Kamile Wayit, a Uyghur college student at a university in China’s Henan province, has been sentenced to three years in prison for allegedly 'advocating terrorism.' (Photo courtesy of Kewser Wayit via RFA)
A Chinese court has sentenced a Uyghur Muslim student to three years imprisonment for supporting terrorism by posting a video of the white paper movement last November that led to the end of the strict zero-Covid policy in the country.
Kamile Wayit, 19, a preschool education major at the Shangqiu Institute of Technology in Henan province, was convicted by the court for "advocating extremism," Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported on July 11.
She was detained last December and was sentenced in March 2023. The verdict was made public recently.
Wayit is detained at the Mush Women's Prison in Kashgar Prefecture in Xinjiang province, the home of Uyghur people, a Muslim-majority Turkic ethnic group.
She received a warm welcome from fellow prisoners on her arrival, RFA reported citing an unnamed prison staff.
"When the Uyghur inmates learned that she was Kamile Wayit, they embraced her, thinking of their own children whom they hadn't seen in five or six years," the unnamed source said.
She had spent six months in the State Security Detention Center in Atush, her hometown, and is now serving the remainder of her sentence at Mush Women's Prison, RFA reported.
Wayit is among the dozens of activists around China who have been detained or jailed for voicing their support towards the white paper movement that rocked the country.
The movement was sparked following a fatal Covid-related lockdown fire in an apartment building in Xinjiang's regional capital Urumqi that killed about 40 Uyghurs.
Wayit's arrest attracted international attention including from the US government, rights activists, scholars, professors, and students who demanded that Chinese authorities provide information on her case and release her.
In June, a US State Department voiced concerns over Wayit's safety and urged the Chinese government to ensure that her fundamental freedom was not disregarded.
"We call on the People's Republic of China to ensure respect for her human rights and fundamental freedoms, including all fair trial guarantees, and to immediately and unconditionally release all unjustly detained persons," the department said.
In June, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson had told The Economist magazine that authorities sentenced Wayit on March 25 but did not state the length of her sentence, RFA reported.
Attempts to know the details of Wayit's case were met with inconsistent responses from authorities in Atush, who referred to the case as a "state secret" and refrained from disclosing details, RFA reported.
Among the heavy-handed approach toward dissenting voices in the country, China is accused of a genocidal crackdown on the minority Uyghur community.
Since 2014, the Communist regime has unleashed a systematic, genocidal pogrom to crush Muslim Uyghur and other minorities, a culmination of longstanding Chinese-Uyghur conflict amid an active insurgency, rights groups say.
An estimated one million Muslims, mostly Uyghurs, are reportedly detained in secretive detention camps in Xinjiang, where they face brutal oppression, including forced abortion, forced sterilization, forced birth control, rape, forced labor, torture, internment, brainwashing, and killings.
Beijing has denied the allegations and claimed the measures in Xinjiang are a part of regular security measures to tackle threats and violence against extremist insurgency in the region.
