Ethnic Kazakh from Xinjiang among Ukrainian refugees in Poland

Warsaw [Poland], March 6 (ANI): Amid the Russia-Ukraine conflict, an ethnic Kazakh from China's North-Western province of Xinjiang has found his way to Poland with other Ukrainian refugees, a media report said on Friday.
Ersin Erkinuly, a Chinese citizen was held up in immigration custody in Ukraine for months. He was eventually granted refugee status by Ukrainian authorities due to the threat of imprisonment and torture if he was sent back to China, reported Radio Free Europe.
Erkinuly was first arrested in October 2020 by Ukrainian border guards for trying to cross into Poland without proper documentation, the report said. He was released from custody in the western city of Lviv in December that year after an appeals court cancelled a lower court decision to deport him back to China.
In August 2021, Slovak border guards detained Erkinuly after he attempted to illegally cross the Ukrainian-Slovak border and sent him back to Ukraine, where he was arrested and held in an immigration centre in Lviv.
Erkinuly crossed into Poland with thousands of Ukrainian refugees following Russia's invasion on February 24.
Erkinuly said that he was now on the Polish side of the border along with thousands of refugees, mainly women and children, who fled as Russian armed forces continued their attack on Ukraine, adding that there were many foreign nationals among the people who left Ukraine for Poland as refugees.
Kazakhs are the second-largest Turkic-speaking indigenous community in Xinjiang after Uyghurs. The region is also home to ethnic Kyrgyz, Tajiks, and Hui, also known as Dungans.
In recent years, many Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and members of Xinjiang's other mostly Muslim, indigenous ethnic groups have fled the country, fearing detention, the report noted.
The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is the largest province in China with a population of 25 million people from various ethnic groups, but about 43% of them are Uyghurs, most of whom are Muslim.
As many as 2 million members of these ethnic groups have been taken to Chinese detention centres spread across the large province of Xinjiang according to the US State Department. China refers to these detention centres as 're-education centres'.
At the end of August 2018, experts from the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination reported that up to 1 million ethnic Uyghurs could be in so-called "re-education camps" in China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
Notably, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday said that the Chinese government "continues to commit genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang against predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other minority groups" while addressing the 49th session of the UN Human Rights Council at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. (ANI)