søndag 13. desember 2020

Uyghur-Australian Reunited With Wife, Child After Three-year Campaign to Free Them From China

A Uyghur Australian national has been reunited with his wife and child in Australia three years after he launched a campaign to free them from their home in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). Sadam Abdusalam welcomed his wife Nadila Wumaier and three-year-old son Lutfy, who he had never met before, on Thursday after they arrived on a flight to Sydney, which they were permitted to board following diplomatic negotiations.

Wumaier claims she was previously under house arrest in the XUAR, where authorities are believed to have held up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in a vast network of internment camps as part of a campaign of extralegal detention launched in early 2017.

Abdusalam said he “never thought this day would come” in a tweet on Friday, thanking Australian government officials, his legal team, human rights groups, and journalists that helped to reunite him with his family. He also thanked the Chinese officials “who decided to give my wife back her passport.”

“My dream is for all my fellow Uyghurs to be reunited with their families,” he wrote, referring to members of his ethnic group in the diaspora and in the XUAR whose family members have disappeared into the camp system or sent to prison for allegedly displaying “extremist” behavior.