Activist Yidiresi Aishan was arrested in Morocco at the request of China. He had left Turkey, which is no longer a safe haven.
Yidiresi Aishan was arrested at Casablanca airport in Morocco on July 19, 2021. The activist of the Turkish-speaking and Muslim Uyghur people of China was the subject of an international wanted notice issued by Interpol at the request of Beijing. The reason? He is accused of all evidence of “terrorism”.
The 33-year-old from Xinjiang was active in a diaspora newspaper. He risks extradition to China, where more than a million Uyghurs are locked up in “re-education camps”.
The father of three lived in Turkey for ten years, along with nearly 50,000 Uyghurs. The minority share cultural and linguistic roots with the Turks and were rather well tolerated by the regime of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In 2009, the leader accused Beijing of committing “a kind of genocide”.
Ankara is getting closer to Beijing
But Ankara, dependent on Chinese investments and the Sinovac vaccine, has moved closer to Beijing. In December 2020, an extradition agreement was reached. The Turkish parliament has not yet ratified it, but the Uyghurs in Istanbul denounce an increasingly hostile climate. Several thousand of them prefer to pack up. Like Yidiresi Aishan, who then hoped to reach Europe via Morocco.
Should the European Union become more involved in foreign policy?
While Beijing is persecuting the Uyghurs, a Taliban delegation was received in China on July 27. The communist regime, deeply anti-religious, is trying to get together with fundamentalist Islamists in Afghanistan to secure its border and prevent attacks by Uyghur Islamist fighters taking refuge in its neighbor.
