CHINA JAILS UYGHUR MAN FOR SEVEN YEARS FOR TEACHING IN NATIVE LANGUAGE

Sat 12 March 2022:

An Uyghur educator has been imprisoned for seven years in China’s troubled Xinjiang region for breaching Chinese legislation by training students in Uyghur, their native language. Adil Tursun has already received government acknowledgment for his efforts.

According to Radio Free Asia, he was detained in 2016 and sentenced to seven years in prison in 2018.

Adil has previously been named by the government as one of the “nation’s outstanding teachers.” Authorities jailed him for the “crime” of educating students in Uyghur since they did not understand the instructions in Chinese.

RFA called Kona Sheher county police to find out about Adil’s sentence. The police, however, declined to answer questions. They did not deny that the teacher had been jailed.

“After his mistake was investigated, he was arrested. It was a previous mistake of his – to speak in Uyghur to his students while bilingual education was being implemented,” the media outlet quoted a police officer in Kashgar prefecture.

“He was handed over to the national-security branch of the police department and was sentenced to prison two years after his arrest,” he added.

As per the authorities, the policy was implemented to improve standard Mandarin language skills among ethnic minority students to make them more competitive in the workplace. However, Uyghurs saw the measure as forced cultural assimilation aimed at diluting their Turkic heritage, according to the media outlet.

Now, not only the instruction in the Uyghur language but the use of standard Uyghur-language textbooks has also been prohibited in nearly all schools, irrespective of the fact that some students cannot understand instructions in Mandarin.

Notably, Adil expressed his dissatisfaction with the Chinese government policy of abolishing the Uyghur language in schools, according to Radio Free Asia.

China has been asked upon numerous times to perform similar activities. Earlier this month, 43 countries urged China to “ensure full respect for the rule of law” for Muslim Uyghurs.

The comment was made in the United Nations, and Beijing was outraged. The United Nations, as well as other European and Asian member states and other countries, have signed the statement.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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