- [Ursula] I'm very happy to be here
and I really thank
the Pearson Global Forum
and especially Sheila
for coming up with this topic,
which isn't a very common topic.
It's seldom heard
and if you go back two or three years ago
it was never heard of.
Although it was already a
very difficult situation
going on this part of China
which is the western part.
The name in Chinese is Xinjiang
and the Uyghurs and the
other Turkic speaking people
who live there,
they call it the eastern Turkistan.
So,
this is a place where
the majority is still
Turkic speaking and especially Uyghur.
We have a Uyghur here today, it's Dilnur.
And the situation was known
of people who had worked
and was advocating
for human rights in China for a long time.
I was a foreign correspondent there.
Rian Thum was already has lived there
for a quite a number of years
and he is scholar specialist
of the Uyghur culture and history.
And Nicole and Sophie
have been advocating for
human rights in China
and specifically in Xinjiang
region for many years.
So I'll do a brief presentation
of our panelists today.
So I'll begin with Dilnur,
Dilnur is French like me
and she is
living in Paris.
She's a student of sociology.
She has done her PhD on sociology
and she is a, if I find your note,
she is a specialist of
identity and nationalism
in the Uyghur diaspora
and she also studies gender studies.
Gender studies among Uyghurs
which is very (laughs) interesting topic
and she has founded recently
European Uyghur Institute.
This is the first of the kind
and she directs a bilingual magazine
"Regard sur les Ouighour-e-s"
Dilnur will be speaking a bit later.
First, Rian will speak.
I present Rian also quickly.
Rian is,
an academic,
he is a senior research fellow
at the University of Nottingham
and he's research and teaching
concerned with the inter-penetration
of China and the Muslim world.
So it's not a very known fact
that there are many, many,
many Muslim people in China.
Not only the Turkic speaking,
also Chinese speaking Muslims
and they are also in trouble now,
they are beginning to have trouble.
And he has conducted
field research in Xinjiang
and other areas of Muslim population
and his book, "The Sacred
Routes of Uyghur History"
Very interesting,
because he has studied the
shrines to Muslim saints
because there is this specific worshiping
of Muslim saints in Xinjiang,
in eastern Turkistan.
His book was awarded
the Fairbank Prize for East Asian history.
And so we have also Sophie,
Sophie Richardson,
China Director at Human Rights Watch.
She has studied and lived in China
as all of us here
and she is,
author of numerous articles
on domestic Chinese political reform,
democratization, human rights
and she's the author of a book
about the Chinese foreign policies,
"The Five Principles
of Peaceful Coexistence
"China, Cambodia"
And Nicole Morgret (laughs),
she's a project manager at the
Uyghur Human Rights Project
and it is a human research project.
Very important
because it's specific about
what is going on in this region.
It's very difficult region
to study, to report and to understand
whatever is going on there.
Their mission is to promote
human rights and democracy
for the Uyghur people and raise awareness
about what's going on there
and Nicole also has studied
and lived in China extensively.
So what my introductory,
words would be about what is
going on today in Xinjiang
about the Uyghurs and the other
Turkic speaking populations.
We are hearing about concentration camp.
The Chinese speak about reeducation camps.
It's not the first time
that we hear reeducation.
It's during the Chinese Communist Party,
Chinese People's Republic,
they have had a quite,
many situations where
they have sent people
to so-called reeducation camps.
But now what is specific to this situation
is that it is targeted to one population,
in one area.
And the target is not for class struggle,
it's not for so-called political struggle.
It becomes very obvious
that it is targeted
to one ethnicity or a group of ethnicities
who speak the same kind of languages.
And that,
the aim is simply to erase
or I dunno what's the real,
the precise term and you,
I will ask you to answer to this question.
So,
I'm very happy that
the title of this panel
was a New Holocaust?
And people would maybe,
criticize the term holocaust
but this corresponds to the definition
of the United Nations Genocide Convention
and we are going to tell you
about what's going on there
and you will see that it fits very well,
the definition of genocide.
So I would ask first, Rian
Thum to describe a little bit,
what is going on in eastern Turkistan
and then to tell us how we
came up to know what's going on
since it's so difficult to go there
and to make meaningful studies.
So please give us short summary
of what is going on there.
- Great, thank you Ursula
and thank you all for
coming to hear about this.
If you've heard only one
thing about China's policy
for Turkic speaking ethnic groups
you probably heard about
these internment camps,
which are being called
by the Washington Posts
and other sober observers,
concentration camps.
The best academic estimate we have
for the number of people in
these camps is 1.5 million.
The U.S. Government has its own estimates
which range up to
three million people.
This is an internment organization
that is outside of the prison system.
So this is in addition to the
disproportionate imprisonment
of these people that are
members of these ethnic groups.
These are people who are taken
away with no criminal charge
which the Chinese State has now admitted,
meaning that there is no trial,
you can have no lawyer,
there is no appeal.
Essentially your sentence
is given at the whim
of local security forces.
Now this number, 1.5 million,
is extraordinary on its own
but it's particularly
surprising in its local context.
This number probably
includes something over 10%
of the entire population
of the Uyghur ethnic group
and probably represents
double that or more
if you look at just the part
of the Uyghur population
that is of parenting or child-bearing age.
So this is a major force,
demographic force in the region.
And inside of these camps we know
from both the testimony
of people who work in them
and the people who have
been imprisoned in them,
people undergo forced indoctrination
aimed at both cultural practices
and ideological material.
And you see a lot of what
you would expect from
any sort of quickly,
improvised, extra-legal,
imprisonment system on this scale, namely,
abuses like torture,
and we're now starting to discover,
quite widespread and
sometimes systematic rape
and other sexual assault.
But this internment camp
system is really just part
of a larger group of policies,
which are aimed at culturally
transforming the Uyghurs.
There's a parallel system of orphanages
and residential schools that has emerged,
partly to take care of the children
that are left behind by the large number
of peoples taken into the camps.
In one county of the Kashgar
region alone in 2017,
according to the Chinese Government,
19 new orphanages were built.
And in these institutions,
the children are raised
essentially as Han Chinese,
in the Chinese language
and without exposure to the Uyghur culture
into which they were born.
Outside of these two types of,
sort of explicit restriction,
the rest of the Uyghur home region
looks very much like an open air prison.
To go, for example, to the supermarket
most people will have to cross
through several checkpoints
where they have to present their ID
and present their face to a
facial recognition system.
There is a system of electronic video
and AI enabled surveillance
that is far beyond anything
else in the rest of the world.
So in a sense it's a mistake
to concentrate simply on
the internment system,
which really, aside from the
immense amount of suffering
it causes to those who are in it,
also serves as a kind
of disciplinary backdrop
for the cultural transformation policies
that the government is employing.
And these include things
like forcing people to
participate in Chinese holidays,
encouraging their advertisement campaigns
to encourage Han Chinese
people to go marry Uyghur women
who can hardly say no,
when any resistance to
instructions from the authorities
are likely to send you
to the internment camp.
Now as you can imagine,
as this has slowly, in my view,
quite inappropriately slowly
come to the awareness of
the international community,
there's been some pushback.
And as you might also imagine,
the Chinese Government is quite
secretive about the details
of these policies.
Nonetheless, the Chinese Government
has really made a enormous change
in how it talks about these institutions.
They were originally called
transformation through,
no, concentrated transformation
education centers
and they now call them
vocational training centers.
This is a part of a larger
change in how the Chinese Government
is dealing with this for
the international community.
A year and a half ago, they
denied that these existed.
A year ago, they admitted they existed
and said that participation is voluntary
and in March, they admitted
that it is not voluntary
and that the people who are put in them
have not committed any crime.
Now why this change?
I think, for me the
most important component
of that answer is simply that
the evidence is overwhelming
and irrefutable.
That hasn't always been the case.
The disappearances started
in really large numbers
in the spring of 2017
and it was difficult even for people,
who were caught up in this
to understand what was going on.
It's one thing to observe that the
incidence of mysterious
disappearance is increasing.
It's another to have some way to know
that your brother, for
example, has disappeared
because there is a new systematic,
program with a whole giant infrastructure
that is aimed at your ethnic group.
The evidence that really
led to a breakthrough
in understanding the scale and
the systematic nature of this
are advertisements for construction bids
by the Chinese State.
It's a anti-corruption method
that requires local governments
to have open advertisements
for construction companies to compete
for who will get the contracts
to build the structure.
And a German scholar, Adrian Zenz,
pioneered the use of
these public announcements
and collected for his initial study,
he's now got many more,
55 of these advertisements for contracts.
And you can see from
them the kinds of things
these institutions require like,
clubs and cattle prods and barbed wire
and prison fencing and things like this
and you can also see where they are.
So once you have this kind of data,
straight from the Chinese
authorities' mouths,
you can then turn to Google Earth
and start to find where these are.
And researchers have
created quite a catalog
of images from space of these places
and you can see for example,
that they have guard towers
and in many cases they're
within the same walled structure
as buildings from the
regular prison system.
And then from that you can
add more details like the
quite numerous testimonies of victims
who have managed to get
out by one way or another.
Now I'll close by noting that the image
that I've given you so far is a static one
but the phenomenon that we're
dealing with is actually
one that's constantly changing
and I want to alert you to a change
that's happening right now,
which I find particularly concerning.
And that is the transfer of people
from the internment camps to other kinds
of restriction and control.
A large number of people have been moved
it seems in the last six months.
The lucky ones to house arrest
or to town or city arrest
but probably a larger number
are being moved into
forced labor arrangements.
And,
what government documents suggest
are several hundred thousands moved
into formal prison sentences.
And the reason I think this
is particularly disturbing
is that it is a sorting of the population,
from people who are considered suspicious
who need to be quote, transformed,
to now a group of people
who the state is saying
have been successfully transformed
and can go to house arrest for example,
and then on the other end
a group of people for whom
transformation failed.
And so I'm quite concerned that the state
now has a large population
of hundreds of thousands
of people who are essentially
designated as irredeemable
and who may not benefit
from the limited bits
of restraint we've seen
for the bigger population of internees.
Thank you.
- Thank you, Rian.
So this very disturbing situation
was known to us,
beginning 2017
and if you know any Uyghur person,
any Uyghur family, if you ask her or him
if they know about, if they
have seen the situation
with their friends and family.
Every one of them has had
people in their family
who are in those camps.
And those camps are no pleasure camps.
I interviewed a person who
came out from this camp
basically because she
had a Kazakh passport
so she wasn't a local Uyghur.
She's a Uyghur from Kazakhstan
and she could come out because there was
the Kazakh Government asked
Chinese authorities to free her.
And what she described me
was absolutely terrifying situations
with torture and with abuse every day
with hunger, with lack of water,
with living conditions
which are hell-like.
So many people are dying in those camps.
It's not extermination camps, Nazi-like
but many people are dying anyway
and the people who will survive,
will have deep scars,
deep, deep scars which will last decades.
So now I turn to Dilnur Reyhan.
She is a Uyghur who lives in France
and she has family, she has friends
and she knows very well
the diaspora of the Uyghurs
and she will talk to us about
the impact of those policies
on the diaspora.
- Yeah, thank you Ursula.
I would like to thank
the Pearson Institute
to organizing this panel also
and inviting us, give the
opportunity to talk about
the situation of Uyghurs.
Yeah, I study Uyghur diaspora since years,
and my main topic
of my PhD thesis is about
the nationalism in the
Uyghur diaspora also.
In the Uyghur diaspora we estimate about
one million Uyghurs
in whole diaspora--
- How many?
- One million Uyghurs
- One million.
- And mostly located in Turkic
central Asian countries.
And we have about 10,000
Uyghurs in European countries.
Since the end of 2016,
China has changed or
brutally worsened
its policy against Uyghurs
in the Uyghur region.
There are major changes in the attitude
of members of the diaspora,
towards China, also towards
the diasporic movement
for the freedom of Uyghurs.
And I will mention
that several important changes or impacts
of the,
concentration camp system on
the Uyghurs in the diaspora,
especially the first one is,
more diaspora members became active
in the political struggle.
This was not the case three years ago,
three years ago when I
finished my PhD thesis in 2017
and the conclusion of my thesis was,
the vast majority of the
Uyghurs in the diaspora,
they are passive followers
or just
participants of the cultural
protecting activities
and now since,
three years, since the camp systems
arrived at Uyghurs,
many Uyghurs became active
participants or actors in
the political struggle,
joined the political movements also
and also this is since the '90s
because also since the '90s
Uyghurs organization in various countries,
especially in the democratic countries,
tried to publicize Uyghur cause
by working to raise 'wareness
on the Sino-Uyghur conflict.
And to influence the public opinions
in these countries
generally within the aim
of influencing foreign
policy of the host countries.
But the rest, as I mentioned,
the vast majority of
members of the diaspora
preferred to remain silence
in the hope of being able to travel
between the home country
and the host country.
But the designation of the Chen Quanguo,
the head of the region and the
began of the brutal genocidal policies
in Uyghur region
with changed the situation
especially by cutting off
the contact of almost all
Uyghurs in the diaspora
from their families,
including the ability to visit
their family without warning.
And Chinese genocidal policy of placing
all Turkic speaking
people, especially Uyghurs,
as potential danger
and also the policy of
eliminating their identity
has forced many people,
many silence,
and passive follower diaspora members
to come out from the silence
and join the political struggle.
And the second point is,
yes of course, many people in the diaspora
they joined the political struggle
but comparing the million
of Uyghurs in the diaspora,
the active members of
the political struggle
is still very small.
Many members, even the
(speaking in foreign language),
even the survivors
of the camps are keeping silent
because of the intimidation, threats,
and the family hostage policy of China.
And it's the case even
when the Uyghurs are,
the host country's citizen.
Like me, I am French
and in France we have
a small number of Uyghur-French people
but they are not accept
like all other Uyghurs
of the diaspora.
They are also intimidating, threaten,
by the Chinese Government
who taking hostage their family members.
And it concerns also
the European spouses of Uyghurs,
asking their professional
and personal information,
even they are French or
other European citizen
and not originally Uyghur.
And,
thirdly that the explanation
of the keeping the silence
of the Uyghurs,
even they wish to join
the political struggle
but they can't act openly
to show their,
willingness to the, for example Uyghurs
or the justice for the Uyghurs.
And third point is,
more Uyghur students or
Uyghur workers in the diaspora
became refugees or got
host country citizenship
since three years
because it's particularly
the case in France,
Uyghurs in France, especially in France,
the Uyghur diaspora is not refugee.
Mostly they came for the studying.
It's not the case in the
other European countries
and after they've studying,
most Uyghurs they did not
ask the French citizenship
because as you know,
then Uyghurs get French citizenship,
they can't get easily the Chinese visa
to go back to their original country.
Especially in their new passport,
it mentioned they're originally from China
or from Xinjiang.
And that's why many Uyghurs
in France, for example,
they did not get, they did
not ask French citizenship
in the case, if there
is a problem, accident
or death in the family in Uyghur region.
They can't go back immediately
and about since three years,
about 80 to 90% of Uyghurs in the diaspora
they have lost all
contact with their family
and it's impossible to think to go back
and also it's hard
imagine one day to go back
in the current situation.
And that's why,
Uyghurs in the diaspora
they don't have choice.
Some Uyghurs in many countries
they asked refugee status
and in France in particularly,
Uyghurs after they have
studying they became workers
or they have open society in France
and so they have the right to,
or the criteria
to demand French citizenship.
Now they're becoming French also.
This is one of the changes since.
And fourth point is,
Uyghur diaspora is living
collective depression
and according to a survey
realized by Uyghur doctor
in the Euros in December
2017 and December 2018,
for two years,
3/4 of the diasporic members declared
having at least one family
member has disappeared
or detained in concentration camps
or in prisons.
And as I said between 80 to
90% of Uyghurs have lost,
at least regular contact with the family
since three years for most of them
and some of them since years
and for some margins
since several months even.
And also according to the same survey,
the feeling of suicide
in the diaspora is increasing
by four times between
2017 and 2018.
And also this is a critical situation
because Uyghurs are mostly Muslims
and even when they are not Muslims,
the suicide is very last
thing normally Uyghurs think.
And this current situation
since three years
conducted to a new
collective depression phenomenon
and the suicide is something
that totally possible
among the diasporic members.
And also in the diaspora there is no
any structure, psychological
structure to support them.
- Dilnur.
- And also, there also feeling of,
Yeah. (Ursula laughs) The
feeling of abandon among Uyghurs
and also disgusted
for the Muslim world as
we've seen this summer
about 50 countries,
signed a supporting
letter of Chinese policy
against Uyghurs,
supporting the concentration
camps for Muslims
and it's very, very strange for Uyghurs.
Among the 50 countries
in the list of shame,
there are particularly Palestine
and of course, other Muslim countries,
there are about 20, 25, Muslim countries
in this list of shame.
Qatar, very fortunately,
they withdrawn their support after.
And thanks, Qatar.
And fifth point,
and it's one point
particularly concerned me as a scholar.
Research on Uyghur
studies is at risk or so,
in abroad, outside of China.
Chinese intimidation and threats
does not target only Uyghurs
in the diaspora in abroad,
and but also even foreign researchers
and foreign researchers
who working on Uyghurs.
And many foreign researchers
who working on Uyghurs
they even don't dare to publish
their working paper
and also
since last year, many foreign researchers
they refused to sign
scholar's petitions
to express solidarity
with the academics Uyghur
and intellectuals who are in the prisons
and the concentration camps.
And we know until now about
450 Uyghur intellectuals
in concentration camps
and about several hundred
scholars they signed collectively
different petitions to condemn China
and ask the freedom
of these Uyghur intellectuals
and also closing the camps
but many I know, especially in France,
I know many scholars on Chinese studies,
they refused because
they fearing of the visa.
Yeah and also very tragically,
ULB, (speaking in foreign language)
where I do my research,
far more the only university
in the world to openly
support Uyghur academics
in the concentration camps
and condemning China for this.
And the University of Libre de Bruxelles
calls since 2017
all Western Countries to join in
but until now
this ULB is the only university problem.
And the last point, I
will finish with that.
Finally,
the psychological effects of
testimonies and the videos
of Uyghur children in the,
state orphanages separated
from their families,
their parents are in
the concentration camps
and their children are
separate from the families,
placed in the orphanages, as Rian said,
just in Kashgar in 2017,
we are in the end of 2019.
Just in 2017 there are 19 orphanages
founded by the State in
Kashgar, only one city
and imagine in the rest of the region.
And there are many
testimonies from the women
about the rape of women,
violence against women
in the camps and a newly reporting again
the Kazakh woman, Kazakh escapee
from the camp,
she testifies also
the very often rape cases
of young Uyghur and the Kazakh women
in the camps by the guards.
This kind of testimonies
and the children's videos,
where the children crying of this.
This also it's very violent
psychological effects
on the diasporic members.
And so Uyghur diaspora
also needs to support
and assistance.
Thank you.
- Thank you, Dilnur.
(audience applauding)
I feel that what is
important to remember is that
the children are being
treated very badly.
The women are being treated very badly.
The old persons, the academics
and even the foreign
academics in our countries
are being harassed not to
support the Uyghur cause.
This is what China is good at,
intimidating the world,
and they are doing it in
a very, very, large scale.
So now I will ask Nicole
to talk about the response
of the world of how we
are responding to this.
And before that maybe, to talk about
the current developments
in what's happening
inside the region or in China.
- [Nicole] I'd like to begin by saying,
that I think it's appropriate
that we're here in Berlin,
celebrating and commemorating
the fall of the Berlin Wall,
which was designed to
prevent Eastern Germans
from escaping into Western Germany.
China hasn't built a wall
entirely around the Uyghur region
but it is as, Rian said
an open air prison.
And I think it gets to the
heart of the contradiction
of China's treatment of the Uyghurs.
They're doing everything they can to
keep Uyghurs inside, controlled,
inside the region they can't move
because of all the checkpoints.
They can't leave their
village without permission.
Many of them are under house arrest.
The question is, why is
China doing this now?
This is part of a broad
crackdown on any form of dissent
or diversity inside China
but many people speculate that it's
intended to solve the Uyghur
problem once and for all
as they roll out the
Belt and Road Initiative.
So even as they celebrate
making connections with
Central Asian countries
and say that they're gonna
go all the way to Europe,
they're preventing Uyghurs from
traveling across the border
as they were traditionally free to do.
People are asking
what's going to happen
to hundreds of thousands
of traumatized people from the camps.
There's no limit on how long
you can be kept in the camp
but it doesn't seem like
they can do this indefinitely
and as, again as Rian alluded to,
it seems that there's a massive system
of forced labor being set up.
This includes not only people
who've been sent to the camps
but also people who are
being sent and pressured,
coerced to go to factories with the threat
of being sent to the camps
hanging over their head.
There's no way for them to freely consent
to go to work in these factories.
It's been a long standing
ambition of the Chinese Government
to uproot Uyghurs from southern Xinjiang
and transport them, scatter them around,
break up families so that
adults are working in factories
six or more days a week
and their children are
in boarding schools,
again this kind of draws parallels,
calls to mind parallels with
what happened to Native Americans
or Aboriginal Australians.
And also there's a massive
expansion of the prison system
which has had a decades
long standing connection
to forced labor with
factories inside prisons
both inside the regular prison system
and the Xinjiang
production and construction
core prison system
which amounts to a parallel government of,
which controls much of
the agricultural lands
and has been what is essentially a gulag,
that where prisoners would be transported
from eastern China to
work in cotton fields
and so forth in the region.
So in terms of what this
means for policy responses.
First of all, companies who
work in the textile industry
there's massive planned
expansion of the textile industry
going on right now, should
understand that this labor,
it's completely tainted by forced labor
and no due diligence can
be conducted in the region
given the level of control,
given the level of intimidation.
And so,
we applaud the U.S.
Customs and Border Patrol
protection for issuing
a Withhold Release Order
on products made by a
company called Heitan Taida.
This company was in the media recently
for being connected to Badger Sports wear.
They openly say they employ detainees.
Detainees testify that they're
paid little to nothing.
They're not free to go.
This is essentially another
form of detention and so,
any company that is
buying from this company
should understand that this is made with
and tainted by forced labor.
And in order to avoid any sort of fiasco
and to maintain their
own ethical standards
they should by no means source
from the region of Xinjiang.
Some pajamas from this company
ended up on the shelves of Costco recently
after the original scandal broke
which goes to show you how unseriously
companies are taking this.
So more really needs to be done.
And,
in terms of other policy responses,
the U.S. Government has
taken some action this month
on October 7th, they put 28
entities on the Entities List,
this includes the Xinjiang
Ministry of Public Security
and the lower level
bureaus of public security
in the region,
as well as eight very significant
Chinese tech companies
including Hikvision and Dahua,
which are the first and second largest
security surveillance camera
companies in the world.
Facial recognition
companies such as SenseTime,
Megvii,
Yitu
iFlytek, which is a
voice recognition company
and then digital forensics
and data analytics companies,
Meiya Pico and Yixin.
The Entities List means that
American companies cannot
sell their products
to these entities without a license,
which could actually be
quite significant since
American chip companies like
Nvidia, Qualcomm, et cetera,
these companies can not really
operate without their chips
and China does not really have
the technological capability
to make their own yet.
So it remains to be seen
whether U.S companies
will get licenses or not.
So but that is probably
the most significant step
that any government worldwide has taken
to respond to this human rights crisis.
And further more as Jewher
Ilham said in the video
on October 8th, of visa
restrictions are placed on officials
from the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
There is a bill in the U.S. Congress
to respond to the crisis.
It passed the Senate, it
has yet to pass the House.
It may be because there
are two bills in the House
that they might reconcile.
This includes calling for the president
to condemn what's going on,
for Magnitsky sanctions to be placed on
officials from the region.
Magnitsky sanctions can
also be placed on companies,
so perhaps that's another
option that can be looked at.
But we really believe that,
the governments and the private sector
both can be doing more
to respond to what's going on.
I would like to call
attention to one case,
that of Tashpolat Tiyip,
he's the president of Xinjiang University.
He disappeared on his way here to Berlin.
He was going to open up
a joint research center
with Leibniz University
for the study of underground
coal fires, he's a geographer
and has done a lot of
research on the environment.
Despite the fact that he disappeared
on his way to the conference,
this joint center has been set up so,
Leibniz University has a partnership
with Xinjiang University.
We believe that universities worldwide
should look at a South
African-style academic boycott
of Chinese institutions
because scholars like Tashpolat
Tiyip have disappeared.
He's been sentenced to
death in a secret trial.
The only reason we know this
is because a Communist
Party propaganda video
calling him a two-faced person leaked.
This is all very much in the style of
Stalinist or Maoist
repression of intellectuals.
Certainly all partnerships
with institutions in the region
should be halted and not undertaken.
Obviously these responses
are not costless or painless
for institutions here in the West.
As Dilnur said, academic
institutions are very cautious
in condemning what the
Chinese Government is doing
both for their access to the region,
for the money they make
off of Chinese students.
Obviously chip manufacturers,
a large amount of their profits
come from selling to Chinese companies.
And textile companies make a lot of money
from getting low cost
cloth and garments from China.
So despite the fact
that it's not costless,
I think something more needs to be done.
- [Ursula] Thank you, Nicole.
So it's very difficult to
react to what's going on
because you have on the
one hand a huge state
with huge means,
and on the other hand some well,
intentioned people
who want to fight
for the rights of totally innocent people
and we don't have the same kind of might.
So please Sophie, (Sophie laughs)
tell us about how to
make China accountable
of what's going on.
- [Sophie] (laughs) It's
a nice manageable topic.
I'd like to start by thanking
the Pearson Institute
for including China in a
discussion about conflict.
The Chinese Government
would of course say that
its policies and practices in Xinjiang
are designed to prevent conflict
but I'm guessing this is
not exactly the framing
or the panel it would have had in mind
and no amount of saying
you have a conflict
justifies gross human rights violations.
We spent 25 years writing
about issues like,
torture, restrictions on
the freedom of religion
but I would say between
about 2014 and 2017
as we were watching the Chinese Government
do everything from baselessly
prosecute Jewhar's father
to hunting down Uyghurs
who were fleeing China,
which is a very unusual
thing for a state to do.
We were begging governments,
I have a vivid memory of sitting
at the National Security Council
and pleading for a page,
just a page about Xinjiang,
to be added to the briefing book
for the Atrocities Prevention Board.
Just a page, didn't even
do anything about it.
Just needed them to acknowledge
that the situation in
Xinjiang was getting worse
and that it required a
distinct kind of attention.
That plea went largely ignored as did
I think a lot of the work
that many of us were doing.
And fast forward a couple of years
and we find ourselves doing things like
documenting torture and ill-treatment
in political education camps
and publishing reports about doing things
like reverse engineering apps
that the Xinjiang Police use
to criminalize all sorts of behavior
and arbitrarily detain people.
So yes, there is a conflict in Xinjiang
and yes it does merit being
addressed in a forum like this.
Implicitly and explicitly,
a lot of our discussions
in the last day or so
have been about things like accountability
and how you try to end crisis or conflict.
I will add to this litany
of very distressing pieces
of information the fact,
that China is getting away with this.
Now I think we can probably
all reasonably agree
that if any other government in the world
was arbitrarily detaining
at least a million people
purely on the basis of their ethnicity,
their religion, their identity.
Imagine if the U.S. was doing this,
imagine if Germany was doing this, right?
That we would see a very
different response internationally
but I think a combination of China's power
and it's money and a
certain amount of ignorance
and Islamophobia are contributing
to virtually a collective
international shrug
as this catastrophe goes on.
So let's talk about why this is happening.
First of all, there're
really no domestic options
for any sort of accountability,
largely because obviously huge numbers
of people affected are detained
and even those who aren't,
are not going to have
their interests served
by profoundly politicized
legal system inside China.
There are virtually no options
for international accountability,
China's not a party to the Rome Statute
and so a referral to the
International Criminal Court
is not realistic, moreover
it's hard to imagine
what governments would be willing
to even push something like that forward.
International pressure generally
both from individual
governments like the U.S.
or institutions like the European Union
has diminished considerably
as China has become more powerful.
We could have a debate about
whether that's less of an effort
on those governments or institutions part
or the extraordinary rise of China's power
or whether it's some of both.
But the reality is
that even though some
governments have been
reasonably attentive and
tried to find ways to respond
to the crisis in Xinjiang,
none of it rises to the
level of what we need to see
in response to a crisis of this magnitude.
If you look for example,
maybe I'll spend a minute
talking about what's happening
within the United Nations
Human Rights ecosystem,
which China has done a
great job of co-opting
over the last decade
and certainly the U.S.'s withdrawal
from the Human Rights Council
makes that much easier
for China to expropriate that space.
But the most recent developments,
as Dilnur referenced earlier
was an effort by about 25 governments
to present a letter to the president
of the Human Rights Council
earlier this year in June,
expressing concern about
the situation in Xinjiang
and reiterating a call by
the U.N.'s High Commissioner
for Human Rights to have
access to the region
to assess the situation.
Those governments took a deep breath,
managed to do that and about
three or four days later
a group of about, or
over the next week or so,
a group of about 50 governments
signed on to a letter
that China had drafted,
saying that everything in
Xinjiang was just fine.
That it was assiduously
countering terrorism
and that everyone should
endorse that approach.
That letter was signed,
both by some governments
that claim to care about human rights,
but also by such human rights luminaries
as North Korea and Venezuela.
And I think the optics of that
show just how weak China's explanation is
but it also makes very clear
that any kind of accountability mechanism
you might want to pursue through the U.N.
that would require a vote,
would face a real uphill battle.
That China has the numbers to defeat
those kinds of initiatives.
Now please do bear in mind
when you think about this
that at virtually the
same time we're watching
efforts towards accountability
for appalling human rights
violations against the Rohingya,
a Muslim community from Myanmar
that was driven over the
border into Bangladesh,
we're now I think five reports
by that fact finding mission in,
there'll most likely be prosecutions
as a result of that work.
And that was largely driven
by a partnership between
the European Union
and the Organization
of Islamic Cooperation.
So this is possible, right.
It is possible.
The difference is, of course,
that Myanmar doesn't have money
and it doesn't have power and China does.
And where we are now really is with
a relatively weak call that hopefully most
or a number of states can get behind
to keep pushing at least
for access to the region
by the High Commissioner with
a view towards some sort of
at least discussion about accountability
but up until that happens,
I think there's a much
larger conversation to be had
around what the developments in Xinjiang
about what it means that
China gets away with this,
because if it can get away with this
what else does it get away with?
Thank you.
- [Ursula] Thank you Sophie.
(audience applauding)
Thank you, so I would suggest
you to raise questions
if there are some persons
who wants to raise question.
So we will take, three or
four question at one time,
and then we will answer altogether.
- [Audience Member] Okay,
so thank you for this panel.
So I'm from Taiwan,
so I'm obviously biased about this issue.
So because I'm from
Taiwan, I grew up in China.
I've always been skeptical
of international support
when dealing with issues with China.
Of course, like the issue in Taiwan
can't compare with what's
happening in Xinjiang
but I kinda feel like
when I listen to activists
care about some sorta issue,
they always have this personal connection
to if either because it's their friends
or their families are
related to this issue
or themselves are connected to this issue.
So I'm very curious about the panelists
about what's your motivation
to care about this issue
and act about it?
'Cause I don't really
see like a very clear,
strong connection of you to this issue.
- [Ursula] Okay
- [Audience Member] Thank you.
- [Ursula] Thank you.
(laughs) Interesting.
- [Mo] Hello, hi.
I'm Mo, I'm from Myanmar.
And first of all, thank you for the panel
and like just Sophie said,
we really don't have money.
(laughs) (Rian laughs) So my question is,
so far the issue in Xinjiang
has mostly been international
so how has the local Chinese people,
in those very industrialized
areas like Shanghai,
Beijing, Shenzhen has reacted?
- [Ursula] You mean the ordinary people?
- [Mo] Ya, just like the
- [Ursula] Okay.
- [Mo] The people
in the eastern coast.
- [Ursula] Okay.
- [Nebrask] Hello, my name is Nebrask,
I'm a student and I'm curious
as you talk about this transition
that the Chinese
Government is putting these
weaker people into labor camps
and in the prison system.
Do you think that is increasing
the international outcry
or is it making it easier
for other countries
to be complicit in what's going on?
- [Ursula] Okay.
- [Eleanor] Hello, I'm Eleanor
Bulgadaria from Armenia.
My question is the following.
So you said you've got
a diaspora in Europe
and I want to know if you
got really significant
or powerful people having
colleagues in position.
I think that a way of
solving the issue would be
that you coming together
and trying to make a whole fist, power,
to do your best, kind of
involve the governments
and to people around and combat this evil,
this devil that happens,
whatever happens in China.
Do you understand what
I mean, right? (laughs)
- [Ursula] Is that a question?
- [Eleanor] My question is it,
if you really got people
who have some positions
in the governments, our
official civil servants,
if you have ever tried to
become like powerful community
in any country of the world?
Or in one country, if you try
to be a powerful community
or to solve the problem
with each other's help.
- [Ursula] Thank you.
- [Eleanor] That's, thank you.
- [Asena] Hello, my name is Asena Baykal
and I'm working in a
Berlin based think tank
and where we're working
also on a project on how
institutions in democratic countries
can work together with institutions
and not of their own countries,
for instance universities
and university cooperation in China
with Chinese universities
and obviously when you
hearing something like this
and it is something that shamefully
you hardly hear anything about in Europe.
And you're hearing
things like, "Oh China,"
especially in Germany,
"our good economic partner,
"our reliable economic partner."
And it is really hard to
really make this understanding
palpable to people, that
we have a huge problem
that the Chinese Government
did many dodgy things
including something that sounds very much
like ethnic cleansing and
genocidal ideas and ambitions
and how I guess,
my frustrated question is,
how in the E.U. or as Germany,
how do we react to this?
As institutions how do
we cooperate with China?
How do we do it in a way that is not
making us complicit in this?
- [Ursula] Thank you.
- [Grant] Hi, my name is Grant.
Something that came up
earlier in the panel
was talk of applying
Magnitsky Act sanctions
to people involved in the
atrocities in the region.
So that was developed
in response to Russian
human rights violations
and is to my understanding,
targets the personal finances
of people involved in these crimes.
I was wondering if you could
discuss the comparative
efficacy of applying
those types of sanctions
to a place like China,
which,
might have
less of a direct tie
between government
officials and the oligarchy
and large material
(Ursula laughs) maybe I--
- [Sophie] Ain't no divide.
(panel laughing)
- [Grant] And if there are any other kind
of similar financial sanctions
tools in the toolbox?
- [Ursula] Thank you.
- [Urian] Hello, my name is Urian.
I'm associated with the
Research Colloquium at Berlin.
I wanted to ask you whether
you could give us a clue
whether the Uyghur
question or issue is also
an important issue within the
opposition circles in China?
- [Ursula] Opposition
circles (Rian laughing)
- [Urian] Yeah.
- [Ursula] In China?
- [Urian] There are, yeah.
There are people,
- [Ursula] Okay.
- [Urian] who understand
themselves as opposition in China.
- [Ursula] Yeah.
- [Audience Member] Hi. Two
direct questions to Dilnur.
What is the position of the Islamic world
concerning your case?
I'm sorry, I'm ignorant about it.
Most of my problems are in the Middle East
so different concentration,
I would like to know
what's the position of the Islamic world
towards the massacres?
The second question directly,
did Uyghurs ask for independence
or self-determination?
That's why they're abusing them.
Thank you.
- [Tuto] Hi my name is Tuto.
And there's chord that I wanted to share.
The chord goes so like,
"how deep or how credible
"the sheep passes resolutions
in favor of vegetarianism.
"It doesn't matter really in reality
"until and unless the wolf favors to it."
Here you're meeting
someone who is not a wolf,
it's a dragon.
And about you told about technology,
China has grown significantly
beyond imagination
of a normal person or a global phenomenon.
You said they are limited
with the chip manufactures,
give them six months to the max,
they can reverse engineer and
produce it and give it to you.
Next is finance,
you can not put a financial
restraint on China
because China has also grown
significantly beyond that phase.
Now if you are trying to create
a blockade from the Western world,
the reality is the global world
is shifting towards the
eastern part, the Orient.
China's main emerging markets will be
the African continent, as
will us other Asian markets.
The third thing, the
Belt and Road Initiative
that you mention,
it is created not to create an open China,
it is to penetrate into newer markets
and able to promote the Chinese products
into a global world.
So by all these means
you have extinguished
all kinds of conventional methodologies
to treat towards that problem.
How do you solve it?
Do you plan to continue
on speaking about this?
Or do you intend to create a solution?
If the solution is what
you are intending to,
how?
How do you create new methodologies
or new ways of interacting
with the dragon?
Thank you.
- [Ursula] Thank you.
Thank you.
So we will,
I will let you choose the questions.
The first question, why are
we interested in this topic?
Do you want to answer,
Sophie, you are in charge
of everything which is
human rights in China
so this being I think this is your answer.
- Well, as a human being (Ursula laughs)
and as a human rights activist I care
that people have the same
rights all over the world.
And I care about that as much as I do
the people who live
down the street from me
in suburban Maryland as
I do the people in China.
Maybe the answer that
you're looking for is,
I fell hard for the Chinese language
and for the country as a whole,
it's an extraordinary
place at the age of 19
and never looked back
but I also have a very strong interest in
social justice and rights.
And a little bit the
answer to the last question
about new ways of
interacting with the dragon.
I'm a big fan of holding the dragon's feet
to the fire of the
international human rights
legal obligations it
voluntarily signed up to.
There's no reason that a
Uyghur person or a child
should have any fewer
rights than I do. And--
(audience applause)
(Sophie laughs)
It seems a very straight forward answer.
- [Ursula] Do you wanna answer Nicole?
- My answer is much the same.
I've made great efforts to learn Chinese
and I couldn't really
picture myself working
for like a consulting firm trying to help
companies get in to China.
It's just not something I
believed in passionately
and I've always been
fascinated with Uyghur culture
and I was not overly concerned if I
don't get a visa to China any
time in the foreseeable future
which is one of the criterias
for this job (laughs).
- [Ursula] I mean we understand
you are (panel laughs)
very touched by this topic, and you Rian?
- [Rian] Yeah, I mean this is one of many
disturbing things
happening around the world
that we all care about as humans I think.
But for me this particular issue
is the rare case where I have some,
knowledge that I can bring to bear on it.
And it's kind of
opportunity to do something
to address one of these great
historical human wrongs.
There aren't a lot of people
who work on Uyghur culture
and Uyghur history and their,
so there's a shortage of people outside.
Uyghurs are finding it
very difficult to speak up
without retribution to their families
and if I were to remain
silent and turn my back
on the region where I've been studying
and doing research for the last 20 years,
I wouldn't be able to look
at myself in the mirror.
- There Rian has begun to
get interested in the topic
way before it became so tragic.
So it was an academic field study
and then these things happened
and you and your colleagues you were
thrusted in this huge tragedy.
So it's a little bit also my story.
I'm a journalist.
I was foreign correspondent in Beijing
for six years and then I wrote
an article about Xinjiang
and it was before the camps.
I was just describing
the ordinary repression
going on in Xinjiang and it was,
it became a huge story in China
and then they expelled me for that.
They expelled me for just describing
what was going on in very normal terms.
So,
I wrote many things about
many kinds of topics in China.
There are many other
different human rights
abuses in China, it's not the only one.
But this one is, it's
now becoming so terrible.
I have known China for more than 30 years,
I mean 40 years probably
and it is the first time that I see China
becoming a fascist.
A fascist state.
It wasn't a nice state.
It was a very repressive state
but it wasn't fascist for
a long time and now it is.
So that's why I'm always happy
to speak about the Uyghur
situation, not habits,
it's not happiness but I'm
always ready to do that
because this is one of the worst things
which are happening in our century.
So if someone wants to asked about
the reaction that European Union
or European countries can have.
What can we do?
What the countries can do.
- [Nicole] Can I just quickly add
to something you were saying,
obviously this is very strong language
but I think it's justified.
What's happening to Uyghurs
I think can be seen in
the framework of a kind of
global rise of ethno-nationalism
and ethno-nationalism is very
much on the rise in China.
They're seeking to transform
Uyghurs from what they are
to normal Chinese
people, speaking Chinese,
having no characteristics of
their traditional religion or
lifestyle.
So it can be seen in that framework.
- [Ursula] Do you want
to answer to what the
European Union or any other country can do
in order to respond to this situation?
- Yeah.
I think,
at the state level,
I think,
China has always used the method
of want to run
and refused to run to
a collective dialogue
and also with the rising of Xi Jinping
since recent years and with
his Chinese dream project
and with one road,
this new Silk road, OBOR project.
China has already divided
the European Union
and 15 European countries, not
only in the European Union,
but 15 European countries has already
separately talked with China to support.
And some of them even
and also
and with Brexit,
it's only for the Chinese favor,
weakening the European Union more.
I think European countries,
they are strong only when they are united.
And China is too strong
to one only country,
to one France, one Britain or one
Spain or other countries.
So I think European Union
or European countries
should unite and respond
from one voice to China.
And for the camps,
current situation,
the first thing that took how to force,
how to press China to close the camps
and free those people
and the second time we can talk about
how to reconciliate or how
to make China accountable
what is happened,
because justice should be done one day.
And but again,
one country can't.
- [Ursula] Yes, thank you.
So my last answer maybe
we are arriving to time.
Rian, this is an interesting question.
Did the Uyghur people
or Turkic speaking people
ask for independence?
Is this the reason why
it became such a toxic situation?
- Many Uyghurs have
asked for independence.
It's hard to gauge public
opinion broadly within Xinjiang.
It's quite a popular
cause outside of Xinjiang
but it's hard to see that as a cause
of the Chinese Government's reaction.
For example, many Tibetans
ask for independence
and while policies are
quite repressive in Tibet
we don't see Tibetans at least yet
being put into
- Yet.
- these kinds of internment camps.
So it doesn't entirely explain it
but I would say, I don't
think it would be right
to say that most Uyghurs
would like independence
but I would say that
dissatisfaction with Chinese rule
over the Uyghur homeland is
widespread, even ubiquitous
and that's something
that bothers the Chinese.
And from the same questioner
there came the question
of what is the
reaction of Muslim majority states
and that has been a
very disappointing one.
And I think the story of
that is well summed up by
the actions of the Organization
of Islamic Cooperation,
which, I forget, a year,
year and a half ago,
created a committee to examine this issue
and report back to the organization
and that committee issued
a really scathing report.
That depicted the region much as I did
in my first remarks.
Then a year later after much interaction
with the host government of
the OIC and the Chinese State,
they issued a official pronouncement
that they applaud the Chinese State
for its treatment of Muslims.
- So this gives--
- A complete 180.
- Yes, so this gives a measure
of what's going on now.
In my closing word,
I would say that we all
need to be more courageous
with China and with
regards to this issue--
- [Nicole] I would very much
echo that and I think that
there has been a change
in attitude towards China.
I think European countries
might be catching up to where
the United States is but I think
the expected,
loosening of repression
and respect for the rule
of law that we did expect
when we began to engage China,
people no longer believe
that is happening.
And what is happening to the Uyghurs
is very high on the list
of why people believe this.
I think that in the West, when
we see concentration camps
we do have a very visceral
and emotional response to it
because of our own history.
It's not just a cudgel to beat China
and we should be more courageous in
our engagement with China
and less focused on
short-termism and profits.
And I think this will be
in the long run the best for everyone
including the Chinese citizens themselves.
- [Ursula] Thank you.
Thank you very much.
(audience applauds)
