When [Persistent] Picketing Works: China Frees Ethnic Kazakh Rakhizhan Zeinolla after 17 years of detention

      When Picketing Works: China Frees Ethnic Kazakh Rakhizhan Zeinolla
                     by LEILA ADILZHAN*

Bitter Winter, “a magazine on religious liberty and Human Rights,” published the following on April 16:

His wife’s picket at the Chinese consulate in Almaty got so much attention that the CCP decided to give up, [and] set her husband free after 17 years of detention.

Those who insist that picketing and protesting outside Chinese embassies and consulates is a waste of time were proved wrong last week in Kazakhstan.

An ethnic Kazakh woman from Xinjiang, Farida (also spelled Paryda) Kabylbek, who had been picketing the Chinese consulate in Almaty, achieved the return of her husband Rakhizhan (also spelled Rahizhan) Zeinolla. A resident of Almaty, Farida Kabylbek, not only protested in front of the Chinese Consulate in her home city, but also picketed the Chinese General Consulate in Nur-Sultan.

On April 9, 2021, she and her relatives and friends finally met her husband at the Almaty airport. The aircraft arrived from the Chinese city of Chengdu.

This is the story of an amazing woman, whose husband was arrested without evidence when he went to Xinjiang from Kazakhstan, and kept in jail for 13 years. After this, he was put into a camp, then remained under house arrest. And only 17 years after his arrest was he able to reunite with his family.

 * wife of  Serikzhan Bilash, Kazakhstan human rights activist

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… though he will not rise and give to him because he is his friend, 

yet because of his persistence 

he will rise and give him as many as he needs.

So I say to you, ask, and it will be given to you; 

seek, and you will find; 

knock, and it will be opened to you. 

                                                                                       ~ Luke 11:8-9 (NKJV)

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