Q & A With Nury Turkel, Chair of U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom

September 27, 2022

Turkel has founded his own nonprofit, the Uyghur Human Rights Project, and has helped many Uyghurs get out of China and into safety. Nury, why did you name the book “No Escape”? What is the point you were trying to make there?

Turkel: The Chinese government’s targeted attack on the Uyghur women, Uyghur children has been something ongoing. The Uyghur Human Rights Project published a report on the Chinese one-language policy several years ago. That was the government’s initial targeted attack on the Uyghur children through this [forced assimilation] process to create a new generation of Uyghurs who may not look exactly like a Han Chinese, but their thinking, their behaviors, their preferences in life, even marriage, such as sending their Uyghur kids to inland schools.

From a historical perspective, as I noted in the book, [it’s] a very similar method to what the Nazi regime used. If you look at the history, the Dachau concentration camp was built by Jewish women. Just over the weekend, myself and my [Uyghur Human Rights Project] colleagues were in Los Angeles. We visited The Museum of Tolerance. As we walked through, we noticed striking similarities, including the way that Chinese Communist Party use the intellectuals, academics, to formulate [persecution] policies.

Turkel: The Uyghur cemeteries, Uyghur cultural centers, are located in the city and vicinity. Because of booming housing development, shopping malls and apartments are being built in traditional Uyghur areas, neighborhoods specifically in Kashgar. The local authorities have essentially forced the local Uyghur residents to move out of the city and vacate the city center. That also included some old cemeteries. A few years ago, Uyghur Human Rights Project published a report, and after it came out, the late Washington Post [editorial page editor] Fred Hiatt wrote a column likening what Uyghurs were experiencing as Kristallnacht.

Read the full article: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/09/27/q__a_with_nury_turkel_chair_of_us_commission_on_religious_freedom.html