A student activist who accused a prominent Uyghur leader of sending her inappropriate messages said she has spent weeks fending off defamatory comments from his supporters, which worsened after he walked back a public apology for his conduct.
The controversy blew up in May, after the Washington-based nonprofit news outlet NOTUS ran an article detailing alleged sexual harassment within the Uyghur and Hong Kong human rights movements.
That article touched a raw nerve and stirred a heated debate in the activist community. Female accusers said they were being targeted for speaking out, while others came to the defense of the accused and said the allegations were unsubstantiated.
While a number of the accusers in the NOTUS article were anonymous, Esma Gün, a Turkish-Belgian student who had been involved in the Uyghur cause, went on record with allegations of inappropriate advances by Dolkun Isa, president of the World Uyghur Congress, or WUC.
In the weeks that followed, she told Radio Free Asia, messages of support for speaking out were tempered by “humiliating” attacks that left her feeling panicked and sickened.
“I was very stressed after I realized this is not going the way it should be. These guys are not taking responsibility, they are creating more space for people to speculate and to create more and more stories. I think they have a lot to take responsibility for and they didn’t and it all backlashed on the victims of course,” Gün told RFA in a recent interview.
In a May 24 interview with RFA’s Uyghur language service, Isa defended his conduct and said he had no recollection of messaging or meeting Gün. Although he did not directly accuse Gün, he implied that harassment accusations against him and others were part of a Chinese plot. The RFA interview has since been removed.
The NOTUS article outlined allegations of harassment against both Isa and chair of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, Nury Turkel, who has since resigned from his position.
The most detailed of these accusations was made by Gün, who shared text messages with NOTUS in which Isa said he wished to kiss her and repeatedly asked to meet her. Gün, who was a 22-year-old university student at the time, had been involved in the Uyghur movement as an activist and photographer since 2019, though she did not work with WUC.
The WUC is an international organization of exiled Uyghurs and among the leading advocates against grave persecution of the minority group by China.
In the RFA interview, Isa said Gün had not provided proof of the messages. He also said that the party that would benefit the most from the controversy was China.
“I don't know if there's only an exchange of text messages or not. I think it is unfair for them to call this problem ‘sexual harassment.’ I cannot accept this, let me say this first. Of course, the country that benefited the most from this is China, because as I said before, China has been doing this for 30 years,” he said.
Following the interview, Gün in early June posted to X a handful of screenshots from LinkedIn and Instagram messaging services.
“I didn’t want to share screenshots … I didn’t want to humiliate him … I also felt shame even though I was not the one that was supposed to feel the shame,” she told RFA. But because “he went with the Chinese project narrative … I shared the screenshots on Twitter to prove, another time, that I was not a Chinese spy.”
Isa tells Gün in a message that she is “always on my mind” and that “I want to talk, I want to hear your voice, my dear.” The messages are in Turkish.
When she replies that she “hesitate[s] to meet with you alone” out of concern for a misunderstanding among her friends, he asks, “Don't you think it's better to keep our meetings private?”
The screenshots were not independently verified by RFA, but they match the content of what was shared and verified by NOTUS.
Shortly after the NOTUS report came out, Isa issued an English language statement in which he said he had a "duty to admit serious errors of judgement, for which I apologise without reservation."
In the RFA Uyghur language interview, however, Isa walked back that apology, saying it was primarily for damage control.
“After much discussion with each other, in order to prevent any more damage to our reputation, we decided to apologize if the accusation turned out to be true,” he told RFA Uyghur. “We clarified that this is not an admission of guilt or that the accusation is true.”
In response to the criticism of the interview, an RFA spokesperson said in an e-mail that the outlet conducted an editorial review and decided to take it down from all platforms, primarily as Gün was not offered an opportunity to comment before it was published. The spokesperson added that RFA is reviewing its editorial processes.
Isa declined to comment further to RFA when asked about removal of the interview.
Chinese embassy weighs in
Isa is among the most prominent voices in the exiled Uyghur movement. He fled China in the mid-1990s, and has been designated a “terrorist” by Beijing for his human rights activism. He has been president of the WUC since 2017 – the year when China intensified a campaign of mass incarceration and persecution that several governments have described as genocide.
In the RFA interview, Isa readily links the NOTUS controversy to ongoing Chinese efforts to undermine the Uyghur rights movement.
“You said at the beginning of this interview that China has been continuing the operation of using all kinds of insults and slurs to slander and defame me,” he said. “We’ve been through this kind of experience a lot before.”
A review of social media suggests that pro-China trolls and bots have indeed taken advantage of the situation to attack both Isa and the wider Uyghur rights movement. The Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., weighed into the controversy with a post on X – a social media platform that is banned in China. But there is nothing to suggest any of the women quoted in the NOTUS article are part of a Chinese plot.
“[If people would] just look at the work we’ve done for Uyghurs and have a little sympathy, I think it is not difficult to see through this,” Gün told RFA. “If they put me next to Dolkun and they measure who has power, who has a voice, who can silence things and who can talk loud to manipulate things, I think it's clear who can use things to mislead their people. I am not one of them.”
On social media, Gün shared a PDF of the advocacy work she's carried out on behalf of the Uyghur cause. These include several online campaigns highlighting Uyghur forced labor in the fashion industry.
One series of pictures are satirical ads for world-renowned brands that source cotton and other products from Xinjiang. Gün poses in wearing leather boots, described as “made in concentration camps.” In another image, her black sports top is “made by tortured Uyghur women.”
In a separate Instagram post, Esma has tears of painted blood dripping from her eyes, and red tape across her mouth.
“My name is Esma and I am from the Turks of the Republic of Turkey,” she writes in a caption voicing solidarity toward Uyghurs. “With this, I’d like to spread awareness for the Turks of East Turkestan where they are forced to forget their own identity and where a modern genocide is taking place.”
Edited by Mat Pennington.
Updated to identify which screenshots were made public.