In the autumn of 2017, a friend of Gulzhan Tokhtasyn told her that she had to leave Kazakhstan for urgent business in China and asked her if she wouldn’t mind caring for her children for a week while she was gone.
A year earlier, Beijing had appointed the notorious hard-liner Chen Quanguo as Communist Party Secretary of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. By then, his crackdown on the Muslim and Turkic peoples that make up over half of the region’s population was moving through the gears.
At that time Tokhtasyn had been living in Kazakhstan — her historic homeland — for just over a year, having left Xinjiang after “starting to feel something was wrong” in the months before the appointment of Chen, whose repressive reputation came from his previous tenure in Tibet.
One week would turn into three months as Tokhtasyn’s friend was initially barred by Chinese officials from returning to Kazakhstan.
Her friend also confirmed the appalling rumors that mass arrests were under way in the region — where the U.S. State Department says as many as 2 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and members of Xinjiang’s other indigenous, mainly Muslim ethnic groups have been taken to detention centers.
Tokhtasyn’s own situation in Kazakhstan, meanwhile, was precarious.
She had not yet completed the switch from Chinese to Kazakh citizenship and the Chinese Consulate in Almaty was insisting that she return to China to correct a spelling error in her Chinese passport.
Meanwhile, the school director in the Kazakh city of Almaty that her friends’ children were attending informed her that she was breaking the law by looking after two young children without a power of attorney.
Like others, she took her problems to an informal group of Chinese-born Kazakhs that had formed to support people with spouses and relatives who found themselves trapped in Xinjiang Province after Beijing’s sweeping population controls were first imposed.
The group would become known as the Atazhurt (motherland/fatherland) human rights group and would go on to record about 10,000 video appeals related to the crackdown in Xinjiang, arguably doing more to draw attention to the crisis than any other grassroots group.
“During those days people went to Atazhurt because their relatives had been detained or because they were worried about their relatives’ future due to the sudden changes in Xinjiang,” Tokhtasyn recalled. “They went there to appeal for help from the Kazakh government and international organizations.”
The second half of 2017 saw the publication of the first English-language reports covering the mass incarceration of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other minority groups.
While Tokhtasyn’s relatives had not been arrested, she learned that her brothers — whom she could no longer reach — had been coerced into teaching at a reeducation camp.
As word of Atazhurt’s efforts spread — along with their videos — the office became a busy place.
And having originally sought help for her own problems, Tokhtasyn soon found herself helping dozens of others to solve theirs.
“I sat in the office and made a list of all the people coming in. I would take notes on their reasons for coming and show them to the various rooms to record testimonies for their relatives. In short, I became an office manager,” Tokhtasyn said.
The group’s relentless activity and criticism of Kazakhstan’s powerful neighbor and partner soon got them the attention of the Kazakh authorities — although not in the way they had hoped.
And years later, Tokhtasyn is now one of hundreds of would-be members of a party that saw its application for registration rejected by the Kazakh Justice Ministry.
“We have all the conditions for becoming a party. Firstly, we have enough members, and second, we have the team and the required experience,” Tokhtasun told RFE/RL.
But things are rarely that simple in Kazakhstan.
The Wrong Kind Of Attention
Atazhurt members say they had no ambition to become opponents of the government until they were treated as such.
“To begin with they were quite polite. I must have been called there at least 10 times for tea and coffee,” recalls Serikzhan Bilash, Atazhurt’s co-founder who now lives in exile in the United States, of the summons by the Internal Affairs Department of Almaty’s city government.
“They would ask me: ‘What do you want?’ I would say that I wanted an end to genocide in Xinjiang. And then they would say: ‘Do you know Mukhtar Ablyazov?’”
Ablyazov, a former energy minister and the leader of the banned Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan (DVK) party, was at the time regularly calling for protests to overthrow the Kazakh government.