‘A Heavy Blow’<\/strong><\/big><\/p>\nBilash said one of the people behind the inciting hatred charge was Erbol Dauletbek, the leader of the Atajurt Eriktileri group registered instead of Bilash’s group. Bilash said Dauletbek is trying to gain the rights to Bilash’s Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights channel on YouTube.<\/p>\n
RFE\/RL’s Kazakh Service, known locally as Azattyq, asked Dauletbek about the claim but he denied filing any legal complaints against Bilash.<\/p>\n
Keeping the YouTube channel is part of the reason Bilash went to Turkey. Bilash officially registered the popular channel in 2013.<\/p>\n
“There were not any mass arrests in China then\u2026and there was not even an organization called Atajurt,” Bilash said.<\/p>\n
He added that Kazakh police started coming to the apartment of Galym Rakizhan, the editor of the video for the Atajurt YouTube channel, and threatened the owner, who finally told Rakizhan he must leave despite having lived there for many years.<\/p>\n
Bilash then signed over the YouTube channel to Turkish citizen Babisalem Okitan, who is also a member of Naghyz Atajurt and now in charge of programming for the channel.<\/p>\n
Bilash said he has no plans to seek asylum in Turkey and intends to return to Kazakhstan. But he noted that cannot happen until he is cleared of charges there and the pressure against him, his family, and his organization ceases.<\/p>\n
“On August 18, 2020, a court ruled that I was involved with the activities of an unregistered illegal organization and was fined\u2026[the equivalent of $333]. Several members of Naghyz Atajurt Eriktileri were also fined,” he said. “That was a heavy blow for us.”<\/p>\n
“Any time I drove, [the police] stopped me without fail,” Bilash said. “Day and night there are people and vehicles outside my house. My relatives and my wife’s relatives have all been questioned.”<\/p>\n
‘Branded A Terrorist’<\/strong><\/big><\/p>\nBilash said he was also put on a blacklist in Kazakhstan.<\/p>\n
Bilash said Kazakh authorities have branded him a terrorist and, when his mother died and he went to the notary to sign over her property to his father, he was told it was not possible.<\/p>\n
“It turns out that on their network I was shown to be a terrorist, I have a screenshot of it\u2026 from the computer at the notary public,” Bilash explained.<\/p>\n
He added that his bank accounts in Kazakhstan have been frozen and his car was impounded.<\/p>\n
Bilash also recounted seven meetings he had in 2019 while he was under house arrest in Nur-Sultan and Almaty with a person named Maksat Iskakov, a representative that Bilash said was sent by President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev.<\/p>\n
According to Bilash, at one of those meetings, Iskakov told him, “In September [2019], Mr. Toqaev is going to China and your sentence [and conviction] will be a present to the Chinese president.”<\/p>\n
Iskakov advised him to cooperate with Kazakh officials and agree to the deal whereby he would be fined and cease his activism for seven years.<\/p>\n
“My goals were not to challenge Kazakh authorities, I wanted to defend the rights of Kazakhs and other Turkic-speaking peoples who were abused in China,” Bilash said in explaining why he agreed to the deal.<\/p>\n
Bilash also assured: “I am not a dangerous person to the authorities of Kazakhstan, I am not an opposition figure, not an opponent.”<\/p>\n
Bilash said he hoped Turkish authorities will register Naghyz Atajurt. If that happens, Bilash said the group will then seek recognition as a human rights defender from international organizations.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, Bilash has been trying to help five other Kazakhs who recently illegally crossed from Xinjiang into Kazakhstan to obtain Turkish citizenship.<\/p>\n
Azattyq sent a copy of Bilash’s interview to the Kazakh Foreign Ministry and the presidential administration seeking comment but there had been no response as of the time this report was issued.<\/p>\n\n
This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tens of thousands of ethnic Kazakhs in China\u2019s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region have been sent to \u201creeducation camps\u201d along with hundreds of thousands of others from that western\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[349,332,539,4,23,350,26],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9918"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9918"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9918\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9919,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9918\/revisions\/9919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}