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Heart and Soul: Uighurs - Dreaming of Vatan

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25/09/2015 GMT

BBC World Service - Heart and Soul, Uighurs - Dreaming of Vatan

The Muslims living in Kazakhstan, miles from their Vatan, their homeland, in China.

The Muslim Uighers living in Kazakhstan, thousands of miles from their Vatan, their homeland, in China.

BBC Persian’s Rustam Qobil meets the Muslim Uighurs of Kazakhstan who are living and worshipping miles from their homeland.
 
Through the net curtains of a rundown apartment in Almaty, Kazakhstan, a Chinese Uighur carefully peers out into the street. For the last two years this window has been his only access to the outside world - he is too afraid to go outside.
 
He is just one of the thousands of Uighurs who were forced to flee their native Xinjiang when the Chinese secret police started arresting religious Uighur men after violence erupted in the Xinjiang capital - Urumqi. As a practising Muslim he was scared for his life and freedom - so he fled to the closest country - Kazakhstan.
 
But he has been living illegally in Kazakhstan, and still does not know if he should claim asylum there. This would make him known to the Kazakh authorities who could easily deport him back to China. But living like this, in hiding and relying on fellow Uighurs’ hand-outs, is not a viable long term option either.
 
Thousands of Uighurs have fled across the Chinese border since relations between the Uighurs and Beijing reached a critical point in the last few years. Violent attacks by the Uighurs and the crackdown on Uighur dissent by the Chinese authorities is making the situation unbearable for many. According to human rights groups, the Chinese authorities have executed hundreds of Uighurs for demanding greater rights, but China calls them terrorists and say that they are fighting against global terror.
 
Rustam finds out about their mystical, poetic, relatively-liberal brand of Islam.

(Photo: Uigher musicians: Rustam Qobil)

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