The Uighurs’ Nightmare — In Their Own Words

For years, the Chinese government has pursued a relentless campaign against the Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim ethnic group that resides in the northwestern region of China, called “East Turkestan” by those live there and “Xinjiang” by the Chinese government.

Since 2015, China has imprisoned a million Uighurs in “reeducation camps,” where they have been indoctrinated into model Chinese citizens, forcibly sterilized and raped, and forced into slave labor to make masks, shoes, and cotton. Those who are lucky enough to not be in camps live under the most intrusive police state to ever exist: the Chinese government catalogues all of the Uighur in biometric registries, regularly suppresses their ideas, speech, culture and religious beliefs, and watches their every communication.

Tahir Hamut Izgil, one of the great living Uighur poets, conveys in speech the lived nightmare of the millions of Uighurs and other indigenous Turkic groups: 

Your Unknown Place

“Here people’s names were not contagious,

we said they were, it came to be.

There was no sand here growing roots,

we said there was, it came to be.

Here time did not drip from the walls,

we said it did, it came to be.

Here loneliness did not multiply,

we said it did, it came to be.

Here a thousand eyes did not fleck the skies,

we said they did, it came to be.

Here there were no fugitive forgettings,

we said there were, it came to be.

Yet our words could undo nothing here,

even the things we brought to be.”

–Tahir Hamut Izgil, translated by Joshua Freeman

Jonah Kaye is communications coordinator at The Jewish Movement for Uyghur Freedom, an international and multi-denominational Jewish movement countering the Chinese government’s internment and abuse of the Uighur people.