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Yashar Yalkun, the president of the Belgian Uighur Association, outside the EU Council in Brussels (Photo: Yashar Yalkun)

Feature

China accused of intimidating Uighur refugees in Europe

Yashar Yalkun, the president of the Belgian Uighur Association, outside the EU Council in Brussels (Photo: Yashar Yalkun)

China denies it, but Uighur exiles who fled to EU states say they are still being terrorised by threatening phone-calls, SMS-es, and other forms of what some security services have dubbed "refugee-espionage".

One such call, from a masked number, came on a day in July 2019 when Yashar Yalkun, a Uighur activist and Belgian asylum holder, was playing with his infant son at home in Antwerp, a Belgian city.

It was his mother and sister in China, whom he had not heard from in three...

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Author Bio

Andrew Rettman is EUobserver's Foreign Affairs Editor. He has been writing about foreign and security affairs for EUobserver since 2005. He is Polish but grew up in the UK. He has also written for The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Times of London.

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