A moving testimony about the brutal persecution suffered by the Uyghur community in China and the author’s and his family’s escape from the country over the past decade. It helps us understand the most serious political persecutions of our time, while at the same time serving as a call to the West not to ignore these genocides.
The persecution of the Uyghur people by the Chinese government has, since 2017, reached a terrifying dimension. Controlled by an extremely sophisticated surveillance system, the Uyghurs—an ethnic group predominantly Muslim and Turkic-speaking, living mostly in the Xinjiang region in northwest China—are reliving some of the worst moments of the 20th century.
Tahir Hamut Izgil, a prominent Uyghur poet and filmmaker, has also been a victim of this repression. After an attempt to travel abroad in 1996, he was arrested, tortured, and imprisoned for three years in a re-education camp. Two decades later, the transfer of people to internment camps under any pretext had become so common that Izgil and his wife realized their only hope was to flee the country.