Ghulja Tarsoo
The Ghulja Tarsoo are the descendants of Iradi families who fled over the Tian Shan in 1916 and stayed in Xinjiang, with a few who followed in the 1920s and 1930s. They number about 2,000 to 3,000 people around Ghulja (Yining) and in the villages of the Ili valley.[1]
Community
The painter Yusup Ayyubov taught in the refugee community in 1920–1925. Chinese records count the Tarsoo as Kyrgyz or Kazakh. They keep the Iradi Christian name Tarsoo, a few household prayer books in Syriac script, the Fallen Rider funeral custom and a speech colored by the Keñsuu dialect, but no priest has served them since the 1950s.[1]
In Irad they are seen as the living Lost Tribes: the 2016 serial Akyrky Ashuu ended on a Ghulja grandmother, and every 1916 commemoration mentions them. Contact is by family letters and telephone calls.[2]
The detentions (2017–2019)
The Tarsoo were caught up in China's mass internment of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and other peoples of Muslim heritage in Xinjiang, in which a million or more people were held in what the authorities called vocational training centers. Because Chinese records count the Tarsoo as Kyrgyz or Kazakh, their prayer books, their Syriac script and their calls to relatives abroad marked them as "extremist" risks.[3]
Their families in Irad count about 60 to 80 Tarsoo detained, most for months and some for more than a year; at the families' wish, none has been named in public. Nearly all had been released by 2020, some into factory placements. Families buried or burned their prayer books, the letters stopped, and from 2018 telephone calls to Irad were cut off or monitored; contact now consists of short WeChat messages saying that all is well.[3]
In Irad, the Mejlis passed a resolution in 2019 "for our brethren in Ili", and the archeparchy has held a Qurbana for them every autumn since 2018. The authorities in Nurzhan said nothing, and Talas raised the matter only through the US Liaison Office, so neither administration has dealt with Beijing directly. In Talas the case is cited as the sharpest example of "the Russo silence"; in Nurzhan, as Talas "playing with the Chinese border for American applause" (see Irad–China relations).[3]
References
- ^ Department of Ethnography, Talas State University (2012). Beyond the Passes: The Iradi Communities of the Ili Valley. Talas State University Press.
- ^ Talas Herald (August 2016). 'A grandmother in Ghulja: how Akyrky Ashuu ended.' Talas.
- ^ Central Asian Policy Review (2021). 'Christians in the Camps: The Ghulja Tarsoo and the Xinjiang Detentions.' Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 33–52.