Rayhan Asat Leads Human Rights Workshop on Uyghur Genocide

Rayhan Asat, Maurice R. Greenberg World Fellow at Yale University and Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council Strategic Litigation Project, led the Schell Center’s Human Rights Workshop on September 2, 2021. Asat detailed the human rights abuses committed against the Uyghur people in Xinjiang, China, in her presentation, “Nowhere to Turn: The Tortured Path to Justice for the Uyghur People.”

Asat, who is Uyghur, began by describing the culture of the Uyghur people, an element of their story that she argued is absent from mainstream narratives of their ongoing genocide at the hands of the Chinese government. She spoke about their traditional dances and dress and showed photographs of the contemporary skyscrapers of Xinjiang. She also noted that the references to “Muslims in Xinjiang” in press coverage of the genocide fail to reflect the pluralistic Uyghur society. “It’s a very diverse and pluralistic community,” Asat said. For decades, she said, China forbid Uyghurs from practicing Islam, citing that during her own childhood, her parents were not allowed to practice their religion.

Since 2017, the Chinese government has sent Uyghurs to concentration camps for “reeducation,” subjecting them to forced labor, and has closely surveilled the Uyghur population. Asat explained that the concentration camps are based on a logic of “guilt in advance.” According to the Chinese government, Uyghurs are inherently less civilized and more dangerous, particularly due to a predisposition to terrorism. “Unless you are reeducated in these camps, you are not going to be a normal citizen,” Asat said. She pointed to an interview of Chinese officials that explains the Chinese government’s position and condemned the idea of detaining people based on the possibility of future crime. “What kind of justice system is that? Who is the arbiter of who might commit a crime?”

In the camps, Asat said, Uyghurs spend hours per day on “political indoctrination.” Additional time is spent engaging in forced labor — “work to make the Chinese state, which is already so economically powerful, richer than ever before,” she said.

Survivors of the camps have testified to the use of torture and waterboarding, according to Asat. “Not every Uyghur is in the camps, but their lives could be upended in any moment,” she said. There are forced labor programs outside of the camps, Asat explained, which have resulted in mass relocations of Uyghurs to other parts of China, where they work in factories, often without speaking the language. “They use families as leverage,” she said. “[They say that] if you don’t go, your family will have to go…to the concentration camps.”

Surveillance of the Uyghur community is another tool of suppression, Asat said, with cameras and police checkpoints ubiquitous in Xinjiang even before the genocide.

For Asat, the most disturbing surveillance tactic is the “Becoming Family” program. “The Chinese government deploys at least a million civilians in Uyghur homes. These are not judges, not people who have any legal authority. They would spend their day and night in your intimate family home and decide whether you are a correct family according to their own measurement,” she explained. If this interloper decides the family does not meet the standard, they send them to a concentration camp, according to Asat.

The abuses Asat described during her presentation are deeply personal: her brother has been detained in a concentration camp for five years. Asat talked about her brother Ekpar’s solitary condiment in Aksu, far from home in Urumqi, and the constant agony she feels over his physical and mental health. “Before the concentration camps, he was a model citizen,” she said. He was an entrepreneur in the technology industry, celebrated by the Chinese media. “I believed, growing up, that as long as we were what the Chinese government called a model citizen and could be ambassadors for our community, the discrimination would end,” Asat remembered. Her brother’s disappearance shattered that notion. After a year of sustained advocacy, the Chinese government showed Asat’s family a video of her brother. In the video, he was handcuffed. He had lost weight, and he had dark spots on his skin from lack of sun. “He was a shadow of his former self,” she said.

The Genocide Convention of the United Nations lists a series of actions, any one of which constitutes genocide when committed with the intent to destroy a certain social group. “In my view,” Asat said, “every element of this definition is happening in Xinjiang.”

Asat hopes that one potential avenue for justice is the International Criminal Court (ICC). She is currently advocating for the ICC to take jurisdiction over the Uyghur genocide, in order to overcome procedural obstacles that require ICC membership for bringing cases to the Court. The ICC could compile a list of perpetrators, Asat said, so that, if someone named on that list sets foot in an ICC member country, they could be taken to the Hague.

Combating dehumanization, Asat suggested, is another form of resistance to the Chinese government’s ongoing genocide of the Uyghur people. For Asat, dehumanization extends to representing Uyghurs exclusively as victims. “Uyghurs have become synonymous with the concentration camps and that truly breaks my heart,” she said. “They are much more than the victims of the concentration camps.” She spoke about the similarly reductive perception of Uyghurs as “happy people who dance,” common in China before the genocide, as a precursor to the current human rights violations. Asat characterized the stereotype as implying that the Uyghur community is “backward” and primitive compared to the rest of China. “We all know that genocide doesn’t happen overnight,” Asat said. “It happens over years of dehumanization.”

Asat also sees reason for hope in the growing awareness and condemnation of corporations’ complicity in the genocide. Models at a recent fashion show posted photos expressing solidarity with the Uyghur people and denounced the fashion industry’s reliance on Uyghurs’ forced labor. But according to Asat, the Chinese government has propagated disinformation to deny the genocide, so greater public recognition is essential.

“[The Uyghurs] are still resilient,” Asat concluded. “Even facing torture camps, they are still fighting to survive with the hope that at the end of the day, truth and humanity will prevail. That, to me, is a different kind of heroism.”