Kazakhstan national Zhengis Zhanat, who is recovering in hospital in Almaty after returning from a trip to China beaten and in an altered mental state, has spoken out about his ordeal.
Zhanat, 34, emigrated from China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang to neighboring Kazakhstan as a child, and became a citizen of that country, where he now has a wife and two children.
But his mother, who stayed in Xinjiang’s Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture where Zhanat was raised, was in a long-running dispute with local authorities over the appropriation of the family’s land.
Zhanat had traveled back to his birthplace in Ili’s Kaba county to support her and to help her get much-needed medical attention after an earlier attack by police.
Drugged and beaten
But Zhanat said he was drugged, detained and beaten en route to filing an official complaint against the government in Beijing, he told RFA Mandarin in a recent interview.
Zhanat said he was invited to a restaurant where he ate regularly in Ili’s Kaba county town on Feb. 9.
“Police may have had drug my food, or maybe the people who invited me to dinner did it,” he said. “As the drug slowly took effect, my legs got weaker and so did my whole body,”
Back in his hotel room, Zhanat called China’s emergency number -- 120 -- but no help came.
Instead, police turned up the following day and took him to the basement of the local police station, he told RFA Mandarin.
Repeated calls to the Kaba county government offices and the county police department rang unanswered during office hours on Wednesday.
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Zhanat said he was detained after police found out he planned to travel to Beijing to petition on her behalf during the National People’s Congress, which opens March 5.
“The people who work for Kaba county put drugs in my food, then put me in the detention center, saying I was mentally ill,” Zhanat told RFA Mandarin on Feb. 25. “They also detained friends and relatives in my hometown.”
“I had been planning to go to Urumqi to hire a lawyer to defend our rights, and also to go to Beijing to meet with a lawyer, petition and file a complaint,” he said.
“The [National People’s Congress] opens in Beijing on March 5, and the authorities in Kaba didn’t want me to be in China on that date,” Zhanat said.
Medical test
Zhanat’s doctor in Kazakhstan, who goes by the single name Yerkenbek, said his symptoms were consistent with a toxic reaction to a substance of some kind.
“Based on my experience, it’s my judgment that he has symptoms of having been drugged, because he is showing symptoms similar to a mental disorder, as well as amnesia,” Yerkenbek told RFA Mandarin.
“[We] sent him to the Jewish hospital and to the [Almaty] Municipal Hospital, where a professor also said these were symptoms of toxicity,” he said.
Serikzhan Bilash, founder of the Kazakhstan human rights organization Atajurt, said Zhanat had been approached by county police and state security police in Kaba and told to return to Kazakhstan as soon as possible.
“They took him to a local place to eat dinner,” Serikzhan said.“After the meal, he felt unwell and immediately called his mother and his wife, telling them that he’d been poisoned.”
Zhanat’s sister said the family is hoping to transfer him to a better medical facility, before seeking treatment overseas, as his physical condition is still unstable.
Authorities in Kaba county seized 150 mu (10 hectares) of fertile land from Zhanat’s family in 2012, and registered it in someone else’s name, according to Serikzhan.
When the family disputed the move, local officials brought 30 armed personnel, who beat and kicked Kanat’s mother, causing kidney damage, he said in an earlier interview with RFA Mandarin, adding that Zhanat’s mother’s health has since deteriorated sharply as her kidneys fail.
Official figures show that there are around 1.5 million Kazakhs in China, mostly concentrated in and around the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture.
China once welcomed Kazakhs who wished to relocate from Kazakhstan, but Beijing’s mass targeting of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang has prompted many Kazakhs with Chinese nationality to head back in the other direction.
Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.