A Kazakh human rights activist fears his sister could be repatriated to China after police in Kazakhstan arrested her at home on June 25.
Serikzhan Bilash, a naturalized Kazakh citizen who was born in China, is the founder of Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights, a civic group that has documented the detention and other human rights abuses of ethnic Kazakhs, Uyghurs, and other Turkic Muslims in China’s far-western Xinjiang region.
In 2019, Bilash was detained in Almaty, about 60 miles from the Xinjiang border in southeastern Kazakhstan, and released after agreeing to stop his Xinjiang-related activism.
Now living in exile in the United States, Bilash said that he believes the Kazakh authorities arrested his sister as a form of retaliation for his advocacy efforts, under pressure from China.
“She is innocent, and she’s not an activist,” Bilash told The Epoch Times on June 25.
He said he wanted to cry after hearing what had happened to her, but could not. “I lost my mind,” he said.
He said he’s worried the Kazakh government would send his sister back to China.
Bilash said his sister attended several Atajurt hearings but stopped participating after she was summoned to a government office, which he characterized as an act of intimidation.
According to details provided by Bilash’s nephew, his sister left a friend’s home on Thursday evening and soon afterward lost contact. A short time later, she sent a message to her family stating that she had been detained by Kazakh police.
Later that night, she returned to her home in Almaty, accompanied by police and plainclothes officers, who searched the residence.
During the police search, she fainted several times.
She and her husband were subsequently taken away by police, who also confiscated personal belongings, including some old cellphones and religious books such as a Quran.
Her husband later returned to the home in the early hours of June 26, stating that she had been taken to a police station in the nearby city of Konayev and was expected to be detained for about two days.
Bilash explained that his sister has a heart condition that causes her heart to start pounding for no apparent reason, and it happens frequently.
Kazakhstan has “become one of the Chinese states” under the Chinese Communist Party, he said.
“Chinese authorities are using the Kazakh authorities to retaliate against all those who have exposed the Xinjiang concentration camps,” Bilash said. “It is vendetta.”
In April, a district court in Kazakhstan’s southeastern Zhetysu region sentenced 19 activists to up to five years in prison, saying they were inciting hatred for staging a protest in November last year over the detention of a Kazakh truck driver in China.
Their protest, which took place in Almaty, involved burning the Chinese regime’s flag and a portrait of CCP leader Xi Jinping
A day after the protest, the Chinese Consulate in Almaty sent two letters to Kazakhstan’s foreign ministry, stating that the case had an “extremely negative impact” on bilateral relations, according to translated copies of the correspondence seen by The Epoch Times.
Bilash has been advocating for the 19 activists. In an X post in January, Bilash warned about the CCP’s “transnational repression” in Kazakhstan as the trial was about to start under closed-door conditions.
“Kazakhstan is colluding with the CCP to suppress Atajurt,” Bilash wrote. “Without Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights, the world will lose its greatest force for exposing the CCP’s crimes.”
The April sentencing has drawn criticism from rights groups.
Marie Struthers, director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia at Amnesty International, urged the Kazakhstani authorities to release the activists in a statement on April 14.
“Criminalizing peaceful protest under the vague pretext of ‘inciting discord’ is a travesty of justice and an affront to international human rights standards,” Struthers added.
Bilash is urging the international community to follow her sister’s case.
“I just want to say that Xinjiang concentration camps have now moved from Xinjiang to Kazakhstan, [with] Kazakhstan becoming province of China,” Bilash said.
The U.S. government has determined that the CCP is committing genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.
China has used “combating extremism” as a pretext to lock up over 1 million Uyghurs in Xinjiang, where detainees are subjected to forced labor, torture, political indoctrination, forced abortion, and other inhuman treatments in Chinese internment camps.
