Nyrola Elimä & Ben Mauk: The Persecution of the Uyghurs in China and Beyond

In this episode of Not to Forgive, but to Understand, Sabah Carrim speaks with Ben Mauk and Nyrola Elimä about their investigation published in The New York Times. The article, titled “The Long Road from Xinjiang” in print and “He Made a Daring Escape From China. Then His Real Troubles Began” online, explores the journey of Hasan Imam, a Uyghur refugee fleeing repression in Xinjiang. The discussion delves into Hasan's story and the broader implications of China's transnational oppression. Ben and Nyrola share insights from their years-long investigation, highlighting the extreme challenges Uyghurs face both within China and beyond its borders.

Transcript

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They don't like us. They really don't like us. And there is something said in Chinese: 非我族类，其心必异. If you translated it in English it is those who are not my race cannot be trusted so they really just don't like us. They hate us, but then they cannot do things openly like what today we are seeing in Gaza or West Bank. This is Not to Forgive, but to Understand. With your host, writer and scholar of genocide studies, Sabah Carrim. I am your co-host, Luis Gonzalez-Aponte. Not to forgive, but to Understand. Not to forgive, but to Understand. We're joined by Nyrola Elimä and Ben Mauk, co-authors of The New York Times article,“He made a daring escape from China. Then his real troubles began.” This powerful piece tells the story of Hasan Imam, a Uyghur refugee who fled repression in China, only to discover the far reaching influence of the Chinese government. Nyrola and Ben bring their expertise as award winning journalists to shed light on this critical issue. Please enjoy our conversation.“He Made a Daring Escape From China. Then His Real Troubles Began.” So this was basically the running headline for the article that was published. can we summarize the premises of this, this article about Hasan Imam, who who's a member of the Uyghur community? Yeah. So this article is the result of a two year investigation that Nyrola and I have been working on about Uyghurs in exile, Uyghurs fleeing China, seeking asylum and refuge in other countries because of the persecution they face back home. The article was published, as you said, two weeks ago in the New York Times magazine, in print. It's called “The Long Road from Xinjiang”. And online it's titled“He Made a Daring Escape From China. Then His Real Troubles Began.” So the article follows one man's story. Hasan Imam, who's an unregistered Chinese citizen from Xinjiang, from a small village, and who, as the restrictions in Xinjiang were tightening, decided to flee as part of a mass exodus of Uyghurs from China. In that era, roughly between 2011 and 2016, seeking a safe refuge outside China. So Hasan was hoping to reach Turkey, where there's a large Uyghur diaspora. And the article follows him through his journey, which turned into a years long ordeal. He was smuggled through Southeast Asia, crossed several borders without documentation, and then was ultimately indefinitely detained in Thailand for several years as an illegal migrant. And he subsequently broke out of the detention center where he was being held. He planned and then executed a large escape from this detention center in which around 20 Uyghurs escaped alongside him into the forest at the Thai-Malaysia border. He escaped to Malaysia, was subsequently caught there and went through another almost year of detention at risk of deportation before he finally made it to Turkey. And we use his story as being a very dramatic case of the type, the extreme lengths that tens of thousands of Uyghurs have had to go through in order to find, you know, in order to pursue a safe haven outside China. Of course, as part of the investigation, we talked to dozens of people who were smuggled along this route. And toward the end of the article, we focus on almost 50 Uyghurs who are still imprisoned in Thailand, still in detention in Thailand, ten years after leaving China, where they are being held in a notorious immigration detention center. And we highlight the lack of regulation in response and adherence to international law that countries such as Thailand are engaged in. Due, we argue, to economic and kind of administrative pressures from China. So Hasan’s story kind of serves as a model for what? You know, in our investigation, we found at least 18,000 Uyghurs went through trying to escape China. And we highlight the dozens and dozens of Uyghurs who are still in indefinite detention, living in kind of Guantanamo Bay like conditions outside the purview of international law, even today, ten years after their escape. What was involved in the course of this risky and delicate investigation? Well, at the very beginning, when I approached, Hasan Imam, he was quite openly willing to talk about, his story. And when I reached out to other individuals, they were quite afraid to talk to me because this is a very sensitive case. It doesn't matter, it's for them, it's in Turkey or in China. When I talk to them, I can also feel that the risk I'm probably going to face because first of all, I am Uyghur and I have a family in China, and this is a very sensitive topic and a taboo topic for people who live abroad to talk about it. And so while talking to them and then people telling me about the transnational repression they faced both from China and also in Turkey, especially from the Chinese agent or the people who work for the Chinese government. I have been facing either openly or subtly this kind of, I wouldn't say open threat, but you will feel a lot of the things that you wouldn't expect to face during the investigation or during the interview. Nyrola's being modest. She's produced a lot of research projects on issues related to Uyghurs and Xinjiang, including projects on forced labor, projects on detention and projects on outmigration from China. So at a certain point, Nyrola came to me, having already conducted a large number of interviews in Turkey with Uyghurs who had fled China and were living, in many cases, really precarious existences tolerated within Turkey, but without stable citizenship or kind of reliable rights to remain in the country. Many of them also have family members back in China. So this is a really these were delicate interviews. Most people did not want to be named, which is the case generally when you're reporting on this issue, as I've also been doing for many years. We realized as we were discussing the path forward for a story like this, we realized that we had a really unique case in Hasan Imam because, one, he was very transparent and willing to talk to us and two, for reasons that we go into in the article, there are essentially no records of his life in China. So he felt there was the risk of his talking to us. Having repercussions for his family in China was pretty low. And he learned this over his years in detention, where Chinese authorities kind of consistently failed to identify who he was. The fact that he was never registered in China, he was kind of a ghost. He was sort of a man without a past. So, you know, we we decided we wanted to use him as a way of talking about this body, this mass exodus, many of whose members are just unable to speak forthcomingly under their own names about what they experienced. And we summarize some of their other experiences in the article in order to report this. In addition, you know, following Nyrola’s trips to Turkey, interviewing various survivors of this route, we spent around a month in Thailand reporting as well, going to courtrooms to hear trial sessions attempting to visit immigration detention centers, speaking with government spokespeople, speaking with Uyghurs living in Thailand, speaking with a variety of people who were affiliated with the route, including people who were kind of working for smugglers in the 2014-2015 period. So, of course, this was this was really delicate reporting in Thailand. The press is highly constrained in what they can say about the Thai government, the types of criticisms that they can levy. There's kind of routine efforts to suppress criticism of the government. So we had to we had to work carefully in the way that we presented ourselves to people and the types of protections we offered. There's a lot of material we have that was off the record about Thailand's relationship with China and approximately these 48 men who are in detention in Thailand. So those were some of the hurdles, I guess, that we faced. It was an interesting story because it really did require a combination of reporting centers, one in Turkey, one in Thailand. Of course, Nyrola had obtained a huge batch of documents from security bureaus in China, which we also used to substantiate a lot of the things that eyewitnesses were telling us in which we used to substantiate aspects of the treatment that the men remaining in detention are receiving and which we used to kind of poke holes in the existing narrative of the mass deportation of Uyghurs that took place in Thailand. And in 2015, we found varieties of evidence showing that that deportation was larger than it was originally claimed, that Thailand and China worked together quite closely to share information about the asylum seekers in violation of international law that they had planned for the deportation to be much larger than it actually was. So we had these kind of three centers of reporting Turkey, Thailand and China, and we kind of had to string them together for this piece. And and of course, respect anonymity and protect our sources as best we could. Thank you. And what I would like to discuss right now is more about the plight of the Uyghurs themselves as a community, because much about them is actually unknown. I read two works. One is called “The Backstreets”. It's a novel by Perhat Tursun. I don't know if I'm pronouncing the name properly. And the second one is this memoir by Gulbahar Haitiwaji “How I Survived a Chinese ‘Reeducation’ Camp”. And, of course, I actually dug into her past and the fear that a Nyrola you're talking about right now, which is, you know, the fear that she faced even in the aftermath of her liberation when she went back to France and how she was constantly scared about the repercussions on her and her family. So what I'd like to ask you is actually about the beginning of the article that you published in The New York Times, because you begin with a description of a very rustic or spartan scene on the farm, and we know about the suffering of the Uyghurs and the discrimination against them so that even if they're very competent, you know, they're competitive with the rest of the population there, they are relegated to lower socioeconomic conditions in the country. So is there something that you were trying to hint at in terms of the living conditions of the Uyghurs in China by starting with that description? The books authors, you mentioned, Perhat& Gulbahar, they are from I don't want to underplay the persecution that they faced, but both of them are actually, I would say, from an elite level. So before the crackdown, their life I would say they could at least survive. But Uyghur from the South. It's impossible to survive. Their condition is much, much worse than what Perhat & Gulbahar faced. But of course, after 2017 and what Gulbahar faced and Perhat faced is literally almost every Uyghur who in Xinjiang has been facing. But when we start with Hasan's life was we wanted to let the readers understand what a daily normal life for Uyghurs, especially those from the South, are facing every persecution, they live in their life and every oppression they face is daily. It's impossible to avoid. And no matter how hard you tried or no matter how you try your best to avoid the Chinese government's oppression is just there. And we wanted also wanted the reader to understand that Hasan Iman or other Uyghur people. They are exactly like us, who are supposed to have a normal life. But it's impossible. As you can see, Hasan facing this before he was born. And so that's how we start our article. I think most readers and maybe listeners of this podcast have a general sense of Uyghurs as a persecuted minority, as a Turkic Muslim minority in China. But what's always a challenge with projects like this is gesturing to a really long history of interactions between populations in northwest China and in, you know, what's sometimes called mainland China and how that relationship, how those interactions have changed over the past half century, or we should say the past 70 years since the founding of the People's Republic of China. So just as like a super quick overview. Xinjiang, which is also called East Turkistan, was effectively unincorporated into any Chinese political entity until the Qing Empire, when it became when the name, you know, the name Xinjiang dates to a kind of the late 19th century. It means New frontier. And the Qing Empire was kind of the first to incorporate in a somewhat distant fashion, this region into a Chinese body politic. And then we can fast forward to the People's Republic. In 1949, about 5% of the population of Xinjiang was was ethnically Han Chinese, and the main populations were Uyghur and Kazakh and other ethnic groups. Many of you know, a majority of which were Turkic and Muslim. And almost from the start, the People's Republic of China began promoting in-migration into Xinjiang in order to dilute the local population because they had fears of separatism, because there had been attempts in the early 20th century to create an independent state of East Turkistan, typically backed by the Soviet Union, but also because this was kind of a classic case of a periphery that the state believed needed to be settled in order to protect China's modern day borders and also to extract resources, which included oil, which now includes gas, which include coal and also wheat, grain, cotton. You know, Xinjiang is now a famous center of cotton production. So over half a century there have been increasing points of conflict between the local population and, you know, the distant government in Beijing. And all of this, you know, the history is long and complicated and it can be hard to condense in, you know, even even in a 9000 word article. But, you know, the point that we try to make in this first section is that the Chinese government has long treated this population as kind of troublesome and prone to separatism or religious extremism. After 9/11, China began to use the language of a war on terror. So, you know, it was a continuation of ongoing policies, but it now came under the umbrella of this this global war on terror. And indeed, they were kind of aligned with the U.S. government and in, you know, the US government also imprisoned Uyghurs in Guantanamo Bay for decades before ultimately releasing them because they had not committed any crime against the United States. But so there are kind of stages of increasing oppression. And many scholars now consider Xinjiang to be kind of a case of settler colonialism in which China was has been steadily pushing in-migration of ethnically Han people and diluting or even transferring out populations of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims. And that has since been coupled with mass incarceration. The biggest mass internment campaign since World War Two. Xinjiang now has the highest rate of ethnic imprisonment anywhere in the world that the percentage of Uyghurs who are imprisoned far outstrips the percentage of any other ethnic group in China. And that's a countrywide statistic. And, you know, China has also imposed forced birth control, forced sterilizations, separating children and parents, forbidding the use of the Uyghur language in schools. All kind of classic efforts of assimilation and diluting of a local culture that the state views as threatening to its functioning. And, you know, some of the kind of collection of this of these policies have led some countries like the U.S. and Canada and France, to declare that what's happening in Xinjiang is a genocide. And many other countries have noted, you know, the kind of broad human rights abuses that are ongoing in Xinjiang. So that's kind of a really quick gloss. I'm very curious to also discuss what happens or what's been happening before. These Uyghurs are actually put into the camps because I think there is a lack of knowledge about, you know, the surveillance that they're exposed to or rather, they're encumbered with. So there is definitely an indication of constant scrutiny and surveillance of the lives of the lives of the Uyghurs. Can you tell us what you know about the fear and dread, they live in and the rules imposed by the predominant Han Chinese government? Sure. I mean, one one kind of point we try to make in this piece is there have been various turning points, some of which that our protagonist Hasan Imam was there to see or was in the region for one turning point was in July 2009 the really well known Ürümqi riots in which a mob or a protest, you know, there was a protest in Ürümqi, the capital of Xinjiang, to protest the mob killing of two Uyghur migrant workers, and these devolved into riots where hundreds of people were killed and this precipitated a crackdown on all facets of Uyghur culture in the region. It was not the first such crackdown in the lead up to the 2008 Olympics. It already became illegal in Xinjiang for men to have beards, for women to cover their hair. You know, so it's always hard to know kind of where to start. But, you know, after Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, he started talking about building a great iron wall around Xinjiang and using no mercy to treat the region. And surveillance and facial recognition technologies rose up. Many crimes were kind of inflated to terrorism, and especially in the South, as Nyrola points out, where conditions were much harsher than in the north. There were paramilitary forces detaining civilians, searching private homes in invading homes, and in some cases violating kind of women's privacy, which in some cases led Uyghur men to respond with violence, which the state then called terrorism, and kind of an escalating back and forth in which tightening oppression and violence from the Chinese state led to acts of violent resistance from some Uyghur groups, which in turn justified in the eyes of the Chinese government further crackdowns which ultimately led to this policy of mass internment and political reeducation, which is when the conditions in Xinjiang kind of became an international news story Apart from the Chinese government’s well use of technology. Actually, we would also kind of, self-censor ourselves even at home, because of the fear. And the widely reported, Chinese government, would use the high tech to monitor people or surveillance on people. But what I can tell you about my experiences before this mass exodus was the neighbor or anyone who would visit us could potentially report it to the government. Our daily life activities. And then sometimes we would even joke about at home that “Are we allowed to say this at home? What if someone who already, you know, put something to monitor us? Maybe wired us? Maybe we should be really careful”. I can also give you an example. We never, ever say ‘passport’ at home. We would use a ‘notebook’ and we never say‘someone would be in prison’, we will say, ‘he has recently gone to the hospital.’ ‘He's hospitalized’. We will use this kind of code even at home. And sometimes I remember my my parents and I when we were having breakfast, we will, if we heard any knock, someone knocked on the door while we were talking about something, we're not supposed to talk about at home. We will freak out. Oh my god, they're here. So this kind of fear is already, I would say, it's already running in our DNA. Even without the government directly threatening us. We know that the Chinese government is always monitoring us, and we are under a severe scrutiny and if things go wrong. We will end up in detention a facility. This is before 2009 before to 2000 or 2017. And since I was a child, my parents has been always tell me you have to be careful when you talk to other people outside. Do not trust them, especially you to be careful. If someone starts to talk about the things you are not supposed to talk about, then this person works for the Chinese government. So this is the fear that is very common among the Uyghur. And even when we leave China, after we left China, and abroad, we will still self-censor because of the Chinese government, the fear they planted, in our heart and also in our mind is there it's very difficult to defeat that. And you know, something we highlight or try to sort of gesture to in the piece is house suspicious Hasan is of other Uyghurs that he meets outside of his home when he takes the train, when he takes the train east in preparation for his flight, the other Uyghurs who are on the migration route with him, this was a common feeling of I won't say paranoia because I think it was justified, but a common feeling of mistrust, you know, because in Xinjiang so many Uyghurs were themselves caught up in this industry of surveillance and incarceration. You know, many Uyghurs working as police officers, working as party cadres and in coerced conditions, of course. But, you know, it was by no means the case that you could count on some kind of ethnic solidarity among minority populations. The state's mechanisms of control and surveillance and persecution were such that anybody could be working for China or reporting back to China was really only once he was in a Thai detention center that he even began to risk talking to other Uyghurs about where he came from and who he was. Once the situation seemed essentially hopeless. Thank you. These are very precious details in terms of like just giving us an insight into the modus vivendi of people who are persecuted over there, the Uyghurs. Now, you mentioned in the article that I quote “Although the region was exempt from China's one child policy in 1988, the government issued a new directive limiting urban Uyghur families to two children and rural families to three.” Unquote. So why was the region exempted from the rule in the first place? The one child policy was relaxed or unenforced in this region. I think in part to kind of respect the nominal status of Xinjiang as an autonomous region for whom different rules were meant to apply because it was intended originally as an autonomous region for for Uyghurs which received special dispensation owing to kind of cultural history Xinjiang was also very sparsely populated compared to other regions. I think it today has around 2% of China's population, even though it is, I forget how much land area it takes up, but it's the biggest administrative region in China. So I think there were feelings of this promoting kind of cultural stability and reducing ethnic conflict. But of course, it did ultimately change. And even when these policies were relaxed there was still enforcement that was capricious in such a way that you didn't know if you had too many children, if you would pay a fine, if you might go to prison, if you might be, you know, coerced into forced sterilization. And so it was not the case that, you know, you could have any as many children as you want, not really worry about it as we as we show in the article. At the very beginning they were targeted to the Han Chinese people and they were the majority population in China. Since the majority population didn’t go against this, I guess the Chinese government realized that now we can take a further step towards a minority and that somehow China's government also wanted to and not to do the things too ugly because they still need people to believe that kind you know, we have a very harmonious society and other ethnicities are living very gloriously under our rule. So they didn't like go strictly like just only one child policy. Instead they allowed to have two and three. But the problem is, they started this policy toward Uyghur and Uyghur people, majority believe in Islam, and abortion is also not run in our culture it doesn't matter the baby was born healthy or unhealthy. Uyghur never abandon children and this just runs in our culture. So for us, that kind of policy is not just against to the population, but also against our culture. So Uyghur are not very happy about this. But again, when there’s are big government machine coming at you, it's difficult for Uyghur people to survive under this kind of policy. So we see some people against this, but the policy can continued and then now we will see in after 2017, 2018, you'll see the Chinese government just strictly like openly won't allow Uyghur people to have even more to have children. And then we will see how they reference Uyghur people as like a Uyghur woman, as a baby machine. They think they're doing a favor for Uyghur woman by control how many children we give birth or whatever. So as to avoid or prevent us ending up as a baby machine. And you can see they don't even see us as a human. And we don't have a free choice to have children or not. Yeah, it's it's presented as as liberatory as as a kind of feminist policy. But, you know, at the same time, the Chinese government promotes marriages between Han men and Uyghur women in order to kind of further loot, the kind of ethnic distinction in the region, something we try to show in the early stages of the piece, in the early section of the piece is that Hasan lived through, Hasan was born and then became an adult in an era of rapidly tightening restrictions. The 1980s are actually sometimes described as relatively relaxed in terms of the state's involvement in Uyghur lives in Xinjiang. I think Darren Byler and James Millward both kind of describe the eighties as being like relatively quiet. And then in the nineties we get, you know, new campaigns for law and order which result in resistance, which and Hasan kind of came of age in this era of tightening restrictions up to this period in like 2012 2013 when tens of thousands of Uyghurs who kind of had the foresight that conditions were getting much worse and would continue to get worse and that they they had to leave now. So this story is about those who saw what was coming so that such that even before the mass internment campaign, they attempted to flee. So I know we've talked about this and obviously this is the subject of our conversation today, which is why are the Uyghurs targeted for elimination in whatever form by the Han Chinese government? I know we've talked about the war on terror and how that's been used. So these are the official reasons I want to be able to touch in more detail about this crucial question. I don't think we speak enough whenever we discuss genocide or mass atrocity in any part of the world. We don't really like get into the why of this discrimination. So again, I would emphasize that this area, which the Chinese state calls Xinjiang, is historically a periphery in which the state had fairly insignificant reach. And then from the 1950s on, they began to want to settle it, to raise the ethnic Han population and to extract its resources, a kind of classic expansionist state working to control its peripheries, which we see all over the world and certainly all over the region as modern nation states arrived in East Asia, Southeast Asia, as they threw off the the yoke of colonialism in many cases. Increasingly, the Chinese government came to view Uyghurs as a population with separatist tendencies. They were concerned by their religious conservatism, by the fact that they had a different culture, and they were largely kept out of the kind of state paramilitary organization unique to Xinjiang in which many on migrants, Han settlers controlled all of the major industries and and kind of extracted much of the wealth that was coming out of Xinjiang during the period of Chinese economic growth. By the 1990s, many Uyghurs were left feeling like they were becoming marginalized in their own homeland. There was incredible economic inequality, which fell largely along ethnic lines, and this led to clashes between some Uyghur dissidents, not all of whom were separatists, but some small minority of whom were, and Chinese authorities and sometimes police officers were killed. And this led to the first of many“strike-hard” campaigns against what China calls the three evils, which are terrorism, extremism and separatism. And China has evolved. The Chinese government has evolved a very fixed lens through which to view Uyghurs as effectively being having been poisoned by these ideologies of terrorism, separatism and extremism and the function of many of the oppressive measures in Xinjiang, which, you know, many genocide experts and other countries have described as a genocide. The function is to, you know, as some of these government documents say, “wash clean the brains” of Uyghurs living in Xinjiang and to, you know, resolve their you know, it's often described as a kind of medical issue that they're infected or that they have an illness and that they need to go away to study in order to cure them of this illness. So the way in which the the Chinese government frames its measures in Xinjiang is as a kind of population management issue for a culture that is backwards, that, you know, as Nyrola says the women are baby making machines, the men are extremists. This is how government policy has kind of fixed this peripheral population in its sights. But in, you know, in a sense, this is not dissimilar from many cases of, you know, a minority group, an indigenous group that has come under the target of the state, that wants to control and manage and assimilate a population that appears to the state as inflexible or as problematic. And, you know, I think a larger question is, you know, I think a question that is unique to China is that why does the Chinese government go to such extreme lengths to pursue Uyghurs once they have left China? I think that is what makes this case strikingly dissimilar from other cases of, you know, extreme human rights violations of minority and indigenous groups, which, you know, you can make comparisons to other situations to to other places in the world. But the lengths China will go to pursue people like Hasan and these men who are incarcerated in Thailand and the tens of thousands of Uyghurs who are living in Turkey, having fled China, that is kind of unique and requires kind of a different explanation. So what is it? What is the explanation? Because I do have that as a question after I read your the article that both of you published. And what what really struck me was, as you mentioned, how even, of course, we know that, for instance, Thailand has been working in cahoots with the Chinese governments to repatriate these Chinese immigrants, these Uyghur immigrants, whereas we do know that Malaysia and Turkey have a bit of have more of a friendlier approach towards the treatment of the workers. I mean, relatively speaking, of course, we can get into details of that later on. But my question remains, I mean, why is the Chinese government so adamant about making sure that the Uyghur immigrants are repatriated or deported back to China? Because in the end, what I read was they’re tortured and many of them were killed as well. They don't like us. They really don't like us. And there is something said in Chinese: 非我族类，其心必异. If you translated it in English it is those who are not my race cannot be trusted so they really just don't like us. They hate us, but then they cannot do things openly like what today we are seeing in Gaza or West Bank. So they have to do this in the more Chinese way. That won't attract so much outry from the outside. And the for decades they enjoyed that cage that locked Uyghur in an open cage. And then do whatever they want to do to this population and then they have been getting away with this and somehow they also gain the support from different governments. We see they have been gaining support from the United States. They gained support from the Muslim country. And this would be the best way for them to eliminate an ethnic gradually, like step by step without getting so much criticism, or they can get away with this. So when they get the Uyghur back to, when they let the other countries deport back, this group or the Uyghur immigrants, Uyghur refugees. What they can do is we can just cover this because that area is difficult for journalists to go in and also difficult for Uyghur people to send the information to outside. So they can do is is perfectly covered it and you will never trace it, whether in the history book or in the media and sometimes you probably will see some of the major media will somehow use the Chinese propaganda into their own news pieces and let the outside world to think. Okay, maybe they do something or maybe they are criminals. That's why China's government doing this to us. This is the most effective, productive and also most relatively, I would say, low costly for the Chinese government to prosecute an ethnic. So that's my explanation. And the I don't know, but as Uyghur, I feel China's government has been doing a “hell of a good job” and gaining so many countries support and also get away with it. Yeah. I might also just add that, you know, China's proliferating security state is huge and very expensive, but also very inefficient with many redundancies and often a paucity of of information at the local level coupled with quotas for detaining certain numbers of Uyghurs and local level officials are often tasked with tracking down people who are living in their region under under their control. And this was the case, you know, when I when I've done projects on Uyghurs who have been kind of called back across the border, who've been forced to go back across the border, they learn that there's actually quite a bit of pressure being put on local officials to kind of locate and identify and then put Uyghur migrants under a program of, if not detention and reeducation, then a kind of rehabilitation. They might be put under house arrest. They have to give public confessions at flag raising ceremonies, stuff like that. And at the local level, there's very little understanding of why this is. But it cultivates a culture in which all Uyghurs are viewed as suspicious by their neighbors. And, you know, there's there's kind of copious like ethnographic evidence for how like Han Chinese in Xinjiang, think of their Uyghur neighbors as often with real fear and suspicion because they have been consuming this narrative for a very long time that Uyghur are Muslim extremists, that they are violent, that they're criminal, that they're involved in like organized crime. And I think part of the maintenance of these state policies require a kind of outward facing power that that presents itself in other countries as an exercise in silence to control. So we know in the article how important China has become to Thailand economically and as a security partner, as well as an arms dealer. So it puts Thailand in a very difficult place in terms of, you know, their commitment to the kinds of human rights laws that bring them closer into the sphere of Europe and the United States and their kind of economic and security commitments to Thailand. And that's how these men have become trapped where they are. You know, the mass deportation of Uyghurs back to China in 2015 created a huge outcry and led to, you know, it took place alongside sanctions and a real chilling of international relations between other economic partners with Thailand and Thailand. And Nyrola actually dug up a dissertation. We didn't put this in the article, but Nyrola dug up a dissertation that kind of located the decision to deport those Uyghurs with one person in the military government that was in charge that was controlling Thailand at that time. And he you know, he got some the person who wrote this dissertation got some interviews that were much more candid than the government interviews we got. And really described this as, you know, one of, you know, a disaster for Thailand foreign policy that came down to one. I forget if it was a high ranking general or a vice president or something, but. Second hand of the prime minister in the military. Vice prime minister. But this was viewed among high level authorities in Thailand as a disaster. So they're not anxious to repeat their mistake by deporting these 48 Uyghurs back to China. At the same time, they're clearly and according to interviews conducted there, they're clearly concerned about China's response If they do anything else with the men who are in detention, they send them to a third country. If they release them. And I think in general, widening the scope beyond Thailand, China recognizes that its treatment of Uyghurs is a vulnerability in its reputation, and it's a soft power vulnerability. And this is why they bring in heads of state from Muslim countries to take kind of tours of Potemkin towns in Xinjiang and say, everything is fine. We support China's policies in Xinjiang because they recognize that this is a vulnerability particularly for particularly for Muslim countries. And that has implications for China's own international economic plans, its Belt and Road, its agreements with with countries in the Middle East. So I think part of the extent of this transnational repression is the recognition that if Uyghurs are permitted to flee China and find asylum or asylum itself being a way of legitimizing the complaints that Uyghurs have about their treatment in Xinjiang, if they receive asylum, that kind of demonstrates that they're being persecuted as an ethnic group back home. I think China recognizes that permitting this to happen and not exercising a certain element of control over Uyghurs beyond their borders creates this vulnerability for other aspects of Chinese policy. There are different countries that have been have been responding very differently to the Uyghurs. For instance, we are aware that Malaysia, too, in your article Malaysia, for instance, became a bit more relaxed about its treatment of the Uyghurs after realizing that China was not very forthcoming towards them. So my question to you is on issues of realpolitik here, we know that Turkey has been rather welcoming of the Uyghurs and has petitioned countries like Thailand to send the Uyghurs over very often to no avail. That's what your article reveals. Now, what is at stake here in Turkey being forthcoming towards the Uyghurs and attracting them into the country? Because we also know through your article that you mentioned, that there are immigrants who are asylum seekers, illegal immigrants, but we want to call them. We know that this is a definitional problem. But what is Turkey gaining by welcoming all of these immigrants into the country, especially from the Uyghur population? And I'm asking this because I'm interested to know that there is always something hidden that we don't necessarily talk about. Yeah, I think I think it's a popular policy within Turkey. It's viewed as humanitarian. It's viewed as in keeping with, you know, Turkey's increasingly kind of religious political culture, which, you know, is, relatively speaking, new. And I think there's also Turkey historically has used asylum seekers. I mean, we know that asylum seekers from Syria and I think there have been like small numbers of cases of asylum seekers from China being sent into northeast Syria to help settle land that Turkey itself wants to claim from northeast Syria. I think there's various factors at play not not all of them like purely benevolent. And the Turkish government has definitely used its precarious conservative Muslim populations to further its own expansionist ends, which is something that we had at some point had in the piece. But it was just too much and too complicated to get into. But there's also just a large Uyghur diaspora in Turkey. Some of which are, you know, a sizable proportion which predates this mass exodus. That is the subject of our article. So, you know, it's a popular policy in Turkey for that reason too now, you know, we did read for the purposes of kind of researching I remember reading an academic text on kind of Turkish-Sino relations and it proposed some kind of further reasoning for why why Turkey wanted to, you know, build this bridge with the Uyghur community in Xinjiang. But I don't know that I remember it well enough to kind of regurgitate it now. But, you know, I think you're right to think about these countries is acting generally out of self-interest and to the extent that they are willing to promote that they're willing to accept asylum seekers as, you know, as NyrolaI can tell you their their status in Turkey is not particularly secure. I think it's useful to think of these in terms of kind of realpolitik and what the individual countries are getting out of this. I think so. Certainly popular support for the policy, but also, yeah, kind of a flexible, precarious population that it has in some cases used as as part of its own expansionist aims and also just precarious low wage labor. I mean, because this is clearly not a muslim issue. I mean, even in the Palestinian Israeli war at the moment, what some people tend to believe that all the Muslim countries are together and Israel's alone. But we know that it's more complicated than that. For instance, we know currently that for Palestinian citizens to just get any kind of medical treatment, they have to cross over to Egypt. And there are fines which are imposed on them. They have to be $10,000 just to cross the border into Egypt and then later pay more for medical treatment. So just to make sure that we're clear on the complexity of the relationships that exist within the Muslim countries, What I really appreciated or noticed in your article was this mention of, for instance, the fact that countries like Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt and Indonesia have cooperated, which are, I mean, technically Muslim countries, they've cooperated with China and deported the Uyghurs back to back to the country. One thing we try to make very clear in our analysis at the end of the article is that in most of the world, Uyghurs are not safe, whether because their positions are precarious and they can be deported or because China can reach them with other forms of transnational repression and threaten family members. And as you point out, Uyghurs have been routinely deported from many nominally Muslim countries, not nominally Muslim, but Muslim and nominally aligned with with, you know, Uyghur culture, including the United Arab Emirates and Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Indonesia and all of that. And yeah, interestingly, there have been cases like in Malaysia where they have recognized that what's happening in Xinjiang is, you know, includes human rights atrocities and that, you know, Malaysia said they would no longer deport Uyghurs to China on China's request. And then you have countries like Thailand that are kind of caught in the middle. But even, you know, geopolitically or, you know, in terms of, as you say, realpolitik, you would think that a country like the United States or Canada would be incentivized to accept Uyghur asylum seekers based on their description of what's happening in Xinjiang as a genocide and their kind of adversarial relationship with China. But in fact, not really. There's been very few Uyghurs settled here despite, you know, for example, Canada's stated intention to settle something like 10,000 Uyghur asylum seekers, mostly from Turkey in the country. These things have moved very slowly and without any sense of urgency. And even years after these declaration signs of genocide have been made. So, you know, even in a place like the United States where you might think there's, you know, self-interested geopolitical reasons to accept Uyghur asylum seekers, it has proven impossible, for example, to get these 48 men out of an IDC in Thailand and to the United States, despite the fact that other persecuted groups from China who have wound up in Thailand have been resettled in the United States, there is a group of around 50 members of a Christian church who are asylum seekers from China who were at risk of deportation in Thailand. They were living in an IDC like these men and UNHCR, together with the U.S. State Department and you know, particularly the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok, arranged for them to be flown to Texas, where they are now living as asylum seekers, which is great. But clearly there is something especially concerning or especially vulnerable about Uyghurs as a asylum population that makes their lives more precarious and makes them unsafe. And you know, is the reason for UNHCR inaction on this issue, which we also write about in the article. Their concern that it will affect their their own projects in China that it will affect their ability to operate camps on the Thai Malaysia border. And so, yeah, there is something you know, it's a complicated answer, which is why it's a very long article. But Uyghurs are, as we point out, among if not the most persecuted and surveilled population in the world beyond the borders of their country, of origin. I wish I could ask you more questions because I honestly, as a genocide studies scholar myself, feel that there isn't enough material on the Uyghurs and that's what we're fighting to make sure we, you know, we work on. So just a final question or hopefully this will be the final question I do want to know about, you know, the journey to leave, to flee, China is already very complex and dangerous because your article talks about Hasan Imam leaving China and going through Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, and then we know that many ultimately wish to go to Turkey. But the end of the journey, which is supposedly or in many cases in Turkey, is not really the end of the journey of a lot of the Uyghurs. And I do want both of you to comment on what happens to the Uyghur of population when they reach there as refugees, as asylum seekers. We know there's a difference between the two terms. We talked about that before, but I do want to talk about what they need to go through because. Hasan Imam, I think as you mentioned in the article, there is no guarantee, for instance, that he will be able to get in touch with his family members and many Uyghur migrants who end up in Turkey are completely disconnected from their family members in China. Many Uyghur are still stateless today in Turkey. Some of them, yes, gain citizenship, but I would say majority of them still only have either a long term residency or a humanitarian residency, which means they can face being deported at any time. They could be detained any time. And it doesn't matter if a Uyghur gained citizenship or not. A majority of them cannot contact their family back home because it could risk the people who are still in Xinjiang can be detained. And almost every single Uyghur I interviewed, has someone they loved either in the prison today or has been sentenced and then released, or they were in the camp whether is reeducation camp or labor camp. And then we also see many, especially after COVID, especially after the pandemic finished. Now the Chinese government can send other Uyghur, those who work for the Chinese government. Now in living in the Uyghur community and start to, you know, secretly monitoring people or filming them and then report it back the Chinese government about their activities in Turkey. I also did the research regarding this, the Chinese transnational repression on the Uyghur diaspora. I haven't see one Uyghur actually laugh from you know, deep down of their heart they are either afraid of being detained any time or lost their citizenship or lost their long term residency. And we have been seeing news almost every month. We will see some of your being detained in a deportation center after months, even years, and they are released. And now they're facing being detained again and then deported back to China. The situation not only happened in Turkey, but also in European countries and also in the United States. So for us, I would say for Uyghur even they escaped to a country, where they can freely practice their religious freedom, still they're not free. And every single person in this world somehow can contact their family. But this is not the situation for the Uyghur. A lot of Uyghur do not even know if their parents still alive or being detained. So yeah. The ending of the escape from China is never just “Oh, I gained a citizenship in certain country” the ordeal and the agony is there and it's impossible to solve this. So we know about, you know, how certain wars and conflicts across the world are adjudicated as being, for instance, genocide mass atrocity. And in the context recently of Palestine and Israel, they've been called war crimes. And I think we've all been quite hung up with definitions. Even as genocide studies scholars, we understand the technical difficulties of, for instance, just calling something a genocide. Now on January 19, 2021, the US Secretary of State on atrocities in Xinjiang declared whatever is happening to the Uyghurs as genocide and as we talked about earlier, it really was very much like the toothless Tiger syndrome, roar but no teeth, so no effect. At the end of the day, basically. What I'm trying to ask, what I'm wondering right now is what is the way forward? Because obviously the declaration of the Uyghur persecution as a genocide by the US was not sufficient, is not sufficient. So what can all the states do or what is the way forward now to minimize and eliminate the persecution of the Uyghurs? For me, I mean, I think you effectively summarized the uselessness of these declarations without any force of humanitarian aid behind them. And, you know, it doesn't escape anybody's attention that the declaration from the US was happening as Trump was pursuing a trade war with China. Around the same time there were, you know, the the forced labor law was passed, which meant that goods from Xinjiang were restricted from being brought into the United States, which maybe, you know, produced some some economic effects on the Chinese economy. But, you know, would not have materially improved the lives of Uyghurs living inside or outside China. You know, I think that what we wrote is a narrative with some analysis. It's not an argument. And I don't necessarily think it's our place as writers or as journalists to make an argument or to be prescriptive about what government policies should be and how, you know, how their rhetoric should look. And I certainly don't think it's our place to declare such and such thing a genocide and such and such thing, not a genocide. I think that's fine to have a personal opinion about or to do so as an individual. But I would say it's actively detrimental to our goal to inform and persuade readers of a convincing analysis to make those kinds of assertions. But clearly this is a population that needs asylum protections and there, you know, there are guarantees of asylum under international law. This is a population that needs asylum, that should receive asylum, that is being persecuted across borders, and that is has struggled to find safe refuge and in some cases have faced indefinite detention with no crime attached other than crossing the border without documentation for a decade. That's the case in Thailand. There's also a case of, I think, three Uyghurs in Kashmir who have been in a prison for a decade. There are cases of really long term detention that could be resolved if this population was treated as a legitimate asylum seeking population. And the fact that they're not has to do with pressure from the Chinese government. So I think any solution would involve an expansion of asylum protections to these to this population in the places that they're seeking asylum. And I think rich Western countries like the United States, Canada and members of the European Union have the highest responsibility of extending that those asylum rights to Uyghur asylum seekers. I agree with you based on my conversation with every Uyghur interviewees, they all feel unsafe without legal status living in any other country. So the most important thing is recognized the Uyghur as a refugee and also would be good to provide some of the legal aid to the Uyghur population. And right now this is not the case. This was not to forgive, but to understand with our guests Nichola, Alma and Ben Mock. To our listeners, don't forget to, like, subscribe and stay tuned for more discussions. No country in this world ever stand on the Uyghur side. Yes, we have been seeing, by the United States that this is a genocide. I would say it like this, Uyghur are like gold. You have no idea how much a foreign government can gain from us by exchanging us or deporting us to China. When we were“useless” in this political, geopolitical, political game, we are some kind of bad people during the Bush administration. And when the US and China's relationship not going well, then suddenly we become, you know, the center of the human rights people should be focused on. And god knows what’s going to happen when the Trump’s sitting in that position. So this is the same to Turkey. This is the same to Malaysia. I don't think Uyghur ever has allies and Uyghur never has. So when you talk about the other Muslim country, when they need something from China, then where are the bad people. When they don't need something from China, we suddenly become the favor. So for this, I really don't have any expertise to explain this. As Uyghur when I see all these things, I just feel like, well, we are really abandoned by the people and you have no idea what's going to happen the next day. If something just changed in certain decision maker among them, and then we ended up as the bad people again. So