The Uyghur woman who took on Beijing and won

After fleeing Chinese repression, Zeynure Hasan faced a long battle to be reunited with her husband Idris after his arrest

- By Tom Levitt

Zeynure Hasan was at home in Istanbul in July 2021 when her husband finally called. It had been four days since she last heard from him as he got ready to board a flight to Casablanca. The silence had been torturous.

But the news Idris now shared with her was even worse. He had been arrested and imprisoned on arrival in Morocco and told he was going to be deported to China. “You should call anyone who can help me, anyone who can rescue me,” he told her, before the phone went dead.

Zeynure, 31, and Idris, 37, are Uyghurs, a mostly Muslim ethnic group who make up about half of the population of China’s northwestern Xinjiang province. More than a million Uyghurs appear to have been imprisoned in “reeducation” camps and subjected to torture over the past decade for acts as ordinary as attending a mosque or wearing a hijab.

The couple had joined thousands of others who fled to Turkey in the 2010s. Settling in Istanbul, Zeynure became an English teacher and Idris started work as a translator and designer, helping to publish Uyghur news and printed works. They had three children and felt free to live as Muslims.

But when one of Idris’s best friends, who worked in a library stocking Uyghur books, was arrested in the summer of 2021, Idris panicked. There were reports that Beijing was pressuring Turkey to deport Uyghurs. Idris felt vulnerable as he had been detained previously, he suspected because of his work with activists and promoting Uyghur culture. He decided to flee to Morocco, but Zeynure, whose Chinese passport had expired, had to stay behind with the children until her husband could apply for a visa for both himself and the family.