Uyghur historian Tursunjan Hezim, the founder of the Orkhun website, which archived a vast collection of books and materials on Uyghur history before it was shut down by Beijing, was sentenced to life in prison in 2022, a security official at the school where he used to work told Radio Free Asia.

This was his second conviction. In 2009, Hezim was arrested and sentenced to seven years in prison for his work on the website after the July 2009 unrest in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang in northwestern China.

It is unclear when he was released. But he was taken back into custody again in 2022 at age 51 following the mass incarceration of Uyghurs that began in 2017.

“He is serving at No. 3 Prison in Urumqi,” the security official told RFA Uyghur.

However, neither the security official nor members of the school administrative staff knew the reason for his conviction the second time.

Confirming convictions and sentences of Uyghurs is extremely difficult as Chinese authorities do not publicize any information about these matters.

Since 2017, an estimated 1.8 million Uyghurs have been put into concentration camps in Xinjiang, where they are subjected to forced labor and human rights abuses, experts say.

China says they are re-education and job training centers, and that most of them have since been shut down.

But the United States and other Western parliaments have labeled China’s treatment of the Uyghurs as a “genocide” -- which Beijing denies.

Passionate about history

Hezim was born in Aksu in 1973 and graduated from Xinjiang University’s history department in 1996.

He researched Uyghur history and shared his findings in public forums, friends said.

That prompted Chinese state security to monitor him closely, and as a university student he was detained and interrogated multiple times, they said.

The mostly Muslim Uyghurs are a Turkic people who are culturally distinct from the Han Chinese, and share cultural ties with other Central Asian peoples.

“Chinese authorities were never comfortable with Tursunjan because of his deep knowledge of history,” said Erkin Sidiq, a close friend who works for the National Aeronautical and Space Agency, or NASA, in California.

After graduating from Xinjiang University, Hezim began teaching at Aksu Prefecture No. 1 Middle School.

But his views on Uyghur history led to his removal from his teaching position, and he was reassigned to dormitory security duties.

Valuable resource

It was during this time that he created the Orkhun website.

In addition to historical materials, it was a forum for discussion and debate and became a valuable resource for Uyghur readers who were dissatisfied with government-sponsored research websites.

Hezim also translated works such as The General History of the Huns and authored several academic articles.

But he was arrested and the website was shut down after a crackdown after a July 5, 2009, a protest in Urumqi that turned violent amid clashes between Uyghurs and Chinese police.

The protest was against perceived Chinese government inaction over the death of a Uyghur factory worker in southern China.

Hezim was sentenced to seven years in prison and released, an anonymous friend now in exile told RFA Uyghur.

But in 2022, he was detained again and sentenced to life imprisonment at the end of that year, the school official confirmed.

Despite the website’s shutdown Chinese authorities were unable to erase all the archived materials, said Erkin Sidiq, the NASA scientist. Uyghur computer specialists in exile succeeded in recovering a large collection of the materials archived there, he said.

Edited by Martin Shawn and Malcolm Foster.