Thread by @WilliamYang120

The team at @NewStatesman published a special issue focusing on the crackdown of the #Uyghurs this week, focusing on this crisis from the aspect of human rights, politics, the efforts to preserve the culture, and more. newstatesman.com/uyghur-special

In this piece, #Uyghur poet @FatimahAbdulgh2 reflects on the efforts in the diaspora community to preserve the culture of the ethnic group, as #Beijing tries to ban the use of the #Uyghur language and culture. newstatesman.com/uyghur-special…

"Five years ago, when studying geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, her phone buzzed in the middle of the night. It was a voice message from her father on the Chinese messaging service WeChat: 'Daughter, I have something urgent to tell you, call me back.'"

"Seyyah rang her father as soon as she heard his message the following morning. He didn’t pick up. She never heard from him again. In September 2020 a UN document reported his death from 'severe pneumonia and tuberculosis on 3 November 2018'."

“[My father] had diabetes and I’m pretty sure he didn’t have medication at the camp and just slowly decayed,” Seyyah says.

Unable to contact her mother, brother and sister (her other sister lives in Turkey), Seyyah has been informed by indirect sources that they are trapped at home – and having their “every single phone call and move monitored”.

"When she found out that her father had died, she honoured his memory alone by donning a black dress, cooking polo (a traditional rice and lamb dish), and dancing to a Uyghur song that her mother used to sing while her father danced along."

"In her first volume of poetry, The Mystery Land (2018), and in three new poems commissioned and translated for the New Statesman, Seyyah draws on Uyghur symbolism. 'We use spring a lot because spring is something new after the dead winter.'"

"In the final stanza of “Fossil and Tear”, the image of a fossil represents “this waiting, longing to be reunited with family, friends, my culture, the homeland – it is as if I’m getting fossilised”, ...

... yet the tears 'keep things fresh; they are not just sadness, but also like spring, like the rain'."

"Cut adrift from her background, Seyyah uses poetry to preserve Uyghur culture and prevent it from being characterised by victimhood. 'I’m scared of being defined by only genocide,' she says."

"My culture is such a joyful, happy desert – it’s sandy, it’s shifting, it’s hot. My dad was always a happy person. I want my culture to be seen by the world as resilient. It’s been there for thousands of years. It will survive."

And in this piece, @katiestallard looks into the background and history of the #Uyghurs, as well as why they have become targets of #Beijing's crackdown. newstatesman.com/uyghur-special…

"The appearance of a single Uyghur athlete at the Winter Olympics should reassure no one. At best, the torch-lighting ceremony showed the government cared enough about Western criticism to attempt to perpetuate the fiction that it believes in ethnic unity."

"At worst, it was a vision of the future China has designated for the Uyghurs: smiling, compliant and silent."

In this piece, @RianThum and #Uyghur academic Musapir looks at the threats against the ethnic group's history and culture: newstatesman.com/uyghur-special…

" Across the Uyghur region historic old cities are torn down, but Uyghurs build similarly designed homes on the urban outskirts. In the late 1960s, the Uyghurs’ network of sacred pilgrimage sites was closed for two decades,...

... but when restrictions eased in the 1980s, the shrines sprang back to life."

"Today, Uyghur musicians use jobs in the state’s propagandist theatrical extravaganzas to support their own artistic endeavours."

"The Uyghurs have been ruled from Beijing for two and a half centuries, but culturally they still face westward."

"As the Chinese state prosecutes an unprecedented war on the Uyghurs, officials often describe their assimilation policies as the gift of modernity. Villages are destroyed and replaced with clusters of identical concrete buildings."

"Farmers are forced into factories. Those who dissent find themselves in concentration camps, billed as vocational training centres preparing Uyghurs for a more “civilised”, Chinese life."

"Some small part of this compulsory Chinese modernity is widely attractive to Uyghurs, but much is not. Better roads and more access to cars and electronics over the last 20 years cause few complaints."

"But the cost has been the destruction of the Uyghurs’ most important historic sites, the removal of children to boarding schools designed to block cultural transmission, ...

... the criminalisation of everyday Uyghur etiquette, and even the forced redecoration of homes with Chinese-style furniture."

"If history is any guide, the success of this assimilation campaign will be uneven, and if Uyghurs are ever allowed to choose their own jobs, beliefs and habits again, ...

... Uyghur distinctiveness will re-emerge, changed but not severed from its past. It will be a small consolation for what is destroyed."