Family, friends, colleagues, and neighbors of someone who is suddenly gone and doesn’t return for months or years may of course suspect that he’s rotting in a prison somewhere. But this is not the same as knowing for sure.
In 2017, a Uyghur official in Xinjiang, Abdumanap Hakimjan, disappeared after opposing development of local farms. He wasn’t opposing development of them as such but the confiscation of them. Governmental grabbing of private property is a problem around the world, but you don’t always get incarcerated for trying to stop it.
Radio Free Asia reports (“Uyghur official jailed after refusing land acquisition,” May 10, 2024):
News of the arrest and jailing of Abdumanap Hakimjan, deputy head of the Ghulja County Natural Resources Department, comes amid ongoing tensions over land in the county, where residents say Chinese developers are forcing them to hand over their farms for little or no compensation.
Hakimjan, who is in his 50s, was arrested and imprisoned in 2019, and is currently serving a 10-year sentence in Karabugra Prison in Kunes county, Ghulja county police officers and an anonymous official told RFA, when questioned about his status….
The officer who, like others interviewed for this report, declined to be named due to security concerns, told RFA she was unaware of the reason for Hakimjan’s arrest and referred further questions to higher-level authorities.
The wording “arrested and imprisoned in 2019” is a little misleading. The rest of RFA’s story makes clear that Hakimjan was sent to a “reeducation” camp in 2017 but not sentenced to ten years in prison until 2019. China is one of the countries that often imprisons people for a good long time before bothering to sentence them to prison.
Kakimjan was arrested for refusing a Chinese company’s proposal to acquire land. Acting in his official capacity, he was able to cite a law that prohibits building housing on farmland. But such legalities did not matter to the CCP officials with the power to detain Uyghurs at will and send them to the “reeducation” camps. Hakimjan was supposedly guilty of “disruptive collective behavior” and of being disloyal to the Chinese Communist Party. He was disloyal to the Party, loyal to his conscience.
