UPDATED at 5:04 P.M. ET on 08-16-2024
A Uyghur filmmaker and entrepreneur serving a 15-year sentence in a Xinjiang prison labor camp for “inciting separatism” is suffering from a stomach ailment and has requested medical parole, an officer with knowledge of the situation said.
Abduhelil Obulqasim, 47, was arrested on Sept. 15, 2023, and detained briefly in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital, before being transferred to Kashgar for trial.
He was sentenced this April and transferred to Yerken Peylu Prison, also known as Kashgar Prison, the officer from the city’s Ostengboyi neighborhood committee told Radio Free Asia.
Obulqasim’s ailment has prevented performing physical labor, said the officer who declined to give his name so he could speak freely about the inmate.
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The TV shows, evening shows, and various audio-visual recordings related to Uyghur culture that Obulqasim invested in and produced were the reason for his arrest on the charge of inciting separatism, said Abduweli Ayup, founder of Uyghur Hjelp, citing an anonymous source with knowledge of the matter.
Also known as Uyghuryar, the Norway-based nonprofit organization that documents Uyghurs who have been arrested and imprisoned.
An official at the Urumqi Middle Court told RFA earlier that Obulqasim was among many people working in audio-visual production in Urumqi who had been arrested and detained, but he did not know why the filmmaker had been jailed.
An employee at the same court said Obulqasim had been sentenced to 15 years.
Second arrest
This was Obulqasim’s second arrest. Authorities previously arrested him in October 2017 and detained him in a pretrial detention center for more than 18 months before sending him to a “re-education” camp, Ayup said. They released him in December 2019.
Obulqasim's first arrest occurred at a time when authorities conducted mass detentions of Uyghur businessmen, intellectuals and artists across Xinjiang purportedly to prevent “religious extremism” and “terrorism” in the restive Muslim region.
In the 1990s, Obulqasim, who is married with three children, ran an audio-visual business in Kashgar’s Id Kah market, according to Ayup.
When Obulqasim was in Kashgar, he got into an argument with someone and was detained for about 15 days — an incident for which police blacklisted him by marking his ID with a criminal record, he said.
In the 2000s, Obulqasim set up a company called Dolan in Urumqi to produce films, TV shows, soap operas and music albums, according to Ayup. Some of the shows his team created independently or in collaboration with Xinjiang Television were “Xinjiang Talent Show,” “I am a Singer,” and the “Abdukerim Abliz Show.”
Obulqasim also was one of the founders of Hayat Restaurant in Urumqi, Ayup said.
Even though he had lived in Urumqi for many years and set up Dolan there, authorities would not let him transfer his residency registration from Kashgar to Urumqi in 2017, he added.
Obulqasim invested 3 million yuan, or US$413,100 in the series “Stories from Kashgar,” said Tahir Hamut Izgil, a Uyghur writer and activist who now lives in the United States and who directed the project.
“Abduhelil dedicated himself to promoting Uyghur culture,” he said. “One thing he always emphasized was the importance of the cultural sector, which not only generates economic benefits but also provides spiritual nourishment to our people.”
In 2021 and 2022, Obulqasim tried to move Dolan, a company supervised by the local Cultural Department, to Shenzhen, a metropolis in southeast China where he believed it would be safer, according to Ayup. But authorities prevented him from doing so.
Obulqasim continued to produce Uyghur TV shows in Urumqi until his second arrest in September 2023.
Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.
The story was updated to give Abduhelil Obulqasim's age as 47.