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Crime-Justice

China arrests elite Uyghur business owners

IANS | July 14, 2021 11:10 AM

NEW DELHI: In the summer of 2018, Sadir Eli, a Uyghur businessman, was in high spirits. His real-estate firm was pulling in strong profits, and he told his daughter he would buy a house for her in Massachusetts, Wall Street Journal reported.

Then, Eli was accused of being a separatist and disappeared into the black box of China's prison system in the northwest Xinjiang region, the report said.

"He did not engage in politics, " said Maria Mohammad, who last heard from her husband in June 2018, shortly before he was detained. Instead, she believes, Eli was targeted in part because he was a rich businessman, giving him influence that the authorities viewed as a threat.

The report said Eli's fate brings to life an overlooked element of China's suppression of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang: the arrests of elite Uyghur business owners whose wealth and commercial interests enabled them to act as a bridge between Chinese authorities and Uyghur civil society.

Some scholars saw them as helping narrow the economic gap between China's Han majority and Xinjiang's mostly Muslim ethnic minorities -- a disparity that has fuelled tension in the strategically vital but fractious northwestern region.

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