About this episode

Salih Hudayar discusses his experiences and the political situation in East Turkistan, drawing parallels with Myanmar's Rohingya genocide.

Episode #573: “I brought you here to the United States not so you could forget our homeland,” Salih Hudayar remembers his father telling him, “but so you could become educated and one day return to liberate our people and our country from the Chinese occupation.” Hudayar, now Foreign Minister of the East Turkistan Government in Exile, traces his political life to that instruction. Born in 1993 near Kashgar, he grew up amid tightening state control and left for the United States as a child after his father fled repression. He situates the current crisis within a longer history that includes two short-lived East Turkistan republics before Communist consolidation in 1949. He describes a post-2009 escalation of surveillance, detention, and forced labor under the banner of counterterrorism. Citing Chinese government documents and satellite imagery, he argues that mass internment, religious repression, family separation, and demographic engineering amount to genocide. Now based in Washington DC, Hudayar presses U.S. lawmakers to move beyond condemnation. Recognition of genocide, he says, is not enough without confronting what he calls the root problem of colonial rule. Running a…

People in this episode

Guest: Salih Hudayar

Topics covered

• East Turkistan
• Chinese occupation
• genocide
• political exile
• surveillance
• religious repression
• Myanmar

Keywords

• East Turkistan
• genocide
• Chinese occupation
• surveillance
• religious repression
• political exile
• Rohingya
• forced labor
• family separation
• demographic engineering

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: East Turkistan Government in Exile

Places: United States, Kashgar, China, Washington DC, Myanmar

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