He says authorities jailed Eli Mamut on trumped-up charges of \u2018leading a terrorist group.\u2019<\/p>\n
2015-11-16<\/p>\n
A Uyghur teenager sentenced to life in prison for \u201cleading a terrorist group\u201d in northwestern China\u2019s restive Xinjiang region is the wrongful victim of a \u201cstrike hard\u201d campaign to crack down on members of the Turkic-speaking, Muslim minority group, according to his father. <\/p>\n
Eighteen-year-old Eli Mamut, from Aksu (in Chinese, Akesu) prefecture\u2019s Aykol township\u2014the site of a deadly police action on a Uyghur crowd in August 2013\u2014is innocent and a victim of the tense situation in the region, his father Mamut Awut told RFA\u2019s Uyghur Service.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy son did nothing wrong\u2014he simply watched videos on his cell phone,\u201d he said. \u201cI believe he had no idea that the videos are classified as illegal by the authorities.\u201d<\/p>\n
The family has not been able to do anything about the situation other than pray, Awut said.<\/p>\n
Mamut, then 17, was attending Aksu Technical School when authorities detained him and nine of his classmates at the end of September 2014 for watching Uyghur-language videos on their cell phones, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI heard about my son\u2019s detention a week [after he was apprehended] from the parents of his classmates,\u201d Awut said.<\/p>\n
When Awut called Mamut\u2019s teachers about the incident, they told him that the police were questioning the students about accessing the internet from their cell phones.<\/p>\n
At the time, the teachers told him that the students could be released soon after clarifications were made about the materials they had watched, he said. <\/p>\n
But later, the teachers themselves became fearful and refused to take Awut\u2019s calls, he added.<\/p>\n
When RFA recently contacted one of the teachers at the school, he said police had detained 13 people, not nine, for internet access offenses.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is clear that the so-called [terrorist] groups have done nothing,\u201d said the teacher, speaking on condition of anonymity.<\/p>\n
The teacher said that Mamut and several of his classmates had gathered in his dormitory to share information he was interested in.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe some of the content was deemed sensitive by authorities, but for students their age it was not,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
\u201cAll the teachers believe that local authorities victimized the students as they have done to others in the city to show their loyalty to their higher-ups and support to the strike hard campaign.\u201d<\/p>\n
When teachers stopped answering his calls, Awut went to the police department in Aksu, but he could not locate the right office or the officers whose duty it was to answer questions about his son\u2019s whereabouts, he said.<\/p>\n
\u2018Given a life sentence\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n It was only after Mamut had spent four months in detention that Awut received a notice from the No. 3 Regional Forced Labor Camp Administration, which read: \u201cEli Mamut has been relocated from a detention center in Aksu to our camp in order to implement his life sentence [for] \u2026 leading a terrorist group.\u201d<\/p>\n The notice is the only official information that Mamut\u2019s family received about his conviction, Awut said.<\/p>\n Eight of his classmates received sentences ranging from two to 20 years in prison for \u201cparticipating in a terrorist group,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cBut nobody knows the organization\u2019s name, its program and goals, or what it has done wrong,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Later, Awut had learned that Mamut\u2019s trial had been held during the first week of January 2015. <\/p>\n He returned to the Aksu police department and demanded that he be shown evidence supporting the charge against his son, he said.<\/p>\n But the officers refused to answer him and threatened to throw him in jail as well, he said.<\/p>\n One police officer pushed him out, saying, \u201cYou should take care of your other children,\u201d Awut said.<\/p>\n Awut said he believed his son, who was born in August 1997, had been handed a heavier sentence because his identification card erroneously listed him as being 18 years old at the time of the trial.<\/p>\n One of Mamut\u2019s classmates, Ablikim Tursun, had received a two-year jail sentence and was placed in a labor camp for teenagers in the Xinjiang capital Urumqi, because he was identified as 17 years old when authorities issued the verdict in his trial.<\/p>\n \u201cActually, my son is the same age as [Tursun], and the difference between what\u2019s listed on his ID card and his real age should have been clear,\u201d Awut said. \u201cBut the authorities sentenced him so heavily. I am still in shock as to why they hate us so much.\u201d<\/p>\n No details<\/strong><\/p>\n Husenjan Tursun, a police officer in Aykol township, told RFA that authorities there were aware of Mamut\u2019s life sentence, but said he did not know the official charges the teenager was convicted of because the case was handled by police in Aksu city.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were not involved in the case, because Eli Mamut was in a boarding school in Aksu city,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n When RFA contacted the Aksu city police department, an officer who declined to provide his name said he knew Mamut had been sentenced to life in prison on terrorism charges, but was not aware of the details of the case.<\/p>\n Chinese authorities rolled out the \u201cstrike hard\u201d campaign across Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region following a deadly suicide bombing in May 2014 in the regional capital Urumqi, which they blamed on Uyghur separatists. <\/p>\n The campaign has included police raids on Uyghur households, restrictions on Islamic practices, and curbs on the culture and language of the Uyghur people, including videos and other material.<\/p>\n Aykol township became a major focus of a crackdown by Chinese authorities after a violent incident that occurred there during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in July and early August 2013, which left at least three people dead and 50 injured when authorities fired on a crowd of Uyghur protesters.<\/p>\n Reported by Shohret Hoshur for RFA\u2019s Uyghur Service. Translated by Shohret Hoshur. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" He says authorities jailed Eli Mamut on trumped-up charges of \u2018leading a terrorist group.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2195,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"topic":[],"class_list":["post-2196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2196\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2196"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=2196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}