Chinese officials sentenced Erlan Qabden, a 51-year-old Kazakh Muslim, to 19 years in prison for “using extremism to disrupt law enforcement.” According to her relatives in Kazakhstan, she recently attended a flag-raising ceremony in Xinjiang and wore a hijab.
Kazakhs are a Turkic ethnic group that is one of the People’s Republic of China’s 56 official ethnic groups. Russia, China, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan all share Kazakhstan’s border.
51-year-old Kazakh Muslim, Erlan Qabden, was sentenced to 19 years in prison by Chinese authorities for "using extremism to undermine law enforcement" & "picking quarrels and provoking trouble".
Relatives in #Kazakhstan say she just wore a #Hijab to a flag raising ceremony. pic.twitter.com/Ei1MnteGiu
— DOAM (@doamuslims) April 27, 2020
With a succession of border agreements, economic cooperation, and strategic collaboration, China and Kazakhstan have pursued a process of rapprochement and increasing ties following the collapse of the Soviet Union and Kazakhstan’s independence.
In 2019, 4.3 percent of Kazakhstan’s population is poor, according to official statistics. In Kazakhstan, 6.1% of the total labor force in 2020 is unemployed.
Thousands of Kazakh Muslims have been held in China’s notorious re-education centers since 2017. Survivors who have returned to Kazakhstan claim they were tortured, assaulted, and given mysterious injections during their captivity.
For generations, ethnic Kazakhs, as well as Uighurs and other Muslim minorities, have been able to freely traverse the Chinese-Kazakh border. However, as China’s anti-Islam crackdown intensifies, Beijing is also being accused of imprisoning its Kazakh neighbors.
