For over 100 days, small groups of people, many of them women, have been picketing the Chinese Consulate in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, seeking information about family members who have ‘disappeared’ in Xinjiang, just over the border in China.
“We will not stop until they release our relatives,” one of them shouted on the 100th day of their protest, on 18 May. “Even if we are shot, even if we are chopped up, even if we are killed.”
These protests have highlighted how both ethnic Kazakh Chinese citizens, and Kazakhstani citizens, have been swept up in China’s forced re-education programme that predominantly targets Uyghurs in the northwest of the country. Individual stories reveal that families have been separated and children have been left without parents. Testimonies of Kazakhs who have experienced the so-called re-education camps in China, and accounts of their escape from Xinjiang to Kazakhstan, have been shared widely.
