The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which promotes press freedom worldwide, on Monday (April 19) called on Chinese authorities to immediately release imprisoned Uighur television producer Erkin Tursun and to stop using the jailed journalist in propaganda materials.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists made the call after a video of Erkin Tursun was shown at the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region’s seventh press conference on Xinjiang-related issues at the Foreign Ministry’s Foreign Correspondents’ Press Center on April 9. In the video, the former Ili TV reporter and television producer said he would try to rehabilitate himself and seek clemency from the Communist Party and government, and encouraged his son, Arfat Erkin, who is in exile overseas, to return home.
“It is despicable and cruel to use imprisoned journalist Erkin Tursun as part of the Chinese government’s propaganda tactics,” said Steven Butler, Asia program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, in Washington. “The humane thing for China to do would be to immediately release Tursun and the other imprisoned journalists and stop the government’s campaign to harass the families of the prisoners.”
Elapati Elken told CPJ that he was “a little relieved” to see his father alive, but said he “barely recognized him” when he saw a video of him.
The State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor tweeted on April 25, 2019, that 11 relatives of Erapati Elkhen, including his parents, have disappeared in Xinjiang since he came to the United States to study in 2015.
Elapati Elken said his mother was forced to speak ill of him in another propaganda video two years ago, and also asked him to return to China in the video.
“Today, I see my father being forced to do and say the same thing in the official Chinese media. I really want to scream, what do they want from my family? How much pain do you want my family to go through?” He told the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Xinjiang authorities categorized Elapati Elken as “a person who uses his family to commit perjury” and “deliberately makes up stories about relatives in his country being ‘arrested,’ ‘persecuted,’ ‘missing,’ and ‘missing. He is “deliberately making up lies about his relatives being ‘arrested,’ ‘persecuted,’ ‘missing,’ etc.,” to “gain sympathy from the international community and achieve ulterior motives.
Xinjiang Public Security Department Deputy Director Yalikun Yakuf said at that press conference that Elapati Elkun joined the World Uyghur Congress after leaving the country in 2015 and was received by then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in March 2019 as a so-called “Teach-In Center survivor” and his family. The Chinese government has described the large detention camp in Xinjiang as a “vocational skills education and training center” for preventive counter-terrorism and anti-extremism purposes.
The official said that in February 2019, Elapati Elkhen tweeted that his mother had been held in a “concentration camp” in late 2017, but said that Elkhen’s mother, sister and brother “are all living normal lives on the social side. He said, “Elken Tursun was sentenced to 20 years in prison by the People’s Court in accordance with the law for the crimes of inciting ethnic hatred and ethnic discrimination and harboring, and he himself confessed to the crime and is now serving his prison sentence in good health.”
According to research by Radio Free Asia and the Committee to Protect Journalists, prior to his arrest in March 2018, Elken Tursun received several awards for his work with Ili TV.
The CPJ said that in recent months, as the mass detentions of Uighurs and other minorities in Xinjiang have received increased international coverage, the Chinese government has “sought to discredit witnesses, those who have spoken out against the mass detentions, and journalists who, according to news reports, include staff from the U.S. Congress-funded broadcaster Radio Free Asia and put pressure on them,” according to news reports.
The organization also cited the jailed Uighur journalist Atikem Rozi, who was also mentioned in the counter-terrorism documentary “Undercurrents – China’s Xinjiang Counter-Terrorism Challenges,” broadcast on April 1 of this year by China’s official media, CCTV Global Television Network (CGTN). It sent emails requesting comment to the Chinese Foreign Ministry and Global Television Network, but received no response.
At least 47 journalists are being held in China, the Committee to Protect Journalists said in an investigative report published in December 2020, making China the world’s most imprisoned country for the second year in a row.
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