Uyghurs mark 28 years since Ghulja violence, condemn ongoing repression
February 8, 2025 | Voice of America | By Kasim Kashgar
The first week of February is marked by grief for Zubayra Shamseden not only because she lost loved ones nearly three decades ago, she says, but because China’s repressive policies toward Uyghurs continue.
“I have been commemorating this day and protesting for the past 28 years, every Feb. 5,” Shamseden told VOA. “The Ghulja massacre in 1997 was the beginning of today’s ongoing genocide of Uyghurs.”
Many protesters were killed by the Chinese armed forces that day in what Shamseden describes as a violent Chinese government crackdown on a peaceful Uyghur protest in Ghulja, a city in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang. During subsequent crackdowns, she also lost her brother, Sadirdin, and her nephew, Hemmat Muhammet.
In the aftermath, another brother was sentenced to life in prison.
“The Chinese government should release all prisoners, including my brother, who were unjustly imprisoned,” she told VOA.
Now Chinese outreach coordinator for the Washington-based Uyghur Human Rights Project, Shamseden led a demonstration Wednesday outside the Chinese Embassy in Washington. Joined by a dozen activists, she marked the anniversary of what she and many others refer to as the Ghulja Massacre.
Recalling the violence of that day, Shamseden said a few hundred unarmed Uyghur youths marched through Ghulja, calling for basic rights.
“They took to the streets peacefully and unarmed, asking the government to respect their Islamic religious freedom and Uyghur cultural practices,” said Shamseden, a former vice president of the World Uyghur Congress.
The youths also called for the release of previously “arrested leaders of their gatherings, because the Chinese authorities didn’t allow them to gather for Meshrep,” she said.
Some Meshrep organizers, Shamseden said, had previously been arrested despite initial government approval to hold Meshrep gatherings.
Speaking out about a drug crisis among fellow youths in the region had been the purpose of their gatherings.
“The Uyghur youth in Ghulja sought to address the growing heroin addiction crisis that spread in the early 1990s,” Shamseden said. “They turned to Meshrep — traditional gatherings that included sports, music, performances, and other forms of entertainment — to help young Uyghurs struggling with addiction and alcohol.”
According to Shamseden, who had been in Australia since 1993, visiting Ghulja only in the aftermath of the crackdown in 1998, mass arrests and collective punishment had by then become routine.
This crackdown led to the arrest, torture and release of her sister for allegedly helping a Ghulja protester, the killing of her brother Sadirdin in Kazakhstan under mysterious circumstances, and the killing of her nephew Hemmat Muhammet by Chinese police in Ghulja. Shamseden’s nephew and brother were leading members of earlier Meshrep gatherings.
In 1999, Shamseden said another younger brother, Abdurazzak was sentenced by the Chinese officials for being a separatist, receiving a sentence of life in prison.
To this day, she said, she has been unable to learn any details about her brother’s current fate, including whether he is alive.
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