Rabihan Musa had petitioned in public for months for permission to visit her family outside the country.<\/p>\n
2017-03-08<\/p>\n
Authorities in northwestern China\u2019s Xinjiang region have assigned a spy to monitor the daily movements of an elderly Uyghur woman deemed troublesome by police, telling her that the young woman sent to visit her each day is now her \u201cdaughter,\u201d sources say.<\/p>\n
Speaking to RFA\u2019s Uyghur Service, Rabihan Musa, a resident of Bortala city in Xinjiang\u2019s northwestern Bortala Mongol Autonomous Prefecture, said the woman was brought to see her first on New Year\u2019s Day.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe head of our autonomous district came to visit me and introduced Xiong Qizhang to me, saying \u2018This lady will be your daughter from now on and will take care of you. She will take care of any difficulties that you may have,\u2019\u201d Rabihan said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSince then, she has been coming to see me at least a couple of times each day, bringing eggs, milk, and rice,\u201d Rabihan said, adding, \u201cSometimes she comes and meets my neighbors instead, and I have been told that she asks about who comes and goes from my house.\u201d<\/p>\n
After telling her unwanted helper that it seems she has not come to help but only to watch, \u201cshe doesn\u2019t say anything, but only smiles,\u201d Rabihan said.<\/p>\n
Rabihan, 82, had tried in February 2016 to leave Xinjiang to visit family members who had fled Xinjiang for a better life in Norway six years before, but police seized her passport before she could purchase a ticket, she told RFA in an earlier report.<\/p>\n
Alarmed after Rabihan gave interviews by phone to RFA\u2019s Uyghur Service, police offered to give her passport back if she would end a months-long public petition for its return, but she never saw the document again.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne day, I told [Xiong], \u2018I\u2019m getting old. If you really want to help, just bring my passport back so that I can go to see my kids,\u2019\u2019 Rabihan said. \u201cBut she tells me this is beyond her control.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNow I don\u2019t know how to free myself from this situation,\u201d Rabihan said. \u201cI am afraid of being detained and charged with \u2018disrupting ethnic unity\u2019 if I chase her out of my house with a broom, as I sometimes think of doing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rabihan said she has told Xiong that she knows she comes only because she has been ordered to do so.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe says \u2018You\u2019re so smart,\u2019 but makes no reply to my requests,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Reported by Shohret Hoshur for RFA\u2019s Uyghur Service. Translated by Mamatjan Juma. Written in English by Richard Finney.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Rabihan Musa had petitioned in public for months for permission to visit her family outside the country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3493,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"topic":[],"class_list":["post-3494","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\/3494","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=3494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3494\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3494"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=3494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}