Nury Turkel: Nury, what can you tell us about the
growing dystopian reality in Xinjiang?
Imagine that you just wanted to go about
with your daily routine. You get up in
the morning, try to go to work, try to go
to school, take your children to
daycare, you have to pass through
security checkpoints. You are forced to
surrender your phone for data scan. You
are allowing the officials to do iris
scans, in some instance biometric data
collection, and while all this happening
you see non-Uighur individuals waving
hands or not showing any sympathy for
you
to go through a different method to
allow yourself to be subject to this
kind of surveillance, illegal search. So
that's kind of the daily routine for the
Uighurs, and it is so invasive and
pervasive around the region. Some policy
experts liken it to an open-air prison. Often times we focus, rightly so, on the
people who have been detained in the
camps, but the life of the Uighurs who
are outside of the camps is probably even
worse to an extent because it's
happening everyday to them.
