How young women are making sure the Uyghur genocide ‘will not be forgotten’
Students in the Uyghur diaspora explain the atrocities occurring in their homeland and how you can help.
For 15-year-old Uyghur student Mehliya Cetinkaya, the knowledge of what is happening to her people in China hangs over her daily life in Canada. “It's hard to, like, deal with all of this,” Mehliya shares. “I have to think about my family all the time. And so you put on a face, you laugh. But at the end of the day, I come home and I cry and I feel sad about this.”
The Uyghurs are a mostly Muslim ethnic group from East Turkestan (which the Chinese government refers to as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region). In a country that is approximately 90% Han Chinese, the Uyghurs have often faced discrimination for speaking their language, expressing their culture and practising their religion. The situation has escalated in recent years and it’s estimated that the Chinese government has detained between one and three million Uyghurs in camps under the guises of countering extremism and providing vocational training.
In reality, the camps punish and indoctrinate innocent Uyghurs, marking perhaps the largest imprisonment of people on the basis of religion since the Holocaust. Other reported crimes against Uyghurs and attempts at cultural erasure include forced sterilisation and abortions, invasive surveillance and forced labour and relocation. Canada, Holland, the U.K. and the U.S. have accused the Chinese government of committing genocide.
Despite this evidence, there has been limited international action and some even question whether these atrocities are occurring. “It really makes me sad sometimes because people will genuinely think that I'm lying,” Mehliya says of the online and in-person reactions to her activism. “They will think that I come up with this and spend my time as an IB [International Baccalaureate] student working on manufacturing this lie, working on manufacturing all of these documents and all these proofs and apparently getting all my people I know to talk about their survivor stories.”
“If we have the ability to speak our language, believe our religion, be who we are without fearing for our lives, then we should use that to help our people at home not fear for their lives.”
Mehliya’s mom, Mukerrem Qurban, left East Turkestan for Canada in 2002 in order to fight for her freedom and raise awareness about what’s happening to her people. Since before she can remember, Mehliya has been joining her mother at protests for Uyghur rights. She now spends her free time organising, speaking out at conferences, running the Alberta Uyghur Association and serving as Student Liaison for Canada at Campaign for Uyghurs.
“If we have the ability to speak our language, believe our religion, be who we are without fearing for our lives, then we should use that to help our people at home not fear for their lives,” Mehliya explains. “That way, we can go home. I can go home, see my family and see my cousins. It’s so important we realize this and realize that we cannot be silenced. We cannot be pretending it’s not happening. It’s very much happening. An entire people are about to go extinct.”
Telling their stories.
The Instagram account @uyghurwomenig, run by Campaign for Uyghurs, offers Uyghur girls and women like Mehliya a platform to speak out and tell their stories. “A lot of times I think people can look at news reports and get overwhelmed by seeing numbers and seeing the depths of the horrors that are happening to the Uyghur people right now,” explains Julie Millsap, Director of Public Affairs and Advocacy for Campaign for Uyghurs. “And it's sometimes easy for people to kind of disconnect that from themselves.” @uyghurwomenig works to spotlight the people behind the numbers and amplify the voices of Uyghur girls and women.
“They're not just victims. They have all been victimized by this genocide. They've all been touched by it. They've all had family members affected by it and have suffered and in particularly brutal ways. But they're still human beings with families, with goals, with dreams, with hopes,” shares Julie.
18-year-old Shahnura Kasim, an Uyghur student in Germany, is one of the young women who shared her story on @uyghurwomenig. In her post, Shahnura explained that her family hasn’t been able to speak to relatives in East Turkestan in years and fears for their safety. "We can't contact them, so we don’t know anything about them. We just heard that the [family members on the] side of my mother — so my uncle, my aunt and my grandmother — were in a camp,” Shahnura says. “My aunt is in prison for 13 years now, with no reason. My uncle for 17 years. We also heard that my uncle died, but we are not sure, we don't know what really happened to them."
Berna Ilchi, an Uyghur university student in Canada, also spoke out on @uyghurwomenig, remembering what it was like to get a call from her relatives in East Turkestan in February 2020 after five years of no contact. “You forget what they sound like. You forget what they even look like,” she shares.
“I think it's really important for everybody to hear about not just the tragic parts of everybody's lives, but also the happy parts,” Berna says of the account. “I know a lot of the stories on there are quite sad, including mine, like there are sad aspects as well. But I think it's important to really see our daily life and our stories and recognize that it's not unique to us either. So many Uyghur women and so many Uyghur families are going through that. I think it's a really great platform to amplify Uyghur women's voices in a way that kind of shows people that we're all experiencing this.”
Advocating for their people.
Mehliya is frustrated by how surprised people in her community are when they see that a young woman like her is so politically engaged. “I think that as females, we have already such a disadvantage in this world. And I think as younger females, we're even at an even more disadvantage. Like most people see me as a teenager to be boy obsessed and just emotional,” she shares. “When they get to know me, they realize I don't know boys. I know activism. I know fighting for the truth. I know sacrificing my friendships for advocacy. And that's such a strange concept to them.”
(Courtesy of Berna Ilchi)
Like Mehliya, Shahnura and Berna are engaged members of the Uyghur diaspora. In addition to attending protests and speaking out against the genocide, Berna volunteers with Tarim Network, an organisation that works to connect Uyghur youth around the world. One her favourite initiatives to work on is the Tarim Stars project, which highlights successful or inspiring Uyghur youth.
“When I first started [working on Tarim Stars], I was so surprised to see all these Uyghur people doing so many amazing things because before I met all these people, I was like, 'I don't even know if Uyghur people are in these positions, if they're going to these amazing schools, if they're getting their PhDs,’” Berna shares. “And once I started reaching out to these people to write about them. I was like, 'Wow, we have a lot of really successful and amazing people in our community.' And a lot of them are really open to mentoring younger Uyghur people or giving them a lot of advice.”
Shahnura attends demonstrations calling for the release of Uyghurs from camps and uses social media to educate her followers about what’s happening in East Turkestan. “People can see my videos or my posts which are informative about Uyghur people, what’s happening there and that they can spread this on their stories or tell to their friends or families or in their schools,” Shahnura says. “We can also put pressure on political people and journalists to talk about this topic and we can also find many people who want to help.”
Shahnura began posting on Instagram at first and was initially hesitant to use TikTok because of its links to the Chinese government. However, because TikTok’s algorithm surfaces new content better than Instagram’s and makes it easier for her content go “viral,” Shahnura also began publishing videos there — even though she sees the “irony” in using TikTok to speak out about a genocide perpetrated by China.
The risks of speaking out.
Mehliya, Shahnura and Berna’s activism comes with risks even though they’re outside of China. “I get scared when I do interviews and post things because I’m like, ‘What if my family now gets targeted?,’” Mehliya explains. “I put [my cousin’s] name out into the world a couple of times, and that is frightening to me. Once you put the name out there, even without the name, they could find my family in an instant. Putting the name out there solidifies my connection and solidifies the fact that I fear for this person's life at a crazy amount.”
Berna says that her family is outspoken about the genocide. “I think a lot of Uyghur families are like that,” she explains. “But I also understand the fear and a lot of people have even their children back home, so it would be hard to speak out. And they're afraid and I understand that as well and I sympathize with them. I would say that's a really big factor in why a lot of people don't speak out.”
“Yes, my family is there, but not just my family. Millions of Uyghur people, millions of children, and they need our voice. I don’t know if I can stay silent for two or three people when I know there’s a whole genocide against my people.”
“I’m really not afraid of them because I have nothing to lose,” reflects Shahnura. “Yes, my family is there, but not just my family. Millions of Uyghur people, millions of children, and they need our voice. I don’t know if I can stay silent for two or three people when I know there’s a whole genocide against my people.”
Taking action.
Through their activism, the three students hope to educate members of the international community about what’s happening in East Turkestan and inspire them to take action. They encourage people to support the initiatives of local Uyghur organisations, amplify the voices of Uyghurs, contact their government representatives and share information about the crisis on social media. They also suggest that consumers use their purchasing power to boycott brands that use forced Uyghur labour. A recent study found that 83 companies — including Nike and Adidas — have links to forced Uyghur labour. “The Chinese government is thinking ‘Nobody is saying, “Hey, what are you doing with the Uyghur people?” so we can do with them what we want.’ It’s good [for the brands] because they don’t have to pay this and it’s very cheap what’s produced in China,” says Shahnura.
In the future, Berna hopes to see “Uyghur people being able to visit East Turkestan once again without fear ... Especially with all of our parents, as they get older, it's fearful that they'll never be able to go back home.”
Shahnura wants more governments to recognise that China is committing a genocide. “I’m calling on [leaders] to make pressure on China. In Germany, we are talking always about human rights. But also at the same time, they are not speaking about the Uyghur people,” she says.
For Mehliya, the fight for her people is one she plans to fight for a long time. “My entire life has been and will be devoted to this even once we have our freedom,” she shares. “I will make sure that this is written down in history books for students to see in the future. This is not going to be forgotten.”
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