Abdurahman Tohti hasn't seen or heard from his wife, his son, or his daughter for almost three years, for reasons entirely out of his control.
He and his family are Uighurs, the majority-Muslim ethnic minority based in the Xinjiang region in western China.
Authorities from Beijing, under the guise of counterterrorism, have in recent years covered the entire region with facial-recognition cameras, and they are accused of placing up to 2 million residents in prison-like camps.
Chinese authorities are reported to have physically tortured Uighurs, turned them into forced laborers, and compelled them to sing pro-Chinese songs in order to be fed. The region — known to Uighurs as East Turkestan — has been described as a "21st-century police state."
China has routinely denied inflicting physical or psychological damage on Uighurs in these camps. Instead it has referred to them as "reeducation camps" or "free vocational training" that make life "colorful."
Tohti left his village of Besh Tugmen in Aksu prefecture, Xinjiang, in March 2013 and settled in Istanbul that October after studying in Egypt for a few months.
He married his wife, Peride Yasin, in Istanbul in February 2014. They had two children — a boy, Abduleziz, and a girl, Nadire.
In August 2016, Yasin and the children traveled to Xinjiang to visit family. Tohti hasn't heard from any of them since.
He and his wife were supposed to speak after she landed, but she mysteriously deleted him from WeChat — China's most popular messaging platform — almost immediately after she arrived in China, he told INSIDER.
INSIDER's conversation with Tohti was translated from the Uighur language to English by Alip Erkin, an activist in Australia at Uyghur Bulletin. (Uyghur is an alternative spelling of Uighur.)
Tohti later heard from people on the ground that his wife was arrested upon arrival and sentenced to ten years in prison. He has never heard anything official about their fate, and he said he is "completely in the dark."
Nadire, his youngest, was 5 months old.
Tohti still doesn't know what his wife's charges are, but he thinks they could be related to her spending time in Turkey, an act for which China has been known to punish Uighurs.
The Turkish government has long offered a space for Uighurs to seek refuge and stage protests against China. Beijing's response has been to threaten to tank economic relations between the two countries.
China's grip on Uighurs has worsened since Yasin disappeared, with authorities using increasingly flimsy reasons to lock the people up — including having a beard, wearing long skirts, or setting their clocks to two hours after Beijing time.
A familiar sight
Since his family vanished, Tohti has been stuck in limbo in Istanbul, with no idea where his wife or children went.
Tohti's parents are still in Xinjiang, but they cut off contact with him to protect themselves from reprisal, telling him not to contact them and changing their phone number.
Uighurs in Xinjiang are often punished for communicating with people in foreign countries.
Tohti also tried to call his parents-in-law in Xinjiang, but the only number he had for them was out of service.
Then, about three weeks ago, while scrolling through Douyin, the Chinese version of the popular video-sharing platform TikTok, he saw a familiar sight: big, black eyes, and round, rosy cheeks.
It was his 4-year-old son, Abduleziz.
—Alexandra Ma (@AlexandraMa15) February 5, 2019
In the video, Abduleziz can be found answering a series of questions posed by a man off camera in Mandarin Chinese — "What's your name? How old are you? What is the name of the fatherland? What is on the fatherland's flag?" — and answering in a way that seems rehearsed.
Abduleziz can be heard saying his own name around the two-second mark.
The last time Tohti saw his son, he couldn't even speak Uighur yet, let alone Chinese, he told INSIDER.
Tohti and Erkin, the Uighur rights activist in Australia, both think the video was taken in a state orphanage.
"I wasn't expecting this," Tohti told INSIDER. "I was devastated seeing him being brainwashed in an orphanage."
—Uyghur Bulletin (@UyghurBulletin) February 1, 2019
