All posts tagged: Terrorism Discourse

“There was no learning at all.”

What follows is an abridged first-person account of Xinjiang camp eyewitness Nurlan Kokteubai, delivered at the office of the Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights organization on November 5, 2019. The summary and English translation were done by Kaster Bakyt. Gene A. Bunin did the English editing and smoothing. I was born and raised on the Akkoi stud farm in Chapchal County. From September 1979 to July 1997, I worked as a schoolteacher. I myself am a graduate of a vocational secondary school. In 2011, I came to Kazakhstan and obtained a Kazakhstan green card. My wife was also a teacher, but she’s retired now. Our children moved to Kazakhstan too and got Kazakh citizenship here. In July 2017, my wife was called to go to China, and then I went too since they summoned me as well. I went around August 20, 2017. Some days later – on September 3, 2017 – the village police called me to the police station. I thought that they were going to collect my passport, but when I got there they …

Terrifying Uyghurs

In a recent article James Leibold, a scholar at La Trobe University, in Australia, discussed the way ethnic minority struggles against police and structural violence have often been officially misrecognized as “terrorism.” At the same time, in China, as in the United States, violent acts carried out by non-Muslims are read as acts of the deranged and mentally ill, but not as “terrorism.” In China, as in the United States, the lives of Muslims which are lost as a result of “terrorist” or “counter-terrorism” efforts are often unnoticed and unmourned. All losses of life leave gaping holes in our human social fabric, but why are some more grievable than others? What happens when a population is “terrified” by the discourse of “terrorism”? As in many other parts of the world, the concept of “terrorism” in China was strongly influenced by Bush Era American political rhetoric. Prior to 9/11, Uyghur political violence or civil protest was almost exclusively regarded as “splitism” or “separatism.” Since 9/11, as Gardner Bovingdon has shown, according to official state reports Han settlers in Xinjiang have …