This is a conversation with Rayhan Asat and Yonah Diamond, authors of the piece “The World’s Most Technologically Sophisticated Genocide Is Happening in Xinjiang.”

Asat is an international human rights lawyer and the sister of Ekpar Asat, who was forcibly disappeared by the CCP. Diamond is and international human rights lawyer with the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights.

Additional links:

• Sister Fights to Free Uighur Businessman Held in China After U.S. Trip
• ‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims
• ‘Man returns to his native Xinjiang and disappears’ — a story too common for the headlines
• #MetooUyghur campaign asks Chinese government to prove that Xinjiang detainees are still alive
• Voices from Xinjiang: Untold Stories from China’s Gulag State
• Revealed: new evidence of China’s mission to raze the mosques of Xinjiang
• Transnational Carceral Capitalism in Xinjiang and Beyond
• How Should the World Respond to Intensifying Repression in Xinjiang?
• China Secretly Built A Vast New Infrastructure To Imprison Muslims

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Transcript via Antidote Zine:

“Break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins.” If these words aren’t telling, I don’t know what it takes to convey the government’s motive behind destroying the Uyghur people as a whole.

Rayhan Asat: Hi Elia, good to be with you. My name is Rayhan Asat, and I am a Uyghur attorney based in Washington DC. I’ve been working as an attorney for several years, and my main practice is anti-corruption and international investigation, and a bit of dispute resolution. But I also am very much interested in entrepreneurship, in part because my brother inspired my past entrepreneurship, and I founded and am currently serving as the president of the American-Turkic Bar Association, which is tailored to the needs of American-Turkic lawyers. We’re relatively new, still a growing institution. 

I got involved in the Uyghur human rights crisis, unfortunately, because I am directly affected by it. I grew up in a very modern Uyghur family that even the government held as “model citizens” or a “model family”—especially my brother, who has a great platform that has been perceived as a positive bridge between ethnic minorities and the Xinjiang local government, and often held by the government, through their own state media (and they even used his platform), to be able to respond to citizens’ concerns on different issues. Unfortunately he was also detained during this Uyghur human rights crisis, when the government started building the infamous internment camps, or concentration camps, for the Uyghur community as a whole.

It’s very tragic. For me, I always struggle between being an attorney who goes to court and defends others, and now being an advocate for my brother and trying to free him from these detention camps.

Yonah Diamond: I’m Yonah Diamond. I work at the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights as an international human rights lawyer; I’m the legal counsel at the center. We met Rayhan through another international human rights lawyer. What we do at the Wallenberg Center (named after the Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust by issuing false papers and setting up safe houses; our center is informed by his legacy that the power of one person with the compassion to care and the courage to act can transform history) is represent modern-day Mandelas and political prisoners around the world who represent the struggle for human rights in their own countries.

When we were introduced to Rayhan, we took on her brother’s case as emblematic of the persecution of the Uyghurs.

Elia J. Ayoub: Thank you both for having this conversation.

If we can start with an overview of what we’re talking about—most people know that something is happening, and they may have seen some headlines, but depending how much they’ve read, they may not know the extent and sophistication of the problem we’re talking about. So before going into the main argument of the Foreign Policy piece you two wrote calling this a genocide, can we start with a general timeline?

How did it start? What’s the scale of it? And if we could also touch a bit on the Chinese Communist Party’s motive and public rationale for doing this.

RA: I’ll start by saying that 2020, this year, marks four years into the Uyghur human rights crisis; now we’re calling it a genocide. There have been a lot of reports that, as early as 2016, over a million Turkic Uyghurs are detained in camps or prisons, or even forced-labor factories—adding a slavery component to it.

China-watchers, journalists, and investigators found overwhelming evidence, through the government’s own official documents and political speeches, that detainees who are held in these camps are often subject to military-style discipline, “thought-transformation” as they call it, and forced confessions. The government tries to use a soft-spoken language, like “re-education camps,” to define what it is doing to the Uyghur people as a whole.

It has a bit of historical resonance to it, because this happened during the Cultural Revolution when all of China was subject to some sort of re-education. But what we’re seeing now is the government singling out entire ethnic groups. Not just Uyghurs, but Kasakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik—all Turkic groups.

If we look at my brother’s case as an example, somebody who is incredibly, massively successful, and is seen as a positive force by the government, in their own words, these re-education camps prove that it’s nothing but a euphemism for the physical and mental destruction of the Uyghur people.

YD: It’s hard to conceptualize this genocide, but Rayhan often refers to it as a multi-pronged approach to destroying the Uyghur people, the future generation. It’s important to note that each demographic, whether it’s men between the ages of twenty and fifty who are sent to these camps—the vast majority in these camps are men, but the women have been subjected to an increasing systematic program of forced sterilization. We have an increase in women who are either widowed, or those who have been sterilized or subjected to other forms of birth prevention. Then children—up to half a million now—have been kidnapped, essentially, and put in state-run facilities where some have even committed suicide.

So there is a multi-pronged approach at erasing the future generation. It’s very disturbing, because it’s a very slow process but it’s also very sophisticated. There is incredible mass surveillance; the world’s largest intrusive mass-surveillance program: cameras on every block, facial recognition. My grandparents survived the Holocaust, and I just recently watched my grandmother’s testimony for the first time. It’s so hard to conceptualize that entire peoples could be targeted; she was talking about how she had to live under Catholic papers in Budapest during the Holocaust, but she would daily see Jews being shot behind where she worked, and just in the streets.

We see it in movies, and we think this is just surreal. And to have a program with technology makes it almost even scarier. There are many differences, obviously. The scale of the Holocaust is hard to compare. But what we see as a parallel is the targeting of entire ethnic groups simply for who they are. Rayhan’s brother is a paradigmatic example, because he’s someone the Chinese government respects and has even praised, and yet he’s still in this disappeared state. 

EA: In the piece you mention that Rayhan’s brother, Ekpar Asat—they call him a “bridge builder,” a “positive force,” as Rayhan just mentioned. This is an important detail, and thank you for mentioning it, because the CCP’s supposed “rationale” is that they are fighting religious extremism. This is something that’s very common, especially since 9/11; the so-called “War on Terror” is used to justify quite a lot of things. I spent a lot of time involved in Syria-related activism, and this is what the Syrian regime uses to describe pretty much everyone.

Rayhan, would you mind talking a bit more about your brother? Who is he? When’s the last time you heard from him? And what’s happening to him, as far as you know?

RA: My brother is a successful tech entrepreneur, but at the same time he has a massive heart. He’s a philanthropist, for personal reasons, because a cousin he feels very close to is impaired and couldn’t hear since the age of four. He took this so personally; he ended up helping kids with disabilities as his signature campaign. He built a lot of charitable initiatives.

As a result, the government also cooperated with him on these initiatives and always praised him, to the point that his reputation started to expand—not just within China but also internationally. Former US ambassador to China Max Baucus, in 2014 when he was visiting Ürümqi, the city I’m from, ended up meeting with successful and prominent entrepreneurs and business leaders, and he also met with my brother. He met a bunch of Uyghur business leaders, but he nominated my brother as an international leader to the US state department’s premiere program called the International Visitor Leadership Program.

Some other notable alumni include the former prime minister of the UK Margaret Thatcher, UN Secretary-General Antonio Gutierrez, and New Zealand’s beloved prime minister Jacinda Ardern. So he came to this program representing China as part of a delegation, one of nine group members, and he impressed everybody during his trip—his hosts can attest to that; they even wrote letters talking about the memories of hosting him. The program ran about a month; after returning from this program he was immediately detained.

He returned in mid-March 2016, and in late March, after he returned, he organized—this was a program he organized even while he was in the United States; he was keeping it a secret thing from me, likely to surprise me: together with the regional sports bureau, he organized an international boxing tournament, inviting boxers from central Asian countries and Malaysia, together with the Chinese team—a friendship boxing tournament, if you will. It was incredibly successful; there were Chinese flags, and the audience was a mix of ethnic minorities and Chinese, you even see pictures of police officers—it was an incredibly successful program that even the Chinese government put on CCTV. 

This was late March, but early April—in fact it was April 7, 2016—he was detained. That was a period that I was still a student at Harvard Law, just trying to finish my exams and hoping to see my brother in two months’ time at my graduation. And suddenly my entire family canceled their trip to the US. They told me they couldn’t make it, and I just couldn’t understand how my entire family refused to come to my graduation when I’m the first Uyghur to graduate from Harvard. While I was processing trying to understand why they would do this to me, it turns out the reason was because my brother was detained, and they couldn’t just leave and come to attend my graduation. 

It’s been four years, and I’m still struggling, trying to find out if he’s alive. Where is he held? Is he in Ürümqi, or has he been relocated like other prisoners? All this time I thought he was in one of those famous internment camps, until this year after I started meeting with the state department, and until late December last year when I met with members of congress. They wrote a letter to the Chinese government asking my brother’s whereabouts, and that’s when I learned that he’d been imprisoned and is now facing a fifteen-year imprisonment for trumped-up charges of “inciting ethnic hatred” in a system designed to oppress people like my brother.

The government accuses him of inciting ethnic hatred!

EA: Recently I had Wafa Mustafa on, a Berlin-based Syrian activist whose father was forcibly disappeared in Syria. I suppose on one level it no longer fully surprises me that governments are capable of horrors, but one thing we mentioned before is the bureaucratic aspect of it, the sophistication, the technological aspect of the methods used by the Chinese government.

We are seeing widespread torture; you mention in your piece electrocution, rape, waterboarding, stress positions; you mention the forced sterilization campaigns against Uyghur women especially, the multiple reports of murders in these so-called re-education camps (which many have called concentration camps)—but besides that, which is obviously horrific in its own ways, we’re also seeing an extremely sophisticated bureaucratic response by the CCP that makes it more difficult to comprehend the scale of it. 

Can we talk a bit about the more intricate bureaucratic stuff? The advanced online censorship, the monitoring, the tracking, all of that? And maybe your experience with it, if you’ve had any, or people you know who have as well (besides your brother)?

RA: The very fact that it’s been four years and we don’t even know where my brother is should be quite telling. Many governments have their own checkered record of human rights violations, but often at least you would have some sort of access to the family member who is detained. But in our case, and I can speak for other members of the Uyghur community, you can’t even talk to your detained family; you don’t know if they’re alive.

So not only the person who is detained, but your entire family is suffering: suffering from not knowing if they are alive. They are subject to torture, waterboarding, electrocution, all these patterns of brutal treatment that Uyghur detainees endure in these internment camps. But now I’m in the United States; as his sister, of course I care about my brother. Every day I think about him. It breaks my heart to talk to you about him. But as his sister, trying to be his advocate rather than just a lawyer trying to save the world—I can’t even talk to my family about him.

Every time, I’ve gone to media if I want to know what happened, if there’s been any response from the government, at least if he’s alive—they can’t even talk to me about this, because our conversations are obviously heavily monitored. If they dared to tell me something, perhaps they could be sent to these internment camps. That is the terror—and I’m using this word very carefully—that the Chinese government instilled in all of us.

If we’re going to call my brother a victim, then me and my family members are survivors. But even we are subjected to this state terror—to the extent that I cannot even describe the pain of pretending and talking to my family as if life is normal. We can’t even address the existence or non-existence of my brother. That’s how intrusive the entire surveillance system is on the communications between me, as a sister who lives in the United States, and my family members back home.

I cannot imagine how much my family members’ activities in Xinjiang, in Ürümqi, are monitored. I always think, when you use a personal story it’s a far more powerful way to explain the pervasiveness of surveillance. Otherwise, what we see in Ürümqi is: everywhere you go, people have to either scan their identification cards, which already flags you. I’m sure my parents are in the system, so the minute they hand in their identification card when they pass through any sort of security (and there are a lot in Ürümqi), they would already be flagged and subject to all sorts of harassment—that they can never discuss with me.

That’s the thing. That’s what makes this genocide so uniquely dangerous: its technological sophistication. It also allows China to destroy and conceal the scale of atrocities from global attention.

YD: The fifteen-year sentence that Rayhan cited was basically through word-of-mouth. We haven’t seen any court documents to that effect. Essentially, her and her family are still subjected to the pain and suffering of not knowing.

EA: Part of what’s scary about the CCP’s methods is its global implications, in addition to everything we’re talking about. Certain governments test out certain weapons on civilian populations—the Russians have done this, the Syrians have done this. These technologies can then just be sold to other governments and other countries that want to replicate it. China will be able to say: This is how successful we have been, so now this is a product that can be sold on that market.

You’re both lawyers, and in your piece you make the argument that what the CCP is doing is a genocide. Can you walk us through the legal arguments? I’m not a lawyer; I only have a basic understanding of international law. I know the Geneva Conventions when it comes to war-related situations; I know the basics. But can you walk us through the legal arguments of the term “genocide”? And why does calling this a genocide matter, in international law?

YD: Under the Genocide Convention, the universal definition, at least right now under international law, is certain acts against members of a group with the intent to destroy that group in whole or in part. These acts include killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions to bring about the group’s physical destruction, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

It’s not so complicated—and it doesn’t have to be all of these factors to constitute genocide, it’s any one. Just taking the imposing of measures to prevent births within the group with the intent to destroy that group in whole or in part, we see very clearly that there is an intent within the policy and the directives of the Chinese Communist Party at the highest levels: repeated orders to break their origin, their roots, their connections, to round up everyone who should be rounded up to implement the birth prevention program.

And the numbers are pretty horrifying too, recently. As you see in the article, population growth rates in the Uyghur heartland plummeted by eighty-four percent between 2015 and 2018, and sterilization rates are skyrocketing in Xinjiang while plunging in the rest of China. In one major prefecture, Kashgar, only three percent of married women of child-bearing age gave birth in 2019. 

Now we see that the government is trying to destroy some of this evidence, by taking down the websites or not reporting birthrate information—or even in Houston with the burning documents [at the Chinese consulate]; it’s not clear what that’s about. And detainees are being transferred to different camps; it’s unclear if evidence is being destroyed at prior camps. It’s a very systematic campaign.

Like I said before, with the detaining of the men who are of marriage age, and by enforcing the forced sterilization of women of child-bearing age, and by forcibly removing the children—which is the fifth act under the Genocide Convention—all of this is creating the multi-pronged conditions intended to destroy the group either in whole or in part.

RA: As you said, we are lawyers; the G-word carries huge weight, so we don’t like to use it lightly. There has been debate about whether the CCP’s rationale or motivation behind this is one of assimilation. I think it’s way beyond assimilation. Assimilation did happen in the nineties and early 2000s there; there was an emphasis on bilingual education (I went to a bilingual school). But this is a whole different scale.

When we debate whether this meets the definition of genocide or not—which it obviously does, as we clearly laid out in this article—we would be trivializing the pain of millions of people who are in these camps. The argument that this is somewhat limited to assimilation fails on its merits, very plainly. If you look at my brother as an example: he’s a highly educated individual, he speaks Chines fluently. This is not about assimiliation; he was well-integrated into Chinese society.

And look at all the intellectual scholars who are detained in these camps. They were the pillars of the Uyghur society; they were the ones who were educating the next generation of Uyghur kids. They are way beyond well-integrated into Chinese society. I think we would be doing an immense disservice to human suffering if we’re going to make the argument that the Chinese government’s rationale is to assimilate. It is to destroy the entire Uyghur people through this multi-pronged approach, from all different angles: Uyghur men being detained; women sterilized and even being forced into marriage with men not of their liking; Uyghur children are being separated from their families.

The Chinese government is perfectly laying genocide, and it’s happening on our watch. I don’t know how many stories that individual Uyghurs have to share with the world, so bravely, and the world can finally take action and say, This is enough.

EA: This also includes the Chinese government sending Han people into Uyghur homes, as far as I understand it. Can you talk a bit about this? What are they trying to do? This is not new of course; the first time I heard about it was two years ago, but I may be wrong on the timeline.

RA: They call this the “becoming family initiative.” It’s not becoming, it’s unbecoming. You can’t force people to love each other and become family. A relationship of love often happens organically. But what they are doing is that every Uyghur, especially women whose husbands are detained in these camps, is subject to government surveillance through these civilians. They are monitored in their own beds by these Han people.

Imagine a scenario where your thoughts are monitored by somebody. The law is often carried out by enforcement agencies or police departments, but these civilians get to decide whether these women should be sent to re-education camps after they spend a year or two with a family. I cannot imagine the horror of somebody living in my own home and monitoring my every move, and deciding whether I should be sent to a camp or not.

How scary is that? Somebody just decides to grab you, in your own home.

YD: This allows for state-sanctioned sexual violence and rape. Watchers and officials are being placed in Uyghur homes, in their beds. This is truly shocking.

EA: Part of what I was trying to do in preparing for this episode was reading up on some of the reports that have been released in the past year; my involvement when it comes to this is still fairly limited. But one of the reports that I was reading, and I have it in front of me, is the so-called “Xinjiang Papers” by the New York Times. You linked it as well in your Foreign Policy piece.

For those who don’t know, it’s over four hundred pages of internal government documents that were leaked. Can you talk about your reaction when you read this report? And what did it show, in addition to everything we’ve already talked about, about the resolve that the government, the CCP, and Xi Jinping personally? Some of these are his internal speeches calling for “using the organs of dictatorship” (these are his words) “and showing absolutely no mercy.” Using such harsh language shows the dedication of the CCP to crack down, murder, destroy, to levels that are very rarely seen in 2020.

RA: You’re absolutely right. And the tone was set at the very top, with statements like “absolutely no mercy.” When you are the commander-in-chief and using these words, of course your followers are going to implement those policies—because you allowed so. In fact you even encouraged it.

In addition to these statements, one in particular was so troubling. Again, in the government’s own official documents: “Break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins.” If these words aren’t telling, I don’t know what it takes to convey the government’s motive behind destroying the Uyghur people as a whole.

When I hear these statements…my brother is there for a reason: to break him, both mentally and physically. And it’s not just about him forgetting his Uyghur identity. We grew up in a very well-integrated society. I speak Chinese; I also love Chinese culture. There was never this rejection of Chinese culture; I have friends within the Chinese culture, long-term friendships, and neighbors that we grew up with. 

So with this language, what is incredibly telling is the Chinese government truly intended to physically and mentally break the Uyghur people so they can ultimately achieve this goal of destroying the people as a whole. Yonah mentioned about these forced sterilization programs, and if you look at the data, the statistics obviously show that it is having the desired effects. Uyghur birthrates are plummeting while the rest of China is skyrocketing. It’s so painful for a Uyghur person to hear these things, especially the diaspora community, because we have no way of knowing what’s happening over there, and we get to see this through the plain words of the government.

I’m glad that there were some brave government officials within the Party’s own who thought these are despicable crimes that the Chinese government is committing, and did what they could do to expose it.

EA: What has the CCP’s response been? To those leaks (which were in November 2019) or the multiple reports that have been coming out, or to the activists who have managed to leave? They were forced to become activists, obviously, the people who managed to go elsewhere, to leave Xinjiang, and managed to get quotes and photos and stories out of what happened to them or to their loved ones.

What has the government’s response been on the international scene? I’m fairly interested in disinformation campaigns, and obviously in the case of Syria it’s largely the Russian government doing it. As far as I understand it, the CCP has also ramped up its efforts to do this. I’ve seen some campaigns in India, I’ve seen some in the US; they seem to be relatively unsophisticated, compared to Russian tactics which are more advanced, I would say, in terms of disinformation—but that might just be an impression.

How has the CCP tried to mask what it’s doing? How has it tried to respond to international condemnations? Even though they have been relatively muted in the Muslim world—there hasn’t been much coming out of Muslim leaders on this, and there’s active complicity sometimes. How would you describe the international dimension of it, either from the CCP’s own responses or other governments who have made declarations here and there but nothing more than that?

RA: The Chinese government has deployed a multi-pronged approach to discredit survivors of its horrific crimes. It’s using propaganda and disinformation campaigns to attack individual activists or journalists, and even institutions that are reporting on this issue. Initially, it started with silence; later it was outright denial. But now I see a new trend, which is pivoting to offense, and using family members to appear on state propaganda TV shows to portray a “happy Muslim” and “happy Uyghur” face, to discredit [survivors].

It’s not even well-executed. There was one I found incredibly insulting to the world’s intelligence, portraying a young Uyghur guy in his early twenties falling in love with a Han girl in inland China. On their first day, he would FaceTime with his mom telling her how beautiful this relationship is, and so on. Nowhere, not just Xinjiang—even here; in any part of the world—can young people afford to live in such a fancy apartment. We’re all in debt, student debt. That’s what I mean by not-well-executed. It is obviously a government-paid apartment. This guy gets up in a fancy apartment in the morning to shave and get ready to date this girl.

There are examples of [the Chinese government] using social media to its own advantage, to use aggressive disinformation campaigns to portray a whole different image. But at the same time, in terms of the Muslim world, they are using an entrapment policy. The countries that condemn the Chinese government are often Western democracies who represent the other side of the world economy. But the rest of the world is economically dependent on China, especially with the “Balkan [Silk] Road” initiative which the Chinese government is using to buy their conscience.

They not only remain as bystander countries to these mass atrocities, they even end up supporting the Chinese government on paper, even endorsing it in a letter after twenty-two Western democracies condemned the Chinese government. It’s truly a multi-pronged approach that shows the sophistication of the Chinese government in understanding the modern social media platforms, and disinformation and propaganda campaigns.

YD: This is so important and so dangerous. I always ask myself how the world was indifferent during the Holocaust—it makes no sense that countries stood by as bystanders, appeasing. And again, there are differences, but it’s almost scarier today, for this generation, with social media, TikTok (which has other problematic aspects), and the Chinese government taking advantage of these platforms; they know that we get easily distracted nowadays. If there’s a video of someone dancing online, that’s more interesting to your average citizen, unfortunately, than what’s happening in the camps. It’s very scary in that sense. 

China’s ambassador to the UK was actually on the BBC this month, and it was quite the botched interview. He was shown footage of Uyghurs blindfolded, shackled, and shaven, being led onto trains—and he did not even deny the veracity or the authenticity of the video. He just fumbled his words and said it was a standard prison transfer, and then went on to say how happy people who live in Xinjiang are.

So it’s not so sophisticated when it comes to these sorts of statements, but it is when it comes to places like the UN and the Human Rights Council, which is also very scary because China has been able to use its political and economic influence. In July of last year, there was a letter from thirty-seven ambassadors, including Saudi Arabia, Russia, Pakistan, that positively evaluated the human rights developments in Xinjiang, praised China’s “counter-terrorism and deradicalization success,” and justified the camps.

This is thirty-seven countries, in July. And then in October of last year, a joint statement at the General Assembly’s Third Committee, on behalf of twenty-three countries, condemned the persecution. That’s only twenty-three countries! That’s not so many. And then a group of more than fifty countries supporting China sought to commend China’s remarkable achievements in the field of human rights. Of course that includes countries with horrendous human rights records, like Russia and Egypt.

This disinformation and influence campaign is being exercised in multilateral institutions, and it’s successful. That’s why it’s very scary, I think.

RA: I want to add this: another thing the Chinese government is quite successful with is they hand-picked certain countries’ officials who would come out in their favor in their evaluations, and then allowed them to visit these re-education camps, selectively. And even those camps, that are (in the Chinese government’s eyes) good to pass these examinations, are not glamorous at all. There was a video of detainees singing, “If you’re happy, say Yes.” What is that?

Again, they hand-picked those countries that would be in their favor. That just goes to show how much of China’s influence penetrates all over the world, through buying twenty percent of the media in Kenya, while at the same time—I’m so glad Yonah gave the example of the Chinese ambassador to the UK, in this interview in particular. Because we need to ask these questions of ourselves: with the level of sophistication in modern technology that China has achieved, there’s still video footage of men blindfolded and shackled being led on these trains—how many are we not seeing? 

Because they can cover up so much, and we still found these videos. How many horrific treatments and humiliations are these detainees experiencing every day and every second, that the world is not seeing? These are the questions we have to ask ourselves, and we have to act. Because I think the damages are done, and will remain through generations. We don’t have the luxury of time to still raise awareness, but to act.

EA: On that note, if listeners want to get involved, are there Uyghur diaspora groups they can get in touch with? Is there an upcoming campaign that might be useful for them to know? More generally, where can they find more information? Where can they go if they want to be more involved?

RA: You talked about Syria; I came across a website yesterday called the Syrian Archive; they document through different categories what has happened in Syria, and I thought it was really good. We do need to document genocide, because maybe one day we’ll hold these officials and the architects of genocide accountable.

There’s one organization that I deeply respect, called “Read the Evidence” in translation. They document victims of these camps with brief information about the charges people are held on in these camps, and brief stories. To document this, they need resources and public support, so I hope people can support them, either by donating or telling them what great work they are doing.

I often say this: yes, these Muslim governments don’t represent the will of the people. These governments are run by individual dictators. The Chinese government was able to buy the conscience of these world leaders, but they can never buy the conscience of the people. So I hope we can have grassroots organizations at a basic level: if there are students at the University of Beirut, for instance, organize an event and invite us to come to the law school. Perhaps organize student-led coalitions, Muslim students in support of Uyghurs, and those kinds of things.

Public opinion does matter. Hopefully public opinion would indirectly help change the behavior of the Chinese government. I want to add: we didn’t have the time to touch on this but the use of Uyghur forced labor is a huge issue right now, and we should discuss it; corporations are literally profiting off Uyghur genocide. We as consumers have to hold corporations accountable by writing letters to the more than eighty-three companies that are entangled in Uyghur slavery, and ask them how they are sourcing their products, where their products are manufactured, and how they feel about this. Hopefully by public shaming of corporations, we can indirectly change the appalling behavior of the Chinese government.

EA: Yonah, is the Raoul Wallenberg Center doing anything of interest on that front as well?

YD: Absolutely. You can check out our website. We represent cases like Rayhan’s, and as Rayhan said, it’s so important to share and get these stories out, because these are the stories that really move the public and move politicians to act. We represent these cases, but we’re also shining a spotlight on the wider repression and genocide within Xinjiang, and pushing for accountability mechanisms on the international stage—in Canada through the parliament and in the US through congress—to push Magnitsky sanctions, which either freeze assets or impose travel bans on the officials and architects of these camps.

We’re leading the front in Canada to push for Magnitsky sanctions, both in Canada and globally, and also leading the front against the whitewashing of crimes in the Human Rights Council.

To Rayhan’s point: because there are so many industries that are inextricably linked to this genocide, it’s important that we push our congresspeople or parliamentarian politicians to strengthen our laws that force companies to be accountable for their supply chains. I think that’s such an important thing here, because it’s a huge problem. There was just a major report that came out that implicated companies like Nike, Adidas, H&M, and Amazon.

As consumers and as citizens, it’s important not to be complicit. At the very least we can ensure that we’re not complicit. That starts with our buying habits, but we need to strengthen our laws around modern slavery and ensuring that companies are transparent and have due diligence requirements to look into abuses, especially slavery and genocide.

That’s why the term genocide is important here, too. It will push our politicians to act, whereas the terms human rights violations, abuses, repression—it doesn’t do justice to this particular situation or the amount of products coming out of Xinjiang.

EA: I really want to thank both of you for participating in this conversation with me. 

Rayhan, I can only imagine what you’re going through, and I really appreciate you taking the time to do this. Yonah, thank you for co-writing that piece and for what the Center does. Thank you for your time.

RA & YD: Thank you so much.