Police in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, arrested journalist Memtimin Obul in August 2018. He is detained at an undisclosed location on the accusation of being “two-faced,” although no formal charges have been disclosed.
Obul, director of the state-owned newspaper Xinjiang Daily, was arrested on August 6, 2018, for allegedly being an accomplice to the deputy editor-in-chief, Ilham Weli, who is also accused of being "two-faced," and secretly opposing government policies in the region, according to the U.S. Congress-funded Radio Free Asia (RFA)
Xinjiang Daily’s human resources director Liu Jianrong confirmed Weli’s arrest and referred RFA to the newspaper’s Party Discipline Committee for details of Weli’s case, according to RFA. The Party Discipline Committee told RFA that a working group dispatched by the committee had investigated the newspaper and concluded that Weli was "two-faced." RFA said it could not determine what evidence was being used against Weli.
The “two-faced” accusation does not have a legal basis but is often used when the Chinese government considers a person rebellious.
According to RFA’s interview with the newspaper’s Party Discipline Committee director Shui Baoying, law enforcement officials interrogated Weli and found Obul, Juret Haji, and Mirkamil Ablimit to be his accomplices. Obul, Haji, and Ablimit were arrested on August 6, 2018, at a public meeting at Xinjiang Daily’s office in Urumqi, according to RFA. The four men were accused of publishing "two-faced" articles in the newspaper’s Uighur-language section.
Many accused of being "two-faced" in Xinjiang have disappeared, likely to re-education camps, according to news reports.
As of October 2023, CPJ could not determine where Obul was being held, or whether he or his colleagues have been formally charged.
A 2019 report by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, a U.S. congressional advisory panel, found that China had arbitrarily detained at least one million Uighurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Hui ethnic minorities, and others, in a “system of extrajudicial mass internment camps.” The commission’s 2022 report noted that China has continued to expand Xinjiang’s detention facilities, including mass internment camps, and maintained a system of forced labor involving camp detainees.
The majority population of ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang are subject to cultural and religious repression, surveillance, arrest without charge, and internment. For fear of government retaliation and further abuses, people inside the region are often reluctant to provide information about those who disappear into state custody. According to an annual survey conducted by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China in 2022, a vast majority of surveyed journalists who traveled to Xinjiang said they experienced government interference in their reporting.
In October 2023, CPJ sent messages to the Xinjiang governmental service and the Xinjiang region prison administration via messaging app about Obul but did not receive a response.