A Uyghur county chief who appealed to Chinese soldiers not to shoot two Uyghur officials during a violent incident in Xinjiang a decade ago was arrested in 2017 and later sentenced to 20 years for being “two-faced,” authorities with knowledge of the situation said.
Ahat Sayit, now about 50 years old, was chief of Yarkand county in Kashgar prefecture, when Chinese authorities raided a house where Uyghur women had gathered to pray on July 28, 2014.
A subsequent protest by their husbands and sons led to use of deadly force by Chinese soldiers and armed police. Nearly 100 people were killed, according to a Chinese government estimate, though Uyghurs believe that thousands may have died in what they call the Ilishqu Massacre.
Sayit's jail sentence came to light after Xinjiang police provided information about it while Radio Free Asia was obtaining details on the arrests and sentencing of other "two-faced" Uyghurs amid a nationwide "dark forces" crackdown on Uyghur cadres that began this July.
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The term “two-faced” is used by authorities to describe Uyghur officials who do not willingly follow directives and show signs of disloyalty or sympathetic tendencies toward other Uyghurs in the autonomous region in northwestern China where the mostly Muslim ethnic group faces repression.
A police officer at the Yarkand county market told RFA that Sayit was arrested in 2017 during a previous crackdown on “two-faced” Uyghurs.
That year was the beginning of a massive political reeducation program during which an estimated 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic people from all walks of life were taken into detention. They were detained for a range of “offenses” such as wearing Uyghur and Islamic clothing, having long beards, praying or teaching the Quran, and traveling abroad.
“The police arrested Sayit and handed him over to the city police station the next day,” the officer at the county market said.
A staffer at the Yarkand County Department of Justice said about 300 officials and police – who “were nice to the people who caused the incident” there 10 years ago – were later deemed “two-faced.” Sayit was among them, he said.
Sayit is serving his 20-year sentence at Kashgar Prison, an officer at the detention facility told Radio Free Asia.
“He got punished the most among the people arrested for being two-faced,” she said.
Uyghur clothing
Another reason for Sayit’s arrest was his wearing of a traditional Uyghur shirt while he was an official at a time when authorities banned ethnic clothing in Xinjiang, an assistant police officer at a Yarkand county police station told RFA.
Authorities would have considered defiance of the ban as “incitement to ethnic separatism,” said a person with knowledge of the situation, who like others in the report declined to be named so he could speak freely.
Back in July 2014, Xinjiang officials initially responded positively to Sayit’s appeal to the soldiers, so he received a light warning about failing to prevent the incident and retained his position, while other Uyghurs were dismissed from their jobs, according to the families of the two Uyghur officials who were later shot during the violence.
But by 2017, officials became skeptical about Sayit’s explanation for his actions and interpreted them as protecting perpetrators, said the person with knowledge of the situation.
Relatives of the two officials taken hostage and later killed by Chinese soldiers indicated that authorities doubted Sayit’s explanation.
Later, in 2023, the Xinjiang’s Communist Party Committee criticized former Uyghur officials, including Sayit, in a publicly issued document.
Sayit was described as an “evil, cunning, arrogant and unchangeable two-faced person,” and his name was listed alongside that of a former education official who had been given a delayed death sentence.
Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Matt Reed.