The sister of a Uyghur man detained in a Chinese internment camp says she is hopeful President Trump can help bring her brother home after years of failures from President Biden’s administration.
Ekpar Asat disappeared after returning to China from a trip to Washington in 2016, where he’d flown to attend the State Department’s prestigious International Visitor Leadership Program, after being nominated by the United States Ambassador in Beijing.
It wasn’t until 2020 the family found out, through pressure from a group of US senators, that he was being held in a mass detention camp in China’s far-northwest region of Xinjiang.
Around 2017, the Chinese Communist Party ramped up its crackdown on Uyghurs, a predominantly Turkic-speaking Muslim ethnic minority, and began arbitrarily detaining large numbers in what it claimed were “reeducation” camps — actions the US government declared amounted to genocide.
Ekpar, a 41-year-old businessman, was sentenced by Chinese officials, after a closed trial, to 15 years in the camp for “inciting ethnic hatred” as a result of his trip to America – charges that have been widely described by critics as meritless and politically motivated.
“President Trump is uniquely positioned to secure the release of Ekpar,” his sister, New Yorker Rayhan Asat told The Post. “He’s the only one who has the respect of President Xi.”
“Ekpar was so grateful for his experience in the US and for learning about American culture. Actually, those were his last words on Chinese social media,” said Rayhan, a senior legal advisor at the Atlantic Council who lives in exile in the US and has become a leading figure against China’s human rights abuses.
She has been fighting for her brother’s release since 2020, and travelled to Washington a dozen times to meet with Biden administration officials through the years, including one meeting with his Secretary of State Antony Blinken, but nothing came of it.
“The Biden administration failed Ekpar,” she said. “It failed to put an end to this harrowing injustice that my brother experienced for simply coming to the United States and speaking warmly about his experience.”
Trump — slated to travel to Beijing May 14-15 — will be the first US president to make a state visit to China in nearly a decade.
Trade between the two countries is expected to be a big topic – but it’s tradition for cases of high-profile prisoners to be brought up during such visits. Ekpar was recently named by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China among American hostages unjustly detained there.
“This year obviously has been the hardest because 10 years is a very difficult number to swallow. But at the same time, this is also a year that I’m the most hopeful,” said Rayhan.
Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who has been working on Ekpar’s case since 2021, said it’s a prime example of the Chinese government’s relentless and cruel persecution of the ethnic minority.
“Ekpar has endured almost 10 years in jail and multiple years in solitary confinement after a closed trial that released no evidence of his supposed crimes,” he told The Post.
An estimated 2 million Uyghurs are being detained in the camps, where along with being forcibly indoctrinated with Chinese propaganda, they are subject to grave human-rights abuses that include torture, forced sterilization and sexual exploitation.
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