ALMATY, Kazakhstan -- In the autumn of 2017, a friend of Gulzhan Tokhtasyn told her that she had to leave Kazakhstan for urgent business in China and asked her if she wouldn’t mind caring for her children for a week while she was gone.
A year earlier, Beijing had appointed the notorious hard-liner Chen Quanguo as Communist Party Secretary of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. By then, his crackdown on the Muslim and Turkic peoples that make up over half of the region’s population was moving through the gears.
At that time Tokhtasyn had been living in Kazakhstan -- her historic homeland -- for just over a year, having left Xinjiang after “starting to feel something was wrong” in the months before the appointment of Chen, whose repressive reputation came from his previous tenure in Tibet.
One week would turn into three months as Tokhtasyn’s friend was initially barred by Chinese officials from returning to Kazakhstan.
Her friend also confirmed the appalling rumors that mass arrests were under way in the region -- where the U.S. State Department says as many as 2 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and members of Xinjiang’s other indigenous, mainly Muslim ethnic groups have been taken to detention centers.
Gulzhan Tokhtasyn
Tokhtasyn’s own situation in Kazakhstan, meanwhile, was precarious.
She had not yet completed the switch from Chinese to Kazakh citizenship and the Chinese Consulate in Almaty was insisting that she return to China to correct a spelling error in her Chinese passport.
Meanwhile, the school director in the Kazakh city of Almaty that her friends' children were attending informed her that she was breaking the law by looking after two young children without a power of attorney.
Like others, she took her problems to an informal group of Chinese-born Kazakhs that had formed to support people with spouses and relatives who found themselves trapped in Xinjiang Province after Beijing’s sweeping population controls were first imposed.
The group would become known as the Atazhurt (motherland/fatherland) human rights group and would go on to record about 10,000 video appeals related to the crackdown in Xinjiang, arguably doing more to draw attention to the crisis than any other grassroots group.
“During those days people went to Atazhurt because their relatives had been detained or because they were worried about their relatives’ future due to the sudden changes in Xinjiang,” Tokhtasyn recalled. “They went there to appeal for help from the Kazakh government and international organizations.”
The second half of 2017 saw the publication of the first English-language reports covering the mass incarceration of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other minority groups.
While Tokhtasyn’s relatives had not been arrested, she learned that her brothers -- whom she could no longer reach -- had been coerced into teaching at a reeducation camp.
As word of Atazhurt’s efforts spread -- along with their videos -- the office became a busy place.
And having originally sought help for her own problems, Tokhtasyn soon found herself helping dozens of others to solve theirs.
“I sat in the office and made a list of all the people coming in. I would take notes on their reasons for coming and show them to the various rooms to record testimonies for their relatives. In short, I became an office manager,” Tokhtasyn said.
Relatives of ethnic Kazakhs who are forcibly detained in political camps in China request help from the UN and the Kazakh government in Almaty in September 2018.
The group’s relentless activity and criticism of Kazakhstan’s powerful neighbor and partner soon got them the attention of the Kazakh authorities -- although not in the way they had hoped.
And years later, Tokhtasyn is now one of hundreds of would-be members of a party that saw its application for registration rejected by the Kazakh Justice Ministry.
“We have all the conditions for becoming a party. Firstly, we have enough members, and second, we have the team and the required experience,” Tokhtasun told RFE/RL.
But things are rarely that simple in Kazakhstan.
The Wrong Kind Of Attention
Atazhurt members say they had no ambition to become opponents of the government until they were treated as such.
“To begin with they were quite polite. I must have been called there at least 10 times for tea and coffee,” recalls Serikzhan Bilash, Atazhurt’s co-founder who now lives in exile in the United States, of the summons by the Internal Affairs Department of Almaty’s city government.
“They would ask me: ‘What do you want?’ I would say that I wanted an end to genocide in Xinjiang. And then they would say: ‘Do you know Mukhtar Ablyazov?’”
Ablyazov, a former energy minister and the leader of the banned Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan (DVK) party, was at the time regularly calling for protests to overthrow the Kazakh government.
Serikzhan Bilash, a prominent activist who has campaigned for the release of ethnic Kazakhs in China, in Almaty in August 2019.
Bilash told them that he didn’t know the controversial figure.
And yet city officials made it clear that this was an unholy alliance that they deeply feared.
Atazhurt’s profile grew quickly in the second half of 2018, when it helped publicize the trial of an ethnic Kazakh Chinese citizen, Sairagul Sauytbay, who was facing deportation to China after fleeing to Kazakhstan to join her family.
After one of the hearings in the Kazakh town of Zharkent, Bilash and several other Atazhurt activists chased representatives of China’s diplomatic mission to Kazakhstan down the street, demanding answers to questions that the diplomats ignored.
A policeman puts handcuffs on Sairagul Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh from China, in a trial in the Kazakh city of Zharkent in July 2018.
Sauytbay was allowed to go free in August after becoming the first person to testify in an open court about the existence of Xinjiang’s reeducation camps -- facilities Beijing describes as vocational training centers.
Whether it was due to the discomfort Atazhurt caused Kazakhstan’s mighty neighbor or Kazakh officials' fear regarding its charismatic leader, Bilash, pressure on the group began to mount.
Changing The Focus
Atazhurt’s attempts to register as a nonprofit were rejected out of hand, although two spoiler groups with Atazhurt in their titles -- run by former allies-turned enemies of Bilash -- would subsequently be allowed to register.
SEE ALSO: Analysis: Official Trickery? Pro-Government Atazhurt Gets Registered In KazakhstanPolicemen, usually in plainclothes, could often be found in the corridors outside the office.
In March 2019, Bilash was suddenly arrested and flown to the Kazakh capital, Astana, where he was charged with extremist crimes in relation to a speech he had made. He called the charges bogus and politically motivated.
The group's computers were confiscated and the office would not operate to its full capacity again, as many of the group’s private sponsors withdrew their support.
But in addition to becoming ground zero for desperate relatives of Xinjiang’s missing and detained, Atazhurt’s office had also become a regular haunt for international media outlets flying into Kazakhstan to report on the latest repressive trends in Xinjiang.
They were there to interview people like Gulzira Auelkhan, whom China released from a stint of forced labor and allowed to travel to Kazakhstan in early 2019, shortly after her husband and their young child joined the line of video petitioners. And Orynbek Koksebek, a Kazakh citizen and one of the first former detainees to describe the activities -- including torture -- that went on in the Xinjiang camps.
As a result, a significant international media spotlight immediately hit Bilash’s case.
He was eventually released several months after entering a plea bargain that included a seven-year ban on activism -- and just as various opposition groups appeared ready to rally for his freedom.
Bilash would later leave Kazakhstan, settling first in Turkey and then, after some safety concerns, in the United States.
After his release he described himself as “not an opposition figure, not an opponent” of the government.
But Atazhurt’s transition from a civic group to a political party -- just as Kazakh officials had so feared -- eventually took place.
“To begin with our focus was on China. But we came to a realization that all of the misfortunes that had befallen the Kazakh people [in China] were permitted by the Kazakh regime,” Bilash told RFE/RL.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (right) and Kazakh President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev shake hands at a signing ceremony ahead of the China-Central Asia Summit in Xian, China, in May.
And ironically, representatives from Ablyazov’s DVK eventually reached out in search of a partnership.
“We held a discussion and then told them that we respected them but we wished to be autonomous. Among Kazakh speakers, we believe our group is already more popular than DVK,” said Bilash, who says that “over 90 percent” of the 700 signatories of the group’s failed party registration bid earlier this year are Kazakhs born in Kazakhstan rather than “qandastar” -- or Kazakhs “returned” from China and elsewhere -- like Bilash.
“Many returned Kazakhs are politically passive,” he said. “When our group helped get their relatives released by raising attention to their cases, they thanked us and went back to their private lives. Sometimes they are under pressure not to speak. Sometimes they fear for relatives in China.”
'Nationalists, But Good Nationalists'
In Bilash’s formal absence, the party registration bid of the group now commonly referred to as Nagyz Atazhurt (Real Atazhurt) is in the hands of his ally, the group’s current elected leader, Bekzat Maksutkhanuly.
In true Atazhurt style, the signatories to the group’s application released videos of themselves testifying that they were joining the party of their own free will.
But the Justice Ministry rejected the application this spring, arguing that some of the 700 signatories were members in other registered parties.
After that, Maksutkhanuly told RFE/RL, Atazhurt signatories across the country began facing various forms of pressure and intimidation to withdraw their membership.
In November, one of the signatories in Akmola Province, Kapar Akhat, said he was fined the equivalent of nearly $400 by police after posting a message that read “Join Atazhurt!” on Facebook.
Akhat said police told him it was illegal to advertise membership to a party that was unregistered.
Although members plan to try again to register, finances are an issue, said Maksutkhanuly -- an Achilles’ heel he says the authorities are more than aware of.
The soft-spoken leader -- more understated than his friend Bilash -- describes his party as “nationalists, but good nationalists.”
“We will protect the constitutional rights of all ethnicities in Kazakhstan and we acknowledge their equality and defend their economic interests,” he told RFE/RL.
Atazhurt’s nationalism is about “saving Kazakhs as a nation,” a mission that he says has become ever-more vital since at least 238 people -- mostly civilians – died during the biggest political unrest of Kazakhstan’s independence in January 2022.
But inevitably, the first major issue raised by the group as an aspiring party involved China.
Bekzat Maksutkhanuly, the head of the unregistered Nagyz Atajurt (Real Atazhurt) group, at a press conference in Almaty in May 2022.
In May, Maksutkhanuly was arrested and sentenced to 15 days in detention after announcing his intention to rally against a visa-free agreement that China and Kazakhstan reached that month which allows passport holders of the countries to stay in the other country for 30 days.
He had notified city authorities of the planned rally, which was due to coincide with President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev's visit to the Chinese city of Xian to seal that deal and others with his counterpart, Xi Jinping.
Beyond the threat of “demographic colonization,” which he insisted was real, Maksutkhanuly argued the agreement is tied to others that tighten bilateral cooperation on migration, leading to ever closer exchanges of information regarding Kazakhs with birth ties to China and making it harder for Chinese Kazakhs to achieve Kazakh citizenship. (In an interview with China's CCTV broadcaster before his talks with Xi, Toqaev called China a "friend" of Kazakhstan that had "never harmed Kazakhs.")
In the long-term, Atazhurt's overall priority is to “change the situation in the country in the direction of a prosperous democracy....Then China would have to have a real dialogue with us,” Maksutkhanuly said.
“But the current regime doesn’t need independence. If you told them that they could keep power, but as a province of China, they would happily accept that,” he said.