The Slow Motion Genocide: Nury Turkel on the plight of the Uyghurs
"This is a modern-day genocide supported by technology and facilitated by slave labor."
As the frenetic news cycle churns on, millions of Uyghur Muslims are imprisoned in concentration camps, are subject to relentless, Orwellian surveillance, or have simply disappeared as part of a campaign by the Chinese government that the United States and others have deemed a genocide. The lawyer Nury Turkel — chairman of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, member of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, naturalized American citizen, and author of a new book, No Escape: The True Story of the China’s Genocide of the Uyghurs — is perhaps the most outspoken leader on behalf of his people. Born in a re-education camp during the Cultural Revolution and now separated from his family in Xianjing for decades, Turkel has been tireless in his efforts to bring attention to the plight of the Uyghurs and to rally the international community in their defense. Our discussion about the Uyghurs, their history, what we currently know about their persecution, and what can be done to help them is below.
Octavian Report: Who are the Uyghurs and how did they end up being part of territorial China?
Nury Turkel: The Uyghur people are the other Tibetans that most Americans never heard of until around 2003, when the Chinese government started calling Uyghurs part of the global terrorist network. Uyghurs are Muslim, so that made it easier for the Chinese to impose that label. Uyghurs speak one of the Turkic dialects, which is very close to the Uzbek dialect next door. And Uyghurs and Turkish people can understand each other 60% to 70% without an interpreter.
Uyghurs live in an area known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. That's the official name given after Mao's takeover of the Uyghur homeland with the help of Stalin in 1949. But the Uyghur people like to call their homeland East Turkestan, because there was a national state with that name, not only once, but twice in the modern history. The first time was in 1933, the second time in 1944.
The second East Turkestan Republic was established with Stalin's Soviet Union but also dismantled by Stalin's Soviet Union about five years later because they found ideological affinity to Mao's China after the end of the Chinese civil war. That's essentially the beginning of the dark age for the Uyghur people.
Essentially the Uyghur people are a Turkic people. Based on official Chinese figures, the Uyghur population is between 11 and 12 million. They live in a large land mass which is the size of the state of Alaska, four times the size of California, and the size of Western Europe. It has rich natural resources, natural gas, oil, various minerals, agricultural products, cotton, you name it. Rare earth minerals. So the Uyghur people feel that they're both blessed and cursed at the same time. Blessed because they have such a rich, geo-strategically important homeland, but, at the same time, it is because of that significance, China has a keen interest, economic, political, now even diplomatic.
OR: When did the internment start?
Turkel: As I describe it in the book, Spring 2017 was a turning point. I spent a lot of sleepless nights in early 2017 after I started hearing horrific stories: people disappearing, individuals forced to give DNA samples, voice samples, going through iris scans, random mobile checks and Uyghur families cutting off their foreign children and loved ones from their contacts.
I asked, "What is happening?" I have a pretty extensive network, both inside and outside of China, so I have ways to communicate with people. And I was so concerned because in the United States, we had a new administration and then Xi Jinping, as a head of state, arrived and spent time in Mar-a-Lago with President Trump.
And then on April 1, the Chinese legislative body unleashed something draconian called a “de-extremification measure” that essentially makes 48 behaviors criminal: growing a beard, abstinence from sex, drugs, or alcohol, keeping a prayer mat at home, keeping copy of Quran at home. If you have a travel history to some countries, including our own. Even before that, starting in August 2016, a new “sheriff” had arrived in Xianjing taking over the management.
They started going after intellectuals, just like they did in Nazi Germany. Business elites, thought leaders, academics, writers, stage performers, religious leaders, business leaders, they rounded up everyone. And then after the “de-extremification” measure was put in place, they used what's called an “integrated joint operating platform” that I discuss in the section of the book about digital authoritarianism. Its massive personal data with an artificial intelligence-supported surveillance network. They built this network and started ordering people to be arrested. In 10 days alone, the Chinese issued orders to arrest 20,000 people.
So what is happening with the people rounded up? They've been sent to industrial scale concentration camps. We're talking about substantial numbers that we've been able to identify through satellite imagery and also government bidding for construction contracts. In the latest hacked top secret documents, Xi Jinping himself was aware of the overcrowded concentration camps and ordered fast building, just like the way that they built the facility in Wuhan at the beginning of COVID.
Some media inaccurately report one million Uyghurs are in camps. But the Pentagon said in summer 2019, that there are around three million Uyghurs locked up. But you can ignore the Pentagon, you can ignore me, you can ignore others. If you just read the Chinese white paper itself, it says that since 2015, 1.3 million Uyghurs annually have gone through reeducation programs. So in that four years, if you add them up, you will come up with a staggering number. And if it is one million or three million, no one should be punished based on their ethnicity or their religion.
So “never again” now rings hollow because the international community knows. Even if it's just one million, that's more than the population of the District of Columbia, our nation's capital. Three million is almost 70% of the population in Norway. It's a lot of people.
OR: What do we know about what is going on inside the camps?
Turkel: In the camps, there has been reported sexual violence against Uyghur women, physical torture, around-the-clock surveillance, even in their overcrowded prison cells. And the most harrowing part: they go through a kind of a cleansing process. This is a kind of “thought transformation,” that's the term that they use. Stalin used the same term. Thought transformation is essentially human re-engineering. They use the indoctrination process to gradually wipe out your religious beliefs, your cultural appreciation, your way of life. The detainees go through a forced indoctrination denouncing your God.
In one instance I described in the book, the prison guard asks, "Who's your new god now?" Answer: “Xi Jinping.” So from believing in an Abrahamic religion, now they are forced to believe in Xi Jinping. Just let that sink in for a second. If somebody tried to make you to condemn your God, day in, day out, day in, day out, that can break you.
That in of itself is enough torture for somebody or a group of people who are pious and that have a very traditional way of life. And all of a sudden you have nothing when you are confined in that prison. You have only one thing that connects you and keeps you hopeful which is to pray to God. And if even that is taken away from you, that means that you are a dead man walking.
The sexual violence that has been reported in the camps, all of the stories, disturbingly, are so consistent. I interviewed camp survivors, people who worked in the camps, and their stories are as if they had communicated with each other previously. It is so consistent and so credible and so heartbreaking.
Then there are other types of prisons that are the forced labor camps, which is modern day slavery. I co-authored an op-ed with a rabbi from the Wiesenthal Center on Passover a couple of years ago about the similarity to what the Jewish people went through and what the Uyghurs are going through in a modern era: being enslaved by fellow human beings. And also benefiting the global marketplace and polluting the global supply chain, making us complicit in ongoing genocide. I think that should disturb people, even those who are not well versed in politics. We are the global consumers fueling this genocide.
And then there is the role of technology. This is something that no one should ignore. The Chinese have developed, tested, and implemented some of the most intrusive forms of surveillance. Secretary Blinken noted this in his China policy speech at George Washington University. He said the Chinese surveillance techniques are metastasizing.
And then the horror of family separation. Between 800,000 and one million Uyghur children have been taken away for adoption or for brainwashing in state-run orphanages.
And then finally, there is what is happening to ordinary people. They have to go through daily surveillance on the street corners, at their workplace, on their mobile phones. And most disturbingly at their own place of residence. They have QR codes at their doors. The state security knows who lives there, what kind of social ratings their family members have. And also they send people, the Chinese cadres, to stay with the family. They eat and sleep with them. In some instances, they engage in sexual violence.
They make children spy on their own parents. Children generally don't lie. An honest answer from the children could end up having his or her parents in the camps. So, as correctly portrayed by the US State Department, China has created an open-air prison system, a prison-like environment for those who are not in the camps.
OR: And if you opt out of having a smartphone because of the surveillance that is itself suspicious, right?
Turkel: Yes. In 2017 and 2018, people were giving up their smartphones, Androids and Apple, because the phone stores everything: caches, images, the websites that you visited. And mobile data scanning stations can scan your phone, and if they find anything objectionable or “illegal,” then you end up being put in the category of people who need to be re-educated.
So people made a willful decision, including my own family, to delete me from their contacts. The vast majority of Uyghurs still cannot talk to their family members because the family members will be in trouble if their phones are scanned. So in order to avoid that, some Uyghurs switched to dumbphones. And when they saw Uyghurs with dumbphones, the security officials said, "Why you're not using a smartphone?"
You’re doomed. Either way you are a suspicious individual to the state security.
OR: In addition to the camps and the surveillance, you mention often people just disappear. Of the people going into the camps, how many of them actually come out?
Turkel: When I read the news about the crematoria built around the camps in 2018, I could not believe it. I could not believe that we were seeing a slow-motion extermination of the Uyghurs.
If you take individuals into camps in such huge numbers and no one appears to be leaving, and the government is building crematoria around or adjacent to the camps, as reported by Radio Free Asia, then it means that there's something horrific happening. We only know of a handful of people who were able to return home. The vast majority of them have just evaporated.
An Israeli doctor recently published a medical peer-reviewed article saying that the Chinese doctors are complicit in organ harvesting. Uyghur organs have been reportedly harvested by Chinese doctors and sold to people. And the other thing that we also know is that they're targeting a younger generation, so that disappearance could be as a result of physical, psychological torture or serious health issues, but also that they have been transferred into work camps to solve China's labor shortage and to continue to feed the global supply chain.
OR: What are they actually producing in the labor camps?
Turkel: There are 83 global brands there, everything from solar panels that we put on our rooftops to save the planet down to baby pajamas that people buy at retail stores like the Gap and Banana Republic. Patagonia has made a pledge that they're not doing it. It includes consumer products like the T-shirts that we wear. Or computer components. Intel, for example, refused to denounce its practice. Solar panels are a huge problem. The solar panels manufactured in China use slave labor and also dirty coal to make them.
The other type of products that have been in the news are agricultural products. Ketchup, for example. Xinjiang is a large agricultural base for China. It produces some of the best tomatoes. Heinz ketchup has been implicated. So has Campbell Soup. And also cotton. A quarter of “made in China” cotton products are sourced in Xinjiang.
But starting on June 21, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act will go into effect which bans everything from Xinjiang coming to the United States unless the importers and manufacturers can prove with evidence that they're not made with slave labor.
OR: When you talk about a genocide, what exactly do you mean?
Turkel: This is not the Holocaust. But this is a modern-day genocide supported by technology and facilitated by slave labor. There is a legal definition of genocide. In the Uyghur case, all three key legal requirements are satisfied.
First, the state's intentional, purposeful attempts to destroy in part or in whole an ethnic group. This kind of prolonged slow-motion, genocidal act is something disastrous. I don't think that the Uyghur people will be able to recover from this. Specifically the ones inside China. Their spirit is damaged. They have been subject to psychological, physical torture. We know based on the latest police file, the Xinjiang Police File, that they were ordered to shoot non-complaint ones. There's no legal recourse. This has been an ongoing killing of the Uyghur people, an ongoing state-sponsored destruction of this proud ethno-religious group. That’s definitional requirement number one.
Number two, the deliberate prevention of natural population growth. In just one year alone, from 2019 to 2020, we're talking about a nearly 60% decline in birth rates. Whereas there's a slight increase in population for Han Chinese communities in China. So that's the second legal requirement.
Then the third requirement is the most harrowing aspect of the ongoing genocide, which is the forcible removal of children from one group and transferring them to another group. And in the Uyghur case, as I noted earlier, 800,000 to one million Uyghur children have been separated from their families and sent to state-run orphanages.
So all three requirements are present if you look at the statement issued by then Secretary Pompeo in January 2021 and confirmed by Secretary Blinken. Secretary Blinken, in fact, reiterated that position just a few days ago on the occasion of releasing the annual international human rights report. This is a policy and not a legal decision. Under Article I of the Genocide Convention, parties must call it out when they see atrocities and then stop it and hold the perpetrators to account.
So far, disturbingly, disappointingly, only eight parliaments and governments around the world have done what they are supposed to be doing under their treaty obligation. That includes the United States. We are looking for others of the 140-plus nations to join the effort and do what they're supposed to be doing under their treaty obligations. Ironically, China is also a signatory to the Genocide Convention.
So anyone in our country who tries to finger point either at Secretary Pompeo or Secretary Blinken are mistaken. This is not a legal decision, this is a policy response. This is our fulfillment of our treaty obligations under the Genocide Convention.
The US has been the leader in response to the ongoing genocide. In fact, today in US-China relations, the most difficult issue that cannot be hammered out is the Uyghur genocide.
OR: What do you think needs to be done to help the Uyghurs?
Turkel: There are three challenges. The first challenge is that the international community still hasn’t figured it out. This is much more serious in Western Europe. The leading nations in the European Union, namely France and Germany, should do more. Olaf Schiltz just said something. During the entire tenure of Angela Merkel, there were zero statements out of the Bundestag. Zero.
Where is the leadership in Western Europe? If you don't recognize the problem, then you will not sit down to look for a solution. During the Trump administration, the Europeans said, "Oh, this is Trump's use of the Uyghur issue to make progress in the trade negotiations or trade war." And guess what? We have a new administration, and the Biden administration actually expanded this process with the announcement of coordinated sanctions. So I challenge those countries who were quick to defend the interests and well-being of a people who look like them, namely in Ukraine, to ask what could be done for people who may not look like them in communist China? I've been trying to be very diplomatic, but I think my patience is running very thin.
Why on earth can the European countries not show the same type of resolve, the same type of response, including those global companies? It took only several days for international businesses to either suspend or pull out from Russia. But it’s been six years and there's no single company that has done that in China.
In fact, several global brands—Visa, Nike, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Omega—sponsored the “genocide Olympics” early this year. This is unconscionable. This is about humanity. History has taught us that we should not let these kind of atrocities take place, regardless of who is perpetrating them. That's one problem.
And then the other problem is the investors. The global investor community, businesses, and venture capitalists are still investing. Ray Dalio, for example, the other day, was still trying to justify the Chinese behavior. So this is awful. This should be condemned.
And then three, specifically, I call on the consumers around the world to stop buying “made in China” products. Because the likelihood that those products, the baby pajamas that you let your baby wear when you hug that baby at night, are made with forced labor is quite high. And you cannot save the planet by putting up solar panels made by enslaved Uyghurs on your rooftop. That's hypocritical. And also you cannot save lives using PPE made by enslaved Uyghurs. You cannot use wigs made of concentration camp detainees’ hair to make you look beautiful. It doesn't work like that.
I want this to be something treated as a matter of urgency, a matter of conscience and with a sense of purpose. This is about our future. The international community has already seen three genocides in 10 years, starting with the Yazidis, then the Rohingyas, and now the Uyghurs. I wonder who will be the next victim if you fail to stop this?
This is why the Jewish people feel so compelled to help. I've been working with the Jewish community from the beginning. They get it. The experience is so similar. And disturbingly, the Chinese regime borrows pages from Hitler's playbook, even using terms like “final solution” in their propaganda materials.
So, this is about people who are in power doing the right thing. This is about a business world needing to do some soul searching, to say “no” to slave labor and to stop making us, the consumers, complicit in the ongoing genocide.
And finally, this is about our future. People need to ask themselves, "Am I going to be okay with my children, my children's children, living in a world ruled by Chinese-style governments?" The question is quite simple. It may come across as ideological, but as somebody who grow up in a communist country, as somebody who was born in a reeducation camp, and as somebody who was educated in the communist education system, when I say communism's bad, it deserves some attention.
OR: Are you optimistic that the Chinese government can be pressured or persuaded to change its course with the Uyghurs?
Turkel: Yes, absolutely. Pay attention to how the Chinese are reacting. As soon as the Biden administration said that the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act will be fully enforced, the Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs came out saying that they will retaliate. What does that tell us? They're getting the message. This bold action, this bipartisan action by the US government, I think is getting attention in Beijing.
I have been sanctioned twice, once by Xi Jinping and once by Putin. And many fellow citizens and government officials have been sanctioned by both regimes. That in and of itself also shows that our efforts is working.
Two years ago, I briefed Congress and administration officials as part of my government role. The question was very simple: Is it working? And the answer is yes. There's one company as reported in the Washington Post in 2020 that reported $100 million dollars lost as a result of US sanctions.
The way that the international community came together in Ukraine, the way that businesses responded to the sanctions is making Beijing very nervous, actually. Any administration, any political party will not and cannot ignore the Uyghur genocide because this is in our national security interest. This is on our economic interest. This is in our moral obligation. This is also in the interest of our global leadership. So, it's already working. We just need to stay the course and expand our alliance with like-minded governments.
And also we need to continue to call them out. Two things are extremely important to the Chinese. One, how China is been portrayed in public and two, their economic interests. If you look at anything that they do, it's all about China's economic interests or economic power. When Mike Pence said that we helped build China, I think he's spot on. We did in the last 30 years.
When Secretary Blinken said the other day that China is the number one beneficiary of the rules-based international order, I could not agree more. We helped build China. And now they are using that help that they got from us, the West and the United States, and using it against our interests. Even to this day, as we speak Xi Jinping is supporting Putin. When President Biden was traveling in Asia, they did a military exercise. So this is not that difficult. This is quite simple. The American people need to stop politicizing the issue and think about the things that are American and stop the things that are un-American.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.