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Theme: China’s repression of Uyghurs

Editorial

Testimonials we must acknowledge

Imagine that you are in exile. In your home country your father has just passed away and the only way for you to say...

Text: Elnaz Baghlanian April 06 2020
Article

The Uyghur Trauma and the Threat of Collective Amnesia

“Similar to other suppressed and colonised people around the world, there is an imminent risk that the next generation of Uyghurs will suffer from collective amnesia,” writes Patrick Hällzon, doctoral...

Text: Patrick Hällzon June 01 2020
Article

A language on the brink of eradication

In China, to speak and write in Uyghur is acutely dangerous. In 2017 in China Uyghur was forbidden as a language of tuition in secondary schools and Uyghur textbooks have been replaced by Chinese...

Text: Zulhayat Otkur May 26 2020
Article

My fate wasn’t in my own hands

The activist Halmurat Uyghur, who among other things initiated the movement #MeTooUyghur, began his political engagements as a direct reaction to his parents’ internment in a re-education camp in...

Text: Halmurat Uyghur May 19 2020
Poetry

Two poems by Tahir Hamut

Tahir Hamut is considered one of the foremost modernist poets in the Uyghur language today. For three years in the 1990s, he was jailed in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region after being falsely accused...

Text: Tahir Hamut May 15 2020
Article

Life and death under China’s control

Alongside advanced AI technology, China has engaged millions of Han Chinese cadres as human spies with the task of living in with Uyghur families to monitor and thereby control people’s thoughts and...

Text: Rukyie Turdush May 11 2020
Poetry

Two poems by Erkan Kadir

“There’s no land for us,” writes the poet Erkan Kadir in his poem “Poverty” about the tragic destiny of the Uyghur in China. In 2016 he left the Xinjiang Province in China for studies in Turkey, but...

Author: Erkan Kadir May 08 2020
Article

Cultural genocide is the new genocide

The Chinese government is undertaking a broad assault on the culture and heritage of the Uighurs, Kazakhs and other indigenous peoples in Xinjiang, China, including disappearing their poets, artists...

Text: Magnus Fiskesjö May 05 2020
Poetry

To my friends from Chile

In 2003 the writer and poet Abdushukur Muhammet fled the oppression in the Xinjiang Province in China. Today he lives with his family in Sweden. His three published works in Uyghur can no longer be...

Text: Abdushukur Muhammet April 27 2020
Fiction

An unanswered telephone call

To leave one’s home country for a safer life can entail a long-lasting inner conflict. In this story the Uyghur author Aziz Isa Elkun depicts the everyday consequences of a life in exile: phone calls...

Text: Aziz Isa Elkun April 15 2020
Article

The robots are watching us

China is the leading country in the world when it comes to facial recognition and where this technology is spreading and developing in a rapid pace. Maya Wang, China senior researcher at Human Rights...

Text: Maya Wang April 06 2020
Article

My first cellmate in Kashgar

The Uyghur writer and language scholar Abduweli Ayup is one of hundreds of people who have been imprisoned in the so-called re-education camps in the Xinjiang Province. His crime was speaking and...

Text: Abduweli Ayup April 06 2020

Theme: Battle of the Internet

Editorial

New wave of Internet censorship

What would happen if the Internet was shut down? Many of us may have played with the idea and perhaps despaired over the...

Text: Elnaz Baghlanian January 12 2020
Article

Paying attention to algorithms

The algorithms used by the big Internet companies exert increasing power over our lives. They direct what we see on social media and influence us in all kinds of ways from the products we choose to...

Text: Brendan de Caires March 20 2020
Poetry

From a distance

In 2015 the Iranian poet and activist Fatemeh Ekhtesari was sentenced to 99 lashes and eleven and a half years of imprisonment for alleged crimes against the Islamic regime—immoral conduct and...

Text: Fatemeh Ekhtesari March 13 2020
Article

Less freedom on the Internet

World leaders are using social media as a tool of disinformation and control. This is making the Internet less free. In the US, the homeland of the greatest social media giants, the situation has...

Text: Jonas Cullberg March 03 2020
Article

Iran’s virtual iron curtain

In Iran in November 2019 the whole of the Internet was shut down. 83 million people were suddenly isolated from the world. This was the regime’s answer to the people’s protest against rising petrol...

Text: Anonymous February 18 2020
Article

164 days without the Internet

In troubled Kashmir the Internet has recently been shut down for 164 days. This has been the longest ever shut down of the Internet in a democratic country. On January 25 the government restored the...

Text: Aakash Hassan January 29 2020
Article

An animal farm of disinformation

Today China is the digital world leader. Here we find the most Internet users and here the most advanced techniques concerning Internet censorship are being tested. How is it possible that China...

Text: Isaac Mao January 21 2020
Poetry

Uganda’s cyber laws can’t silence Stella Nyanzi

Can one be imprisoned for having published a poem on one’s Facebook page? The answer is yes—in Uganda. In August 2019 the Ugandan writer and women’s rights activist Stella Nyanzi was sentenced to...

Text: Stella Nyanzi January 13 2020
Article

Fear and laughter

“In conditions of shrinking freedom and fewer independent media, the internet became filled with jokes, anecdotes and lampoons,” says the Russian author and human rights activist Liza Aleksandrova...

Text: Liza Aleksandrova-Zorina January 13 2020

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