A young rapper and singer-songwriter-performer Ouïghur has not been seen since his arrest 20 months ago is imprisoned in China, serving a three-year sentence for having composed words that promoted extremism, “according to the Chinese rights group Weiquanwang.
Yashar Shohret, 26, who previously participated in “White Paper” demonstrations in 2022 in China, has disappeared since his arrest on August 9, 2023 in Chengdu, Sichuan province, where he went to university.
A new Weiquanwang, or Rights Protection Network report, a loose network of volunteers in China and abroad seeking to promote legal reforms in China, noted that Shohret had been sentenced on June 20, 2024 to three years in prison to “promote extremism” and “illegally owning articles to promote extremism”.
He called on the verdict, but the second trial confirmed the initial sentence, the prison sentence due to August 8, 2026. He is currently serving his sentence in Wusu prison in Xinjiang, the group said.
Radio Free Asia could not be confirmed independently. Calls to the prison and the office of the autonomous administration of the Xinjiang autonomous region did not receive an answer. Chinese search engines have produced no public file of the arrest, trial or condemnation of Shohret.
The activist of the youth poisonous abroad, Aman, who prefers a pseudonym for security reasons, said that the Chinese Communist Party has used very publicized arrests to give an example, but now they often make people disappear “quietly”, without announcing accusations or public sentences.
‘Protests of the White Paper’
Shohret was from Bole City, in the Xinjiang Autonomous Autonomous region, in northwestern China, where 12 million UYGHOURS live and face generalized persecution and surveillance under the reign of Beijing.
Previously, Shohret had been detained for three weeks for participating in the demonstrations of November 2022, when thousands of people went down to the streets of Chinese cities to protest against severe Restrictions COVVI-19.
The rare public demonstrations were triggered by a large fire of buildings in Urumqi in which several Uighur residents died. Many demonstrators have brandished white paper leaves to express that their voices were stifled.
Shohret sang a commemorative song in the Uighur language for fire victims and was immediately removed by police and detained for 21 days, suspected of “gathering a crowd to disrupt social order” before being released, said Weiquanwang.
“ Loaded like cheetahs ”
Shohret, which occurred under the name of the “Uigga” scene, seems to have been in trouble for the songs he composed.
One of them, a 2023 song entitled “Wake Up” which was listed on the popular Chinese Music Music streaming service of Netease Cloud Musica, contained the following Uyghur words:
“They loaded like cheetahs.
WHO? A group of hunters …
When I woke up,
The surroundings made me sink into a profound reflection. “”
In his words, Shohret seems metaphorically to qualify as a prey in a hostile environment, has already decided his fate, said Sawut Muhammed, director of affairs of East Asia at the Oulur World Congress of the Defense Group.
These words were probably considered threatening to the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, said Muhammed.
“In the opinion of the CCP, underline the Uighur language could lead to an increase in Uighur nationalism,” he said. It is “prejudicial to Xi Jinping’s vision to build a unified Chinese nation”.
Sawut stressed that after 2017, when there was a mass internment of Uighurs in the camps, China arrested many academics, singers, poets and writers. Many have been accused of having used politics in their art.
Although the constitution of China guarantees the right to use its mother tongue, the implementation of bilingual education after 2000 effectively obliges Uighur students to learn Mandarin and remove the Uighur language, he said.
Gong Zi Shen, a Chinese Commentator on Current Affairs living in the United States, said that Shohret’s words are not explicitly political, but describe interior emotions. Although the movement of white paper was triggered by dissatisfaction with the locking and zero-cook policies, Shohret was not a leading student figure, he said.
However, Beijing cannot even tolerate dissent’s suggestion and condemned it for “extremism”, a much more serious punishment than what would be applied to the majority of Chinese Han, said Shen.
Edited by Malcolm Foster.