Riada talks to Nury Turkel and Samira Imin about the Uyghur humanitarian crisis

Dignified Resilience with Riada Akyol

Riada talks to Nury Turkel and Samira Imin about the ongoing horrific persecution of their people - the Uyghurs, and the admirable resilience with which so many of them around the world advocate for the justice and freedom of their loved ones. Uyghurs are mostly Muslim ethnically Turkic minority concentrated in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region. Over the last few years, they have faced immense pressures and campaigns with the aim of destroying their cultural and religious identity. Under pretext of religious extremism and separatism, at least a million people disappeared, as they are interned in the so called re-education camps - the Chinese government’s heavily fortified detention centers. They are being forced to renounce their faith and culture. So, in this episode, we talk about the heartbreaking pain and about the incredible, outstanding, exceptional courage and resilience of Uyguhrs who are facing widely documented persecution, surveillance, pervasive control, intimidation, forced labor. By raising awareness about the injustice they are experiencing, we recognize what the grand majority of all of them had always wanted anyway - for their dignity to be preserved and respected, to exist freely in China and practice their religion accordingly. Nury and Samira explain the human cost of this tragedy, and also how their own lives were upended with this crisis. At the end, we also chat about Samira's interest in singing and cooking Uyghur food and Nury's old and new hobbies - playing basketball with his son and learning how to do video-editing. Mr. Turkel serves as Chair of the Board for the Uyghur Human Rights Project, a documentation-based advocacy organization that he co-founded in 2004 and for which he served as Executive Director until 2006. Mr. Turkel also served as president of the Uyghur American Association from 2004 to 2006. Samira Imin works as a research assistant at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital. She is a daughter of Iminjan Seydin, a prominent Uyghur historian and a publisher who owns Xinjiang Imin Book Publishing Company.