BOSTON (RNS) — Samira Imin had been waiting three years to see her father’s face again.
She had been praying to hear his voice telling her that he missed her, that he was safe and healthy — that her public campaign urging China to release Iminjan Seydin, a prominent Uighur publisher and historian, had worked and her father was now free.
But when it finally happened, it was via a two-minute video posted on Twitter by Chinese state media on Monday (May 4) morning, in which her father states that Imin had been “deceived” by “overseas anti-China forces” into believing he had been detained.
“It was unbelievable to see him,” said Imin, a 27-year-old research assistant at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “I watched the video again and again, just seeing him sitting there alive. It was a relief, even though he seems like he has weakened a lot physically.”
“It looks like, obviously, he was forced to say that to me under threat,” Imin said. “We all know that. … They tried to silence me by having my dad say that to me, and they tried to discredit my words. If I didn’t speak up, I don’t think they would have released him and made this video.”
Imin and her father, 55, are part of the beleaguered Uighur community, the mostly Muslim ethnically Turkic minority concentrated in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region. At least a million Uighurs have disappeared into the Chinese government’s extensive detention camp network over the past few years.
Last year, she learned…
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