The Uyghur Online website, which was created by Professor Ilham Tohti in Beijing 2006, was an important advisory platform for Ilham Tohti and other Uyghur intellectuals’ struggle to make heard the voices of the Uyghurs to Chinese people, as well as the world. He campaigned for the rights of Uyghur people despite limited resources. He was at the forefront of this struggle conducting research and writing for the website about the injustices that his people were facing in China. This website soon became a focus point of learning about Uyghur’s situation at home and internationally.
This website was closely watched by the authorities and subsequently was closed down and reopened several times before Mr. Ilham Tohti was arrested in January 2014 where he was given life imprisonment. His website was a beacon of truth for Uyghur people under Chinese strict Internet censorship. Published were many controversial topics that were written fearlessly, predominantly by a group of intellectuals who were headed by Ilham Tohti. There were many valuable articles about the Uyghur people, including research on political, socio-economic and cultural aspects of Uyghur lives.
To share this valuable legacy of Mr. Ilham Tohti, to provide this for the Uyghur people and researchers, the Ilham Tohti Institute decided to work on the restoration of his website. The institute organised a group of young volunteers led by a computer expert Mr.Abliz Mehsud who lives in the United States. After a year and a half of our efforts, we successfully completed restoration work on valuable articles from an old website that existed on the Wayback Machine Internet Archive. We restore a total of 3553 articles which were published on the old website between the year 2006 and 2013. The restoration is based on the materials of the Internet Archive, as well as preserved articles found on the Uyghur website archive. We weren’t able to restore some relevant images and we were not able to restore some parts of serial articles.
Even though it is just a restored copy of the old Uyghur Online website, it’s almost complete. The Illham Tohti institute wants to sincerely thank Mr. Abliz Mehsud and the volunteers who put great effort to make this wonderful work available for the public. The Ilham Tohti Institute hopes that people around the world will make use of our new Uyghur website and work together to free Mr. Ilham Tohti, who has now been sentenced to life imprisonment unjustly in a Chinese Prison for 6 years.
The new Uyghur online website’s link:
The Ilham Tohti Institute warmly welcomed every bit of feedback and comments from our readers about the improvement of the new Uyghur Online website. We sincerely hope that any person who has gathered materials from the old Uyghur online website or have any other information about Mr. Ilham Tohti’s work, please send it to us so we can constantly improve this website.
Thank you!
Sincerely
Ilham Tohti Institute
5th October 2020