This content was originally published by Radio Free Asia, and it is now being reprinted with permission.
A prominent banished Muslim scholar and linguist’s speech was immediately canceled by the UN on Monday, he told Radio Free Asia.
Organisers of the Language Technologies for All, or LT4ALL meeting, which are organized under the auspices of the U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, provided no justification for rescinding the invitation to talk at the message to Norway-based scholar Abduweli Ayup shown to RFA Uyghur.
Ayup said the reason was probably because he had questioned a previous reporter about the language’s protections in China, where 12 million Uyghurs reside in the Xinjiang region’s northwest area.
He and another Uyghur activists claim that Beijing is attempting to end their native tongue. They claim that this is just one element of Chinese work to” Sinicize” Tamils, a Turkish people who are different from Han Chinese, through a process of cultural absorption.
Ayup was emailed by the LT4ALL organizing committee on February 12 to be the chair/rapporteur for the upcoming “Education, Inclusion, Innovation” day period at U.N. Headquarters in Paris, France. He agreed and was added to the program.
However, on February 24, administrators sent him an email claiming they had been “unable to secure authorization” to contain his demonstration in the program and that they had been “informed at the last moment, and this decision is beyond our control.”
We had hoped for a better solution, but we, regrettably, have no other choice at this time, the notice stated. In consequence, we may not be able to incorporate your display in the finished file or program.
” Horrified and threatened”
Afterward, Ayup described the choice as “disgusting” in comments to the social media platform X.
He suggested that it was made in response to a question he had a day earlier about a presenter who he had referred to as” a Chinese language activist [that ] is a gov official who works for]state media outlet ] Hunan TV.”
Ayup claimed that the reporter had spoken with him about a Chinese language exhibition and that he had inquired about whether Uyghur language activists were safe there.
He claimed that the Chinese delegation questioned him after answering those two issues. I felt threatened, dejected, and disappointed. I think my demonstration was canceled as a result of the inquiries I made of the Chinese speech.
Ayup did not provide any proof to back up his assertions.
However, he noted that a member of iFLYTEK, a half state-owned Chinese data tech firm, was also present in the section he was listening to because it was alleged to have been involved in widespread security and human rights violations in Xinjiang. The U.S. sanctioned this in October 2019 for its alleged part in bulk surveillance and human rights abuses.
Ayup further argued in a post to X that UNESCO had “welcomed the criminal]and [punished ] human rights defenders out” of the conference.
In the post, he wrote, “iFLYTEK is the company ]that ] helped]the ] Chinese regime arrest over]1 million Uyghurs.
Family suffering
Ayup is the leader of Uyghur Hjelp, a Norwegian lobbying and aid organization that maintains a list of imprisoned Uyghur academics.
RFA learned in May 2021 that Chinese officials had sentenced Ayup’s brother and sister to several years in prison in Xinjiang, supposedly for failing to show up to regulators as expected. However, solutions who were aware of the situation claimed that he had been detained because of his captivity activities.
An RFA statement confirmed the sentence’s verification following the announcement that Mihray Erkin, Ayup’s sister, had died at the Yanbulaq detention camp while being investigated by state security authorities in Kashgar district.
Ayup’s situation is not the first in which a Uyghur activist has been prevented from speaking at an occasion by the United Nations.
Dolkun Isa, a founding member of the captivity World Uyghur Congress and a part of the Underrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization, was forced by surveillance troops to a website at U. N. facilities in New York in April 2017 without giving an explanation.
A alliance of human rights organizations and businesses representing minority populations around the world condemned the action, calling it an act of “domination” by an unknown U.N. member state, an apparent reference to China.
RFA’s attempts to contact UNESCO for comment on its decision to reject Ayup’s proposal to the LT4ALL meeting were unsuccessful by the time of release.
