Uyghur activist to expose language erasure through child separation

MNTV News Desk — Acclaimed Uyghur poet and human rights advocate Abduweli Ayup has been invited to speak at the Sorbonne University in Paris on Oct. 24, documenting linguicide and family separation in Xinjiang, Asia Sentinel reports.

Speaking from his home in Norway, Ayup said he plans to use the occasion to reveal that 47,000 Uyghur children in Kashgar county have been separated from their parents. He also plans to share videos and photos from so-called boarding kindergartens, an established institution in China used to instill national culture and make Uyghur children “forget” their first language.

A translation of the invitation, written by the European Uyghur Academy, said Ayup would lecture on his research as part of a “scientific symposium” bringing together Uyghur academics, engineers, artists, writers and young entrepreneurs working across Europe. 

The meeting aims to exchange views on preserving the Uyghur language and cultural heritage, and on how the diaspora, especially youth, can pursue opportunities in science, technology and business.

One part of Ayup’s presentation will focus on linguicide — the forced death of a language through policy, violence or other means. 

“According to my documentation, Uyghur kids under 13 don’t speak Uyghur. The boarding kindergartens are the most dangerous [places], which [are] killing the Uyghur language,” he said. 

“Uyghur language was eliminated from public life, like street signs, tables and even the menus at the restaurants. The kids have to report every morning at the school what language they spoke at home — if the schools found that kids speak [Uyghur] at home, their parents would be punished [by losing] their security scores.”

Children, whom Ayup described as “prisoners,” “have to speak Chinese when they meet with their family members once a month.” He said the residential schools are “killing” the Uyghur language by keeping children there up to 270 days a year. “If their kids speak Chinese well, their score will rise. If they don’t speak Chinese to their family members, they will lose their scores. The complete surveillance mechanism makes linguicide possible in the Uyghur homeland.”

The other part of his presentation will focus on China’s ethnic unity law, which he calls his “main focus” because “we need to tell the world how dangerous it is.” The Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress took effect on July 1 this year. When it did, the World Uyghur Congress said the legislation “seeks to forcibly assimilate ethnic groups” such as Uyghurs “into a single Chinese nation,” discouraging distinct ethnic identities while elevating Han Chinese identity as the national norm.

Ayup said the law has “criminalized freedom of expression in diaspora,” including expressing opinions, sending children to Uyghur schools abroad and joining Uyghur gatherings outside China. It also “legalized demolishing Uyghur mosques, replacing place names, changing Uyghur culture [and] banning [the] Uyghur language,” he said. 

He said his team would publish a report on children aged three to six placed in the boarding-kindergarten system because their parents are imprisoned or have been transferred to other provinces.

While he documents testimony of both crimes, Ayup and his volunteers at Uyghur Hjelp, a non-profit he co-founded in Norway, are not pursuing litigation. “I just document and publish reports. But legal action? That’s not my job,” he said. 

“We are focusing on documenting and explaining.” He noted that international human rights lawyer Rayhan Asat has initiated a legal case in the United States, “but the case is really slow.”

Verifying, documenting, exposing

Ayup, the only linguist in his group, said his process involves confirming identities and reports through open-source data. 

“We use Google Earth. For example, if you say that the mosque in your neighborhood is being destroyed, we use Google Earth to check if it happened or not,” he said. “We don’t publish anything if we are not sure it happened, but we hide some parts of the facts if it will put someone in danger … so we never share the source.”

Corroboration is a persistent challenge. Uyghurs who have witnessed mass graves can say only that they saw them and that family members are buried there, he said: “It is really hard to prove it because we need to have solid evidence” such as photos. 

“People can tell us what happened, but they can’t share the names and they can’t share the exact location,” fearing the Chinese government will retaliate against relatives.

Ayup said Uyghur Hjelp now focuses on telling detailed stories of those arrested in China rather than simply counting them. 

“We did something like that in 2021 or 2020. At the time, we investigated 5,000 people being arrested … then we focused on who they are. Now we are publishing their story. We published books of the people in jail, and we are going to publish an anthology of Uyghur writers who have been arrested.”

While he and others continue to raise awareness, Ayup said the “crucial part” is stopping the genocide of the Uyghur people and holding those responsible to account.