New York conference discusses crimes against Uyghur Muslims

NEW YORK – A two-day conference was held in New York last week to call further attention to human rights violations in Xinjiang, an autonomous region in northwestern China inhabited by Uyghur Muslims. 

The Chinese government’s campaign of repression in Xinjiang – billed as a security measure – was declared a genocide by the United States in 2021, a designation reaffirmed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this month.

The conference began with a brief message from Natan Sharansky via video: The Chinese government, Sharansky said, “is keeping millions and millions of Uyghur people in concentration camps. It’s probably the most massive crime against humanity in the modern world.”

Rep. Ritchie Torres of the Bronx also addressed the conference via video, on the second day of the event. 

He recalled testimony heard in Congress of “unspeakable horrors: the deprivation of [Uyghurs’ Muslim] faith, the agony of starvation, the brutality of shackles, the abomination of sexual assault,” and told the audience that “the courage of Uyghur Muslims in speaking out serves as a beacon of resilience in the face of genocide.”

The event was held by the World Uyghur Congress and the Uyghur Human Rights Project, long at the forefront of advocacy for the Turkic minority group, in collaboration with the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, the organization founded by the late Holocaust survivor “to combat indifference, intolerance, and injustice.”

Elisha Wiesel, the late author’s son, has made opposition to China’s Xinjiang policies a focus of his human rights advocacy since he read a harrowing account of the region’s so-called “re-education camps” in 2021. 

The crowd at the conference reflected the involvement of Jews in the cause, with a number of yarmulkes visible on people’s heads, while other members of the audience wore dopas, the traditional Uyghur skullcap.

Reflecting on the conference’s origins, an early panel on Wednesday morning was titled “‘Never Again’: The Uyghur Genocide and Learning from the Holocaust.” On stage were Ellen Germain, the US State Department’s special envoy for Holocaust issues, and Danica Damplo, policy manager at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

They spoke alongside Nury Turkel, a Uyghur-American lawyer who chairs the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom and who has represented more than 150 Uyghur refugees in asylum cases. Of all the trips Turkel has made to New York over the years to address this issue, this conference was the most meaningful, he said.

The panel discussed the slamming-shut of America’s doors to Jewish refugees in the years of the crematoria; when the panel went to questions, one member of the audience addressed the State Department’s Germain, asking whether enough was being done for Uyghur refugees who are currently detained in Thailand, who face atrocities if deported back to Xinjiang.

The audience member also asked Damplo about the possibility of an exhibit on the Uyghurs’ plight at the Holocaust Museum in Washington. The museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide has determined that “there is a reasonable basis to believe the Chinese government is committing crimes against humanity against the Uyghurs.”

Another panel of Uyghurs and Jews discussed the importance of preserving a culture in exile, and what it means to live freely in America while one’s fellows are suffering abroad.

The catastrophe in Xinjiang is not merely a threat to be prevented; it is a currently unfolding destruction, and the question for Uyghurs abroad is not only how to stop it, but how to live with the loss of what it has already destroyed, and to prepare for revival in the future.

“Children understand,” said Irade Kashgary, who founded a Sunday school for Uyghur children in Virginia to teach the language and culture to the next generation. “They see their parents crying because they can’t communicate with their family members back home. They understand that while everybody else goes to see their grandparents and cousins and uncles and aunts, that they’re unable to do that. And that impacts how they view their Uyghur identity, vastly.”

The Uyghur diaspora must be ready to pass the torch, Kashgary said.

“This fight will be going on for a while, and we will eventually have to have kids who are educated in the language and the culture enough to go back to East Turkestan”— an Uyghur term for what the Chinese call Xinjiang— “and be able to teach those kids that are currently being prevented from learning anything.”

Other panels addressed more urgent questions of the here and now. One discussion about forced labor and supply chain ethics was conducted off-the-record, so that potential failings of both governments and corporations could be discussed freely by those in the room.

That discussion came on the heels of a recent report by Human Rights Watch in February, which found that virtually the entire auto industry is implicated in Uyghur forced labor, including companies like Tesla, which boasts a showroom in Xinjiang itself, and Volkswagen, a company with its origins in the Third Reich which maintains a factory in the Chinese province.

A panel on the conference’s second day titled “Revealing the Unseen: China’s Surveillance Tech and the Long Arm of Repression Across Borders,” focused on the mammoth surveillance apparatus in Xinjiang, and on the spread of products designed for that effort to other countries, including in the West.

The United States must build more surveillance tech, said one panelist, a researcher at a surveillance industry research group. He acknowledged that this proposal may strike listeners as counterproductive, but insisted: Countries will use surveillance systems, and right now, they have no choice but to use China’s. 

If liberal democracies don’t want surveillance technology to be used for totalitarianism, they must enter the game and deprive totalitarians of their monopoly.

In one of the final panels of the conference, a financial correspondent, a professor of constitutional law, and a commissioner of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission discussed “TikTok, Social Media, and the [Chinese Communist Party]’s Agenda to Control Information” with Omar Qudrat of the Muslim Coalition of America and Esma Memtimim of the Uyghur Youth Initiative.

That discussion came as debate raged about the so-called “TikTok ban,” a law signed by US President Joe Biden this week demanding the divestment of ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese owner, within the next nine months, out of concerns that the Chinese government is using TikTok to manipulate Americans.

Indeed, data revealed by The New York Times this week showed that for every 100 Instagram posts about Uyghurs, there were only nine on TikTok, suggesting that the algorithm was intentionally suppressing the information, as it appeared to also be suppressing content about Tibet and Hong Kong, as well as pro-Israel and pro-Ukraine content.

Closing the conference with an interfaith panel – “Campaigning to Disrupt Complicity and Support Survivors,”– Ruth Messinger, global ambassador of the American Jewish World Service, lamented that even in a world consumed by social justice issues, “this vast population, suffering unbelievable oppression and fear, is not seen and heard.”

Rabbi Joseph Potasnik of the New York Board of Rabbis, gesturing to a stage of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim clergy, insisted that “in all our faiths, there is no such thing as an innocent bystander.

“The tragedy of the Holocaust,” he said, quoting Rabbi Joachim Prinz, “is that people were silent.”

The event concluded with a candlelight vigil.