'China was making a direct threat to me from my mother's voice. They're using my mom to silence me.'
A U.S. citizen said Chinese police released his mother from an internment camp after 15 months so she could try to silence his criticisms of the country's human rights abuses, only for her to be sent back to detention the next day.
"I felt at the time shock, nervousness, and at some times I also cried. I was so happy because I could hear my mother's voice," Jawdat told Newsweek. He said his mom praised the"good" camp she had been in, is"more educated" now that she has learned Chinese laws, and said her family "can go back to visit her"—a dangerous proposition, as many Uyghur individuals who have been enticed or threatened to return home have disappeared.
"I knew that China was making a direct threat to me from my mother's voice, they're using my mom to silence me," he explained. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo meets with representatives of the Uighur Community, including Jawdat Ferkat, at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., on March 27, 2019. State Department photo by Michael Gross/ Public Domain
In March, he and a number of Uyghurs in the U.S. met with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. That weekend, Jawdat said he was told his mother had been transferred from a camp to a prison and an aunt and uncle were sentenced to eight years in prison, in moves widely seen as retaliation for speaking out. The Uyghur community in Australia is small but tight, and the foreign affairs department has reported that three Australians have returned after being detained in Xinjiang. The government only found out after the fact, but it has also made multiple quiet enquiries to Beijing about relatives of Australians who have disappeared in Xinjiang.
"The other reason is, China doesn't historically have ongoing sort of hostilities with Australia in the same way that it does with America," Smith Finley said, citing the two nations' long-standing disagreements over Taiwan and Tibet, and America's expanding military footprint in Central Asia. "Also, Australia is more of a neighbor."
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