As an Uyghur Mother, Please Do Not Forget East Turkistan’s Genocide
Opinion: Aydin Anwar
I can barely stand a few hours away from my children. I’ll first feel a slight pang, a budding curiosity, and, eventually, a genuine and almost irresistible longing to embrace them. A bit dramatic, one might think. When my children finally run into my arms, my mind never fails to quickly race and think of the Uyghur mothers who may never again hold their own children. Perhaps that mother was locked up in a cold, overcrowded “reeducation” camp and later transferred to prison to serve a 20 year sentence, the father imprisoned and sent to a factory thousands of miles away, and their breastfeeding one-year-old taken to a Chinese, state-run orphanage.
Instead of hunger, my stomach churns with a heavy sadness and a slight nausea as I place a plate of homemade food in front of my kids and repeat with them the du’a before eating. I imagine them in these facilities, torn away from the very being who carried them and where their lives first began. I imagine them crying themselves to sleep in cold bunkbeds, wondering when their mother will return. I imagine them malnourished and punished when speaking their mother tongue—all while the regime works to re-engineer them, making them slowly but completely “Chinese.” My children could very well have been among the thousands of Uyghur children who emerge from these orphanages as walking shadows, alive but emptied.
Meanwhile, I feel the flutters and kicks of my children’s youngest sibling in my womb, an experience thousands of Uyghur women have been stripped of through forced sterilization by the Chinese regime. Those who are able to conceive but exceed the state-imposed child birth limit are purged with the fear of enduring late-term abortion or infanticide by the regime, or other desperate measures to protect their children: hiding their pregnancies, surrendering their baby for adoption, or paying hefty bribes in the hope of sparing their child’s life.
The Uyghur genocide has been on the backburner over the years, and the silence has grown so heavy that it’s deafening. My mind screams for answers, yet I no longer have the strength to yell at embassies or even post on social media. My mind flashes back and visualizes the graphic torture methods explained through former political prisoners I interviewed pre-motherhood. Yet, I have no choice but to suppress those accounts in order to function as a strong and present mother, as my own mother would remind me.
Therapists stress the importance of a happy and balanced mother in order for children to be raised healthy and confident. But here I am, still pleading to everyone reading this: please, don’t ignore our genocide.
To many, the ‘Uyghur crisis’ may feel like old news, something that belonged to yesterday’s headlines. But the reality is that it is far from over. Those who have recently visited occupied East Turkistan paint it as a ghost town, where even the air feels heavy with the oppression of constant surveillance and threat of detention. Streets once alive with weekly bazaars, the echo and busyness of Friday congregation, and the rhythm of the five daily calls to prayer now stand muted—a dystopian quiet enforced by mass disappearances, cameras, and the watchful eyes of armed Chinese guards. If not quiet, the squares are filled with people watching state-choreographed Uyghur dances, to show the world that “Xinjiang Muslims are the happiest in the world.”
Just miles away from city squares are hundreds of camps and prisons, overcrowded with young and old Turkic people—locked away for years, where one hour feels like eternity. Their names fill databases that read like death registers, and reading through the lists feels like a nightmare: professors, poets, artists, farmers, chefs, parents, and even children—all swallowed whole by a machine that does not distinguish between innocence and guilt: their very existence is considered a crime.
Meanwhile, we have scrolled past livestreamed massacres on our phones, feeling helpless as we watched Gaza, Lebanon, Sudan, and Iran being bombed and maimed in real time. The images burn themselves into our minds, leaving us with vicarious trauma (dare I say “trauma” when we’re not even living in it). And yet, even in the face of that horror, the world could not look away, and their plight still pierced the global conscience.
What about us, the Uyghurs?
The people of occupied East Turkistan do not have the means to livestream their horrors. Their voices are smothered by firewalls, propaganda, and punishment. They are penalized even for crying. And when they do cry, the world cannot seem to hear them. We don’t even share the same online platforms: our families cannot tweet their suffering, cannot post their grief on Instagram, and cannot send WhatsApp messages across oceans.
I have not spoken to a single family member or friend in East Turkistan in over ten years. Entire branches of my family tree have been severed, leaving silence where laughter used to be and, worse, an all-consuming fear of the unknown. What happened to them?
What has become of our world when we can bear witness to such crimes, document them, and still allow them to persist? Have we accepted that there are people whose suffering is allowed to fade into the background of global politics?
Let us not forget the millions crouched on cold prison floors, forced to chant indoctrination phrases, and punished for uttering “Assalamu Alaykum.” Let us not forget that those outside the camps and prisons are not spared from the torture—rather they are in an open-air prison, with surveillance so heavy that Chinese government officials live in Uyghur homes. Let us not forget the millions of families ripped apart, and the children taught to forget their mothers’ lullabies.
It is upon us to continue fighting, not because victory feels near, but because forgetting and failing to act are death sentences.
Surely, the mothers of East Turkistan deserve at least that.
More about the author:
Aydin Anwar is an Uyghur-American advocate and Campaign Manager at MPower Change. With dozens of her relatives missing in Chinese-occupied East Turkistan, her work focuses on amplifying Uyghur voices and advancing global awareness of their ongoing genocide.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Kashgar Times
Everything we publish on Kashgar Times is free, help us keep it that way by supporting us to expand our work.
For U.S. Donors Zelle to “kashgartimes.news@gmail.com” (if you don’t use Zelle then donate via DonorBox)
 | A guest post by
|