Chinese authorities have blacklisted Australian Uyghur community leaders and activists as “suspected terrorists” for monitoring and harassment in a trove of police records obtained by the ABC.
The Australian citizens, who have lived in Australia for between 7 and 20 years, are among thousands of Uyghurs in China and abroad who are singled out in an official Chinese blacklist for surveillance and interrogation.
The leaked blacklist contains the records of 10,000 “suspected terrorists”, including children and more than 7,600 ethnic minority Uyghurs, who face a campaign of repression and detention which Beijing claims is aimed at stamping out Muslim extremism.
The files are among more than 1 million police and surveillance records from Shanghai contained in a database named “uyghur terrorist” that was hacked late last year, as revealed by the ABC earlier this month.
An ABC investigation has now identified at least three Australian-based ethnic minority Uyghurs blacklisted in the database as “suspected terrorists” — evidence of a far-reaching campaign to monitor and stamp out foreign influence and dissent.
They include two Australian citizens — prominent Canberra-based community leader Nurgul Sawut and Melbourne Uyghur elder Maimaitiaji Kasimu — who both appeared in an explosive ABC Four Corners program in 2019 about human rights abuses in the province of Xinjiang.
The third Australian Uyghur, whose identity the ABC is withholding for his family’s safety, is a permanent resident whose mother was threatened with detention in Xinjiang months after he attended a major protest in Canberra.
Each of the three have family members or relatives who have been detained in a network of “re-education” camps in the province.
“I take being on this list as a badge of honour,” said Ms Sawut, a director of the US-based Campaign for Uyghurs organisation, who has spent years gathering data on the detention of Australian residents and their families.
“But some of the family members [of blacklisted Uyghurs] took it hard. They interpret it as they’re still being watched, even though they live in Australia.
“When I saw my name on the Chinese terrorist list, I was shocked but not surprised because I have been outspoken about the Uyghur cause and the crisis in our region since 2017.”
Ms Sawut says dozens of her family members in Xinjiang have been locked up in retaliation against her activism, and she has received attacks and warnings online which she believes were sent by Chinese authorities.
Hayrullah Maimaitiaji, whose blacklisted father Maimaitiaji Kasimu is revered as a devoutly religious leader in Melbourne’s Uyghur community, told the ABC he feared the discovery would further discourage others from speaking out.
“We are telling the truth, and now the Chinese government put my father with more than 7,000 people [Uyghurs] on that list,” said Mr Maimaitiaji, who was detained in Xinjiang in 2017 and is from a prominent Muslim family repeatedly targeted by authorities in China.
“If we are suddenly on the list, our relatives in China or us ourselves are in a very hard position.
“You [already] can’t go to China anymore or we can’t leave China anymore. It’s going to affect our safety as well.” ABC news