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Jazexhi says the university rector told him only that the decision on his teaching work was out of her hands. In a country that has grown increasingly close to China, and where his university also has ties to Beijing, he believes he is being punished for the Uyghur exposés.

“I don’t have any proof … but I see with concern the great influence (the Chinese) are having in my university, and other universities in Albania,” he said in an interview. “There was no reason for them to reject me.”

Charles Burton, a China expert at Ontario’s Brock University who spoke alongside Jazexhi at campus talks in Montreal and Hamilton recently, said he has no direct knowledge of the history PhD’s employment record.

But he said it’s more than plausible the academic is facing retribution.

“It seems like a likely scenario to me,” said Burton. “Olsi has made an enormous contribution to our understanding of the situation in Xinjiang.”

Photo by YouTube/File

Neither the university’s rector, Kseanela Sotirofski, nor Endri Fuga, spokesman for Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, responded to emailed requests for comment on Jazexhi’s case.

While he immigrated to Canada a decade ago and did a post-doctoral fellowship at Toronto’s York University, Jazexhi divides his time between here and Albania.

On Tuesday, he, former Canadian MP David Kilgour and others were part of a panel discussion at the European Parliament in Brussels on the Uyghur situation.

Jazexhi’s role in exposing China’s treatment of the group centred in Jinjiang province is an unusual one. Convinced that reports of systematic repression of the minority were a plot by the West to turn Muslims against China, he obtained a spot on a stage-managed media tour of Jinjiang earlier this year.