Read RFA coverage of this story in Uyghur.
A prominent Uyghur historian and expert in Uyghur place names is serving a 17-year prison sentence for his writings, people with knowledge of the situation said.
Ghojaniyaz Yollugh Tekin, 59, was an educator at the Aksu Education Institute in the city of Aksu in the north of China’s far-western Xinjiang region. His research and publications focused on Uyghur toponymy — the linguistic evolution of place names and the historical and geographical reasons for the names.
A police officer who works in the village where Tekin is from in Aksu prefectur’s Uchturpan county, told Radio Free Asia that the intellectual had been sentenced to 17 years and is serving his sentence in Hotan, about 500 kilometers (310 miles) south of Aksu city.
Tekin was detained in 2017 amid the Chinese government’s mass roundup of Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples in Xinjiang, according to a list of imprisoned Uyghur intellectuals compiled by Norway-based researcher Abduweli Ayup.
Tekin was sentenced to prison in late 2018 for his research, writings and views that Uyghurs are part of the Turkic world — and not Chinese — according to Ayup’s data.
He was among an estimated 1.8 million Uyghurs, including intellectuals, teachers, cultural figures and prominent businesspeople, who were forced into re-education camps.
Harassed for writing on sensitive topics
Besides his influential historical research and writings, Tekin boldly and actively participated in intellectual gatherings and debates in Uyghur society, said his friend Tuyghun Abduweli, an activist now living in Canada.
Chinese state security agents often harassed Tekin after he gained significant recognition for his writings on sensitive historical topics concerning Uyghurs’ connection with the Turkic world, he said.
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Tekin’s professional colleague used to refer to him as “Aksu’s Turghun Almas,” a reference to one of the most influential Uyghur historians of the 20th century who challenged China’s claim that the Uyghur homeland had been part of Chinese territory since ancient times in his book, “The Uyghurs.”
After the book was published in the late 1980s, China banned it and forbade Almas from further writing and publishing anything for the rest of his life.
Tekin was involved in visiting and hosting prominent Uyghur intellectuals, including Almas, Abdurehim Otkur, Nizamidin Huseyin and Abdullah Talip, and organizing meetings between them and readers, Abduweli said.
Turanism
In the late 1980s, Tekin published an article titled “East Turkistan, West Turkistan, and the Concept of Turan,” in an Aksu newspaper, which caused a stir among Uyghurs in Xinjiang and caught the attention of Chinese authorities, Abduweli said.
The term “Turan” refers to a historical region in Central Asia, as well as to a political and cultural movement. In the early 20th century, Turanism emerged as an initiative aimed at uniting Turkic and other Ural-Altaic-speaking peoples throughout Eurasia.
“Because of this article, he was suspended from his teaching position and went through very difficult times thereafter,” Abduweli said, adding that authorities had repeatedly interrogated and detained Tekin since the 1990s.
Tekin was criticized as a “stubborn separatist” in 2018 for not abandoning his research and continuing to speak out about Uyghur history, and ended up in a re-education camp, he said.
China has said that the camps were vocational training centers and has claimed that they have been shut down.
However, the testimony of Uyghurs held in them and other credible reports indicate that political indoctrination, physical abuse, sexual assaults and forced sterilizations of women took place in the facilities.
Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.