Read RFA coverage of this story in Uyghur.
The older brother of former World Uyghur Congress President Dolkun Isa is serving a 20-year sentence in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang for “inciting terrorism,” local police and security officers at a school where he taught said.
Yalkun Isa, now 63, taught at the Aksu Education Institute in the city of Aksu, a college where over two dozen Uyghur educators had been arrested in 2017 at a time of mass detentions of Uyghur educators, businessmen and cultural figures in re-education camps to prevent what China said was terrorism and religious extremism.
When an expatriate Uyghur with knowledge of the situation in Aksu told Radio Free Asia in the earlier report about the detained teachers from the school, he mentioned that Yalkun Isa also had been jailed.
Yalkun’s brother Dolkun served as president of the Germany-based World Uyghur Congress, or WUC, from 2017-2024. Dolkun, who has lived in exile since 1994, has long faced harassment from China for his advocacy work on behalf of Uyghurs.
A police officer with whom Radio Free Asia spoke confirmed that Yalkun had been arrested for contacting people in foreign countries by phone, but said he also had downloaded content from foreign websites.
The police officer said he saw Yalkun’s verdict, stating that the teacher had been sentenced to 20 years for inciting those around him to form an organization and to commit “terrorism.”
Another police officer from Aksu who requested anonymity so he could speak freely about Yalkun, said the teacher was arrested in late 2017 because records of his phone communications showed he had spoken with people abroad.
Forced confession
During his interrogation, which lasted about a month, Yalkun was forced to make a confession that while speaking with Dolkun, he received instructions about establishing an organization in Aksu and conducting “terrorism,” the police officer said.
A police officer at the Aksu Education Institute said Yalkun was handed over to state security agents for questioning, and that after his closed trial he was transferred to Aksu Prison.
But a political leader from Aksu’s state security police told RFA that Yalkun’s case had been transferred to the Criminal Investigation Department.
“We didn’t interrogate him,” he said.
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Another official from the city’s state security police who asked not to be named so he could speak freely about Yalkun said during the trial, Yalkun’s ordinary discussions about international affairs with two of his students were misrepresented as “incitement.”
Another employee at the school’s police station said Yalkun was tried alongside two former classmates from Xinjiang University but did not disclose their identities.
“All three of them were arrested for plotting terrorism,” he said.
Yalkun is currently serving his sentence at Urumqi Prison No. 1, both of these officers said.
Cautions interactions
Yalkun began working at the Aksu Education Institute after he graduated with a degree in math from Xinjiang University in 1984.
Abduweli Ayup, a Uyghur activist living in Norway who maintains a list of Uyghurs in Xinjiang who have been detained, said Yalkun was always cautious in his interactions in Xinjiang because of Dolkun’s political background.
Dolkun Isa said he spoke several times with Yalkun, usually during holidays, about their elderly father’s health until April 2017, after which he lost contact with him.
In 2019, Dolkun received unofficial information from the Uyghur community that his brother had been detained and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Then, in January 2020, when the Chinese Communist Party forced Dolkun’s older sister, Azgul Isa, to make a video statement condemning Isa for “smear[ing] Xinjiang from overseas,” he said he only saw Azgul, his older brother’s son and the son’s wife in the video, but not his older and younger brothers.
On Friday, Dolkun Isa posted on X that he “woke up this morning to the news — reported by RFA — that my brother, mathematics Professor Yalkun Isa, has been sentenced to 20 years in prison by China. His only ‘crime’ is that he’s my brother and Uyghur! My family and relatives are being punished for my activism abroad. +1000 of Uyghur intellectuals have been imprisoned in an attempt to silence us. But we will not be silenced!”
In 2017, authorities in Xinjiang arrested another brother, Hushtar Isa, based in Aksu, while he was working at a driving school because he was a former prisoner, sources with knowledge of the situation told RFA in an earlier report. Hushtar had been reportedly detained in 1998 and sentenced to two years in prison.
During Hushtar’s two years in a re-education camp in Aksu, authorities accused him of more than 10 crimes for “mistakes” he had committed during his life.
Their mother, Ayhan Memet, died in a “re-education” camp in May 2018 in Aksu, where she had been detained for exhibiting “religious extremism.”
Chinese authorities denied that she died in the internment facility and said Memet and other members of the family were living peacefully.
A January 2020 report by China’s Global Times, a nationalistic tabloid, revealed that their father, who had been sent to a concentration camp in May or June of 2017, died a year later.
The report criticized the WUC and Dolkun Isa for what WUC claimed reflected China’s increasing frustration with his success in bringing attention to the issue of mass internment in Xinjiang.
Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.