Nine-year-old Mayir Bazarbay holds up photos of her family and begs and says she misses her father, who is currently imprisoned in Xinjiang, China. Mayir Bazarbay is suffering from a tumor on her kidney and needs urgent medical care. (Photo: ChinaAid)

ChinaAid

(Almaty, Kazakhstan—April 13, 2018) Nine-year-old Mayir Bazarbay posted a video online on April 5, sobbing as she talks about a tumor on her kidney and how much she misses her dad, who went missing last year when he tried to return to Kazakhstan from China’s northwestern Xinjiang.

“I am getting thinner and thinner,” she said. “There is a tumor on my kidney … I need help. I miss my dad very much. The doctor said that there’s something on my kidney. I was hospitalized twice in Almaty. The doctor suggested that I go to the large hospital in Almaty, but I couldn’t go. I wish my dad was at home … My mom swept snow for the entire winter for me. When I see other children with their dads, I want my dad to be with me as well.”

Mayir Bazarbay was born in Ili Kazakh Autonomous Region of Xinjiang, but she and her mother immigrated to Kazakhstan and obtained Kazakh citizenship. Her father, Bazarbay Nurdhanz, attempted to leave China on Oct. 15, 2017, but officials detained him for trying to do so. For three months afterwards, he was allowed to contact his family, but no one has heard from him in the past four months.

“We need help!” Mayir Bazarbay said in the video. “The roof is leaking. It needs to be repaired. We are so worried. We haven’t heard from Dad, and we can’t call him, either. I miss Dad so much … I want the family to be together.”

One Kazakh told a Chinaid reporter last week that staff members of Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs would send Mayir to the hospital, and the Kazakh procuratorate assigned staff members to inquire about her father’s condition in China.

Unfortunately, Barzarbay Nurdhanz’s story is not uncommon. Many Uyghur and Kazakh people residing in Xinjiang have been prevented from leaving the country recently, and Chinese authorities have set up “political training centers” and “anti-extremist education centers” that hold more than 100,000 Kazakhs and Uyghurs arbitrarily. According to reports, these centers are now crowded to the point that that authorities are closing schools for minority children in order to make room for more. 20 Kazakhs held in such centers had to be hospitalized after suffering mental breakdowns from the relentless torture. Most of these detainees have a religious background or demonstrated intentions of leaving the country, and some of them simply discussed immigrating over WeChat, a Chinese social media platform, with their family members.

ChinaAid exposes the abuses suffered by Bazarbay Nurdhanz and his family in order to stand in solidarity with them, and calls on the Chinese government to unconditionally release him and the others imprisoned in camps designed to target minorities, upholding human rights, religious freedom, and rule of law.

ChinaAid Media Team
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