How you can help the Uyghur Muslims of Xinjiang, China.
My name is Rahima Mahmut. I am a Muslim from Ghulja, East Turkestan, the so-called Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. I came to the U. K. in 2000 after witnessing first-hand the violent suppression of peaceful demonstrations against my people in my home city in February 1997. I have been campaigning for the freedom of my people through my music, activism and translation work for the last 20 years. I am now the U. K. project director of the World Uyghur Congress. Since I lost contact with my beloved family in January 2017 after a brief conversation with my brother, who said with a trembling voice, „Leave us in God’s hands and we leave you in God’s hands, too,“ there has not been a day that has passed without worry. The situation in the Uyghur homeland has developed from the systematic persecution of my people into full-fledged, state-sponsored genocide. Since August 2018, when the UN openly condemned China for holding up to one million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in „re-education camps,“ I hoped that the free world would act against China—or at least impose crippling sanctions. But since then, atrocities against my people have continued to mount, one after another. Some of these have been highlighted in worldwide media reports about the concentration camps. There have been personal testimonies from ex-detainees about torture and rape, classified leaked documents, expert reports about cultural destructions, forced organ harvesting and sterilizations of women, drone videos showing blind-folded, shackled Uyghur prisoners herded onto trains and video footage of young children crying for their mothers behind barbed wire enclosures—which the Chinese Communist Party names „Loving Kindergarten.
