I had heard of the Uyghurs, but didn’t really know anything substantial about their history, only that they were a persecuted minority in China. I have to confess that I had never bothered to learn more about them, but that has changed when I came across the book … by Tahir Hamut Izgil ‘They will come to stop me at midnight’ (Libros del Asteroid, translation by Catalina Martínez Muñoz). Tahir Hamut Izgil is a Uyghur poet and filmmaker, persecuted, tortured, imprisoned in a forced labor camp – “Reeducation Camp” – who went into exile with his family fleeing repression. We might think that these events occur in the times of Mao Tse-Tung during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, but no: Tahir Hamut Izgil was arrested for the first time in 1996, when the persecution of intellectuals of the Uyghur ethnic group, harassment, was more than normal. which since 2017 has escalated to levels that have been described as genocide.
In ‘They will come to arrest me at midnight’, the author narrates his own experience and that of others like him and contextualizes it in the historical, political and cultural process of recent decades, making his book one of the few testimonies of what is happening in our century with the Uyghurs of China. In his illuminating introduction to the book – which begins with a magnificent sentence: “If you have ordered an Uber in Washington DC in the last few years, chances are the driver was one of the greatest living Uyghur poets” – Joshua L. Freeman, scholar in Uyghur history and culture and English translator from Izgil, summarizes the escalation of violence against the Uyghur minority, of Turkic language and predominantly Muslim religion that is mainly concentrated in the Xinjian region, in northwest China.
It begins with linguistic and religious discrimination from institutions, taking advantage of global Islamophobia to justify it; continues the forced dispersal of Uyghurs from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region to other regions due to the impoverishment caused by the same institutional discrimination; The social rejection of the majority becomes more acute, the episodes of violence and lynching against them increase; In 2016 their passports were withdrawn, they were prohibited from communicating with foreigners and finally mass internment in concentration camps began. Some isolated episodes of violence by Uyghurs become an excuse to label the entire population as extremists, terrorists and separatists. The situation becomes a death trap from which his friend, Tahir Hamut Izgil, is miraculously able to escape in 2017.
Episodes of violence by Uyghurs lead China to classify the entire population as terrorists
These days when we talk so much about the technological leap due to artificial intelligence, the almost absolute control of the Uyghur population and, with it, its extermination, is largely due to a biometric surveillance system unique in the history of the humanity. One more example – another would be the Government of Israel – that shows how genocidal regimes use the most advanced technology to control, subdue and, finally, annihilate their target.
Beyond the interest aroused by the political and historical themes that Tahir Hamut Izgil deals with, ‘They will come to arrest me tonight’ is a testimony of great literary quality. Izgil’s voice tells facts, events and anecdotes with the thoroughness of a chronicler and the expressive beauty of a poet, at the same time that it delves into the analysis of the repression of the Chinese authorities and the violence that arouses discrimination and impoverishment in the Uyghur people. His gaze is critical and profound, he avoids the sentimentality of tragedy. What he narrates is sometimes inconceivable not only because of the terrible persecution that he witnesses, but also because of the sophistication of the Chinese government’s daily cruelty against the Uyghurs, imposed largely by the Han colonizers. An example: Izgil says that in 2015 Chinese authorities repeatedly forced Uyghur Muslim clerics to participate in a television dance contest. The clerics had to dance on stage to a Chinese disco song titled ‘Manzanita’, an ubiquitous anthem in the Kashgar region that was mandatory to play on the cell phones of all officials because it was the favorite of the Chinese governor on duty. Another: in 2016, after several attacks attributed to Uyghur terrorists, the Chinese Government forced all merchants in the region to participate in a ‘United Defense Block against Terrorist Violence’ which consisted of wearing the party’s red armband, taking into account their stores with a baton and a whistle – bought with their own money – and participate in absurd maneuvers, accompanied by ideological training against “ethnic separatism.” Another: From forcing clerics to dance ‘Mazanita’, the possession of religious articles was prohibited; “Those who preserved the Koran – Izgil relates – were soon discovered, arrested and subjected to severe punishment,” sometimes denounced by their own neighbors.
The public and daily humiliation, the climate of fear and paranoia, were part of the great machinery of annihilation that would begin shortly after: massive raids and internments in “study centers”, a euphemism for the concentration camps that were established throughout the territory. Uyghur and to which the detainees were transferred in a secret protocol that prevents, to this day, their monitoring.
When these years are judged from the future, those who study the past will say that these first decades of the 21st century are characterized by genocides and ethnic persecutions that were already believed to have been overcome after the barbarities of the 20th century, such as the genocide of Palestinians by Israel. or this other type of genocide without bombs or drones that the Chinese Government has so cruelly designed: concentration camps, prisons, torture, persecution of religious and cultural practices, biometric technological control of the Uyghur population, sterilization practices, and a long etcetera. of human rights violations with the aim of exterminating this minority. Despite the Chinese government’s information blockade, despite its lies and campaigns full of euphemisms and false accusations, thanks to authors like Tahir Hamut Izgil and works like ‘They will come to arrest me at midnight’ we will not be able to say that we knew nothing.
#Argentina
