I last saw Rahile Dawut in 2016, at a conference we’d organised in Hong Kong. We sat in a sunny precinct, drank coffee, and enjoyed a rare moment of calm before the gathering storm. She was detained in 2017, and now we have confirmation, via the US-based Dui Hua Foundation rights group, that Dawut has been jailed for life by China for “splittism”: a deliberate attempt to split the Chinese nation.
When we met in 2016, Dawut was already experiencing trouble. On her journey from Urumqi to Hong Kong, her plane was diverted due to snow, and she and a student checked into a hotel in Chengdu. They were woken in the middle of the night by the local police: the hotel had reported them because their ethnicity was marked as “Uyghur” on their passports, and Uyghurs no longer had the right to travel freely within their own country.
