Opinion In China’s Uyghur genocide, another voice silenced

October 1, 2023 | The Washington Post

But the sentence adds to the evidence that China’s rulers are executing a cultural genocide of the Uyghurs, a Turkic Muslim ethnic minority, and others in the Xinjiang region, attempting to eradicate their language, culture and traditions and replace them with those of the Han Chinese majority. A human rights lawyer, Rayhan Asat, whose brother Ekpar Asat has been detained in Xinjiang since 2016, told Voice of America, “If you look at historical examples, when the state attempts to commit genocide, they tend to go after the brightest and the finest of the society, who would preserve their culture, who would preserve the collective dignity of the people.” The Uyghur Human Rights Project has found that a minimum of 312 Uyghur, Kazakh and Kyrgyz intellectual and cultural elites were detained or imprisoned as of late 2021, and probably many more. Also sentenced to a life term was Uyghur university professor Ilham Tohti. Uyghur journalists for Radio Free Asia have also been threatened.

Read the full article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/01/uyghur-professor-life-sentence-china/