
Mr Bilash’s revelations have placed Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s president, in a diplomatic quandary, since he does not want to antagonise his mighty neighbour. His government has not condemned the camps explicitly, although Beybut Atamkulov, the foreign minister, acknowledges that there is “pressure” on China’s 1.5m Kazakhs. That is more than Central Asia’s other governments, which have found no fault at all with the treatment of their brethren across the border.
There is already a degree of public hostility towards China in Central Asia, because of its overwhelming economic power. Central Asian governments are not keen to amplify that by allowing the sort of outrage that the internment camps have stirred up in the West. That makes the role of campaigners like Mr Bilash all the more important, and his arrest all the more alarming.
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