[Bell Toll]
Take your seats and get ready for our
very interesting event today we have a treat
here at the MSA we've organized this event
to bring together a few people to
discuss a very serious but important
topic of Uyghurs currently facing
persecution in China so first and
foremost I want to thank some of our
sponsors this is organized by the Muslim
Students Association of Georgetown but
with the support of the Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim Christian
understanding I also want to thank the
Georgetown history department for
helping fund the event as well as the
Center for Contemporary Arab studies for
providing us this very beautiful board room
so we can enjoy a hopefully very
interesting and enlightening the
scholarly discussion before I continue I
want to make it very very clear that
currently this event is being recorded
by the ACM see you so being here you are
consenting to your questions possibly
being reported although they may be
edited out by the ACMCU however no
unauthorized recordings be it video
audio pictures flash photography or
otherwise are allowed for this event so
we please lastly really abide by that
rule as like the privacy of both of our
speakers and the general format of our event today
so in the future weeks you'll be able to
find a recording of the full event and
content available on the ACMCU website as
well as on YouTube on our platform so
without further ado I wanted to
introduce our speakers today we'll begin
with a couple speeches first by dr. James
Milward he's a professor of history here
at Georgetown University in the School
of Foreign Service where he teaches
Chinese
Central Asia and world history
Eurasians the the silk world and history
of the qing dynasty he's famous and
well-known regarded for his study of Uyghurs
and his advocacy for the Uyghur
issue and for Human Rights
he's also studying ethnic policy in
China as well as a member of Association
for the Asian Studies and central
Eurasia Studies Society so he will begin
with the talk on the context history of
the Uyghur issue and some of the current
problems that are being faced afterwards we will 
hear from mr. Nury Turkel Nury Turkel's
an attorney here in Washington DC
specializing in regulatory compliance
and anti-bribery investigations however
he's also regarded for his advocacy for
the Uyghur as a Uyghur himself he is a chair of the board of
the Uyghur Human Rights Project which he
helped found in 2004 and was the executive
director of the organization until 2006
he's also published widely and is well
regarded and speaks very often to media
organization after they both discuss the
cost of the issue and some of the
current activism and advocacy for the
Uyghurs we will move to a moderated
question-and-answer led by Matt Schrader
he's a China analyst at the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German
Marshall Fund he's also a Georgetown
student currently pursuing a master's
in Asia studies a very well regarded program he writes widely as well
as a used to work at the Jamestown China Brief at the Jamestown
foundation so so
please give a round of applause for dr. james
Millward as we begin our discussion
Thank You Velez and thank you to the
organizers to the Muslim Students
Association for putting this on it is as
said a very important very important
issue I'm glad to see such a large
number of people coming up at a busy
time I've actually given talks on this
subject in this very room twice in the
last six months I think I see a couple
faces who've been here before but
most people have not I'm going to go
very quickly through through some slides
you just kind of remind us or inform us
what is going on in in Xinjiang
right now - the three main categories of
the repression of Uyghurs it is of course a Uyghur
crisis as the crisis for the Uyghurs as
our flyer says but I don't think it
diminishes at all from that crisis
status to point out that Kazakhs
Kyrgyzs and other people who are
in Xinjiang and even engaged with
studies of their region
are also being pulled into this mess and
likewise while it is targeting religion
in particular Muslims it's also targeting
ethnicity and nonreligious aspects of
people's identity as well so I'm going to fly
as quickly as I can through some some of
the set up stuff so we have lots of time
to listen oriented for discussion later
on but those of you don't know where
we're talking about this is the Xinjiang
region in the far northwest of China
it's geographically and ethnographically
really part of Central Asia was brought
under Beijing's control in the 18th
century about the Qing Empire and really
a lot of the problems that we see the
Tibet and Mongolia or really even
Taiwan or Hong Kong you know are due to
this issue of how do you of China
inheriting the former Qing Empire without
really coming to grips with what that
means how do you go from being an empire to be
a nation state like that alright so this
I think is the iconic piece of tech
which underlies or rests above
everything going on right now
now the facial-recognition camera and
the first category of things that have
been going on in the region really is
the high-tech securitization the high tech
facial recognition cameras everywhere
with checkpoints all over limiting the
movement of people all around but doing
it in differential way as you can see
from this the caption here a photo taken
by Han are assured through
a regular gate while Uyghurs are
segregated out or people who look like
Muslim minorities are segregated out and
they go through much more scrutiny and
this kind of differential treatment is
very common in the general
securitisation of the whole region there
are checkpoints everywhere that police
vehicles everywhere there are facial
recognition scanners on police phones
and the people's faces and their ID card
numbers their blood type their DNA their
iris scan sometimes their gait that is
their walking scan that they're walking
printing their voice print all of this
information is now being integrated into
a vast database and available through an
AI platform to the security forces at
all times
there are police stations called
convenience stations located all around
cities in the region and repolicing
has been implemented so that you really
can't go very far without running into a
checkpoint
or running into police at one sort or another
armored vehicles are there lots of
policemen and armed police on the
ground scholar Darren Bylor mapped out
this period of police stations around
Xinjiang University which is mainly
attended by you know not minorities and
you can kind of see the logic behind
where they're been where they've been
located about where they've been
situated in the region in addition to
all that bio data that I just mentioned
and that in the data is data on also all
aspects of behavior been recorded
through surveys which people are
required to take through their workplace
or through their place of living as you
can see it includes of course your
nationality that is your ehtnicity your [Chinese] in Chinese your work status
whether you have a passport whether you
travel whether you pray how much you
you pray what your faith is all
sorts of information along those lines
and it's scored so you may have heard of
the social credit score that's being
implemented in various ways in various
parts of China this is probably the most
extreme expression of that social 
credit score system that's now being
experimented on in different places the
most intrusive and it has some of the
most dire consequences because ifyou get a
low score and simply being Uyghur
means some 10 points off the top then it can
control where you can go whether you get a
bank loan where you can rent job prospects other sorts of things like this 
it's a very very intrusive system of
data gathering and then being
implemented to control population so
that securitization would be broadly and
data gathering is one aspect of the
situation the second aspect of course is
the camps that we heard about but we're
still getting a sense of how many they
are and how large they are a lot of the
information came available or been
picked off of websites by scholars and
journalists and from satellite
photography some of it comes from
information released by chinese state
media and government agencies themselves
such as this for the iconic photo on and
this was circulated early on and you see
the message of this photo is quite
interesting right this is a very
different message than you get from the
content from the propaganda now that's
talking about reform schools or
vocational schools this is a message
showing how grim the situation is and
that these potential terrorists are
being treated
firmly so this was the first wave of
official propaganda about these
facilities to say look what we're doing
we're cracking down on these people and
the audience of course it is this
Chinese population as a whole and then
the son of the images that show how we
know about these camps and where they've burgeoned up really since 2017 through 2018
we've got series of before-and-after
pictures from various places
architectural scholars and analysts have
been working with some of these pictures
to figure out the numbers of people that
are being interned in these kinds
of facilities and I think our best
estimates right now and conservative
estimates right now are between one and
two million people something like eleven
percent of the Uyghur population and a
higher percentage since of the male
Uyghur population since men were singled
out and so you can see these facilities
are hardened at high walls they have barbed
wire they have guard towers and police
stations associated with them and this
aerial photo of the same place corner
down here is that point we were just
looking at gives your sense of the scale
of this particular facility but it's
been expanded even further since those
pictures were taken
likewise this facility here in Khotan
just down the street from that this may indeed be a re-education
Center something more like a school perhaps a mandatory school that people
have to stay in but just on the
street is a much larger center with more
prison like facilities and that too
has been expanding in recent years so that was very very
brief and we can talk more detail about
what happens in there I gave the figure
of maybe between one and two maybe 1.5 million
something like that but let's not forget
that that's simply people who are
interned in the camps through extra
legal methods in other words disappeared
into the camps they don't go through the
law system at all in addition to that
though going through the legal system
and this this is from publicly available
data publicized by the people's Republic of China
you see that between 2016 and 2017 the
numbers of people actually arrested and
put through the legal system into prison
jumped by an additional two hundred
thousand right and out of the blue and
that accounts for pretty much all the
increase of arrests in the entire
People's Republic of China in that year
so there was a sudden spike in addition
to hundred thousand arrests in one year
all right so the camps I suppose are the 
second aspect of this a third aspect
though which is been going on really for
several years but has intensified in the
last couple of years is a broader
targeting both of ethnicity and religion
things that were discouraged or perhaps
discussed in public materials before now
have been effectively illegalized because
the is is targeting is cracking down of
what it calls extremism but the
definition of extremism has expanded and
expanded and expanded to include all
aspects all all all sorts of everyday
behavior associated with being a Uyghur associated with being would be
Muslim you can see a list of some of
the things which can get people locked
up in in camps here refusing to smoke refusing to eat non-Halal brands and many sorts of other
things like this part of this is associated with a
campaign that's been going on for the last
couple years to sinicize religion and this is announced by
President Xi Jinping become a national
policy affects other religions
Christianity Buddhism even as well it
seems to particularly focus in an
architecture moving of crosses and crescent and star fields from the tops of buildings
you may have heard about the closure of mosques in Yunnan and the
threatening to tear down a big mosque
in [Chinese] so it's not restricted
to Xinjiang but under that broader
atmosphere
obviously is singled out in Xinjiang
targeted and likewise concern about
language concern about particularly the
Uyghur language and efforts to make
Chinese really the only language that
can be spoken in official contexts in
the region these are supposed to single
out various kinds of headwear and veils
various kinds of beards it's all which
are seen as abnormal and seen as signs
of extremism which could get people into 
camps again these things were talked
about and discouraged before and now they
are effectively illegal see it posters public
praying whatever
that means has been targeted really
for several years
and it's been an interesting shift in
the overall ideology and language
whereby efficiently to us talk about
religion
this is a mosque that's been closed it
has this banner poster up above the gate
which means an [Chinese]  so love the
party love the country this is a
truncation of a slogan that has been in
use in China really since the 1950s that
used to say love the party love the
country love the religion or love our
religion so they dropped love our
religion from this slogan that's been
around for decades perhaps most well so
much of this is really distressing but I
think that really indicates that this is
not simply about religion it's certainly
not about extremism has been this move
to literally erase Uyghur script now
Uyghur is written now in a modified
version of arabic script it gives you
the vowels it's actually a very good
script for the language what you see is
what you get so it's very clear but
because of concern excessive concerns
and noises coming from the top about an
arabization about everything 
people have become nervous about even
the Uyghur script itself so what this
poster here is it's hanging outside of a
lower school and it shows students
talking to a teacher and it used to have
both [Chinese] is hello in chinese
and then it has the romanization of it
there here [Uyghur]
it used to have that in the Uyghur
script above and someone as you can see
very heavy handedly as a plastic over it
to get rid of that Uyghur script in the
Arabic script like that and there are
lots of examples of this here's a
pharmacy used to be run by somebody
named  Haji well it is still owned
presumably by that person but he's had
to delete again in a fairly obvious way
the Haji and then one of the characters
[Uyghur] which represented in Chinese
and there are other examples of that sort of thing public editorials who's
been a big movement against halal and of
a scare
actually I think somewhat
analogous perhaps to the creeping Sharia
scare that was going around in the
United States a few years ago perhaps
still is about such creeping Halalization and the
irony is that Halal brands had to have
a little bit of a problem in China
because they had a reputation of being
clean and safe after so many food
scandals and so there was an issue of
people just slapping halal and all sorts
of things and the state having trouble
controlling that and so on but now
they've gone completely the other way
and they're saying that you know
anything other than meat from the
butchers you cannot call halal
here there we have a editorial by
somebody named Yusuf who's trying to
argue in the editorial that not eating
pork is somehow backward and
non-scientific if you're a modern
scientific person you recognize that at
the molecular level lamb and pork are
really the same so it doesn't really
matter if you eat it they're both edible meats so that's an argument put forward
and I think this is the Global Times you
see the kind of the thrust in this
campaign it often reaches ridiculous
ridiculous levels likewise here in an
argument here being put forward by an
interview with the mayor of Urumqi who's arguing that the Uyghur
people who are Central Asians who speak
a Turkic language related to medieval
Turkic of the Turkic continent and
actually very closely almost mutually
recognizable he's arguing that it has
nothing to do with the ancient Turkic
language rather has somehow derived from
Chinese people are putting this sort of
argument different time so this is an
effort to infuse false history to
actually try to erase the very obvious
historical background of Uyghurs and of
other minorities in China too and say that
everything is really derived from some
poor Chinese of [Chinese] ethnicity
ancient past all right so finally how
did we get to this and here I'll try to
explain a little bit maybe what's
happened in the political and
ideological field to explain why
somebody could think it's a good idea to
do these sorts of things one of the
points where we begin would be the
collapse of the USSR which had a system
of organized a top-down system of
organizing ethnic groups and national
groups that the Chinese system is quite
similar to and was in many of its ways
borrowed from initially so when the USSR
broke up and rendered into its
national republics this made many people
in China nervous perhaps for the wrong reasons
perhaps it's a false diagnosis of the
problems of the USSR and in any case
trying to set a marker there so some
discussions began about this now you
call it separatism unrest dissent in Xinjiang Tibet and
Inner Mongolia and among some other
groups that's really been common in
China all along and certainly the
treatment of non non ethnic groups in
particular Uyghurs and Tibetans that's
never been you never been good I think
it's probably never been as bad as it is
right now for the Uyghurs in 2008 in Tibet
in 2009 in Xinjiang there were
riots at a fairly large scale
and again this was set off alarm bells before
the leadership in Beijing and a lot of
discussion ensued over the next few
years about whether the actual policies
of organizing ethnic groups in China
were themselves responsible for the
fact that what what the Chinese
leadership saw is a is a problem that
the ethnic difference hadn't just
disappeared everything should really
come together in the fact that it hadn't
and that people were still maintaining
their different identities and seen as a
seen as a problem so there was a lot of
debate about that in the internet and in
party journals and academic circles so
on 2013 and 2014 there was a series of 
particularly prominent attacks relatively
small scale except for Kunming where
forty some people were killed in a knife
attack so serious attacks that Western
observers agree to call terrorism a lot
of the stuff which Chinese tends to call
terrorism any kind of unrest it's called
terrorism in the Xinjiang context but these
are clearly following that sort of playbook and
the reaction from the Chinese Communist
Party was was was immediate and has been
quite severe there was a new campaign
against terrorism announced a strike
guard campaign called the people's war
on terror which was rolled out with a
lot of fanfare Xi Jinping convened a
central ethnic work conference where these
kind of issues with what he talked about
and in it he signaled some changes in
the overall approach to ethnicity in China he mentioned that rather than just
material concerns the issue of ethnicity
would have to involve spiritual or
psychological attention as well and what
that was a that was a way of saying that
simply by raising standards of living
and economic development alone now the
party was recognizing that this would
not solve as what they saw as the
problem of ethnic difference they have to check people's minds as well and do something to change people's minds
and they rolled
out a serious slogan of four
identifications that all ethnicities have to
do the ancestral land the Chinese nation
the Chinese culture with the Socialists
filled with Chinese characteristics
so a much tighter focus on on Chinese
as either [Chinese] or [Chinese]
identity the sinicization of religion
policy started in around 2016 as I
mentioned before and in the same year
[Chinese] who was the first party
secretary in Tibet and had a
reputation of being kind of a fixer for
these kinds of rest of areas was
transferred from Tibet to Xinjiang and he
launched and he had something of a blank
check for securitization and launched
this massive program that I mentioned
before the budget went up something like
two hundred and fifty percent in one
year for security expenditures and they
hired something like a hundred thousand
new security personnel many in sort of
very low levels and actually many Uyghur and many minorities
as well and he began to build these
camps around 2017 now the camps have some
precedences smaller versions of them
have been around for more years in
Tibet and also in Xinjiang as well what's
different now is the massive scaling up
to levels where hundreds of thousands more people are in them
and also different now although
not entirely new but but much more
audible is this kind of rationale for the re education program which uses these
really terrifying metaphors of weed 
killer
you know chemotherapy and the idea is
that the sick as well as the well as as
well as the sick need to be treated but
people need to be inoculated against
extremism the whole field needs to be
treated with the weed killer in order to
get the weeds those kinds of metaphors
coming out again out of state media like
this and these of course one of the
things that really alarmed people so
much is it's a very similar metaphorical
kind of they're very similar metaphor to
sorts of things that we heard during the
Holocaust and elsewhere as well as in
in Chinese context with regard to Falun
Gong and political prisoners and
poisonous weeds for example all right
I'm conscious of my time
finish up very quickly here
the official rationale for what's going
on in these facilities which which may
include some that are more like schools
some that are much more like prisons but
the official rationale actually
dovetails very nicely with this kind of
with this kind of metaphor right the
idea is that people need to learn all of
this and they need to have their
psychology changed through this
reeducation process about China learning
Chinese and then of course it's said that
they would they should learn a
vocational skill as well now the
implication of this is that these are
poor people people who don't have a job
unemployed unsophisticated who are most
likely to be subject to an extremist
ideology and thinking that's kind of but
in fact the people who have been
although although people who fit that
that description have been put in the
camps as well so has really the entire
upper stratum of Uyghur intellectual
and cultural society and this is just
five five names including university
presidents and prominent scholars but
there's a list now that people have
compiled it names we know of some I
think it's 300 or more intellectual and
cultural figures who have been disappeared into the camps and so and as we noticed in that
survey that I showed you before foreign
travel having a passport those are
actually probably the most the aspects
most of concern to authorities and if
you think about what that means is
you know who has a passport who's
traveled abroad among the leaders of
other and other groups these are
intellectuals as people who are educated
they're elites they're business elites the
people who can go on vacation right and
ironically these are precisely the
people who China could point to
that would actually show the success of
the last few decades of policies of
economic raising standards of living and
so on right these are global and
national elites they speak Chinese very
well they probably also speak English
and so on and so those are the people
who are absolutely targeted and many of
course Uyghurs and others have been
stuck abroad don't dare go home because
they know the first thing that happens
they'll be detained and put into camps
[Applause]
well thank you so much for organizing this event and particularly for putting this event together in such a short period of time
and following him sensible is it impossible proposition but I will try my best to give you some
anecdotal information
The Uyghurs are experiencing the darkest
period in their modern history even
though the Uyghur people have experienced
something similar throughout the history
but this the scale of magnitude of what
is happening in the last two years is extraordinary the
US State Department recently put out a figure
eight hundred thousand to two million
people detained some of the US
government officials both in the
administration and the Congress have
described the the mass detention as the
largest internment of ethnic minorities
that since Second World War and also the
international pressure has been mounting
particularly since last August after the
the UN panel
publicly challenged the Chinese government
the Uyghur issue both politically
societally drawing a lot of attention in
my lifetime I never thought that I will
see this level of media scrutiny but the
the interest public interest being
expressed in a mild form by various
government officials and others
concerned others and that really
translated this momentum into a policy
action so I'd like to take this
opportunity to go over a few questions
and then I will make some
recommendations towards the end first of
all is this really vocational training
Jim showed us what kind of
people that the Chinese
government is currently detaining in
those detention facilities associated
French press journalists
according to the Chinese government's
documents coded official statement it
which says teach like a school be
managed like a military and defended
like a prison so and also the same
report is only describes the Chinese
official lines by setting up these camps
a quote break Uyghur lineage break
their roots break their connections and
break their origin end quote there's a point
earlier of Chinese government denied the
existence and punitive nature of these
camps until late last year by showing
some happy faces this is still happening
the cover story the narrative has been
restructured but the fact remains that
these are of prison camps
the recently a very senior level the US
government official through the travel
in Asia stated that the Chinese
government can call it whatever they
wanted but we need to call these camps
what they are they are internment camps
created to wipe out the cultural and religious
identity of minority communities and
ambassador Brownback and also said the
Chinese is at war with faith and it's a
word that they will not win
what is Chinese government's fear of
Uyghurs naming their children Mohammed
so the official government state has
particularly expressed by the United
States government and the reports done
by various media organizations witness
accounts and government's own publicly
available documents shows that these are
not really educational facilities and
also if if they are building educational
facilities there should be some somebody
needs to stop but various think tanks
and media reports describe the increased
the expansion of these camps an
Australian think-tank launched last year
reported after surveying 28 camps the
expansion rate within less than two
years of period is about four hundred
sixty five percent around the same time
reuters reported that of those eighty
two prison camps that they identified
through satellite imagery 36 of them
expanded as the area the size of 140
soccer fields and BBC  reported late
last year the Chinese government is
building the largest prison camps 
just outside of Qurumqi so it is
expanding it's still in the process of
building so so Chinese can call it 15
times that it's a reeducation camps but
you don't re educate someone with a
medical degrees honoraries doctors
degrees well-known scholars that Jim was
showing earlier and also these camps are
really instead to prevent terrorism but
the Chinese government has a few stated
goals one of them is they tried to
achieve social stability weeding out
three forces extremist terrorists and
separatists but when you look at the
mindset their rhetoric that the
Chinese government has been publicly
making in in in public arena should make
you concerned about their true intentions
last november the Chinese ambassador to the
United States [Chinese] a very high-level
foreign policy individual in the Chinese
government ridiculed the Chinese our US
government and other Western governments
by stating why the u.s. is using bombs
and drones to go after terrorists we
Chinese are trying to re educate most of
them turning trying to turn them into
normal persons who can go back to normal life so the Chinese government in
a way engaging in human engineering
as if the social engineering that they
have launched implemented in the 90s
2000 were not enough and also what kind
of impact the ongoing crisis
is having both the Uyghurs both inside
and outside of China often time we just
focus on the individuals for detained
but we don't talk enough about the ones
outside of China outside of those camps
and also individuals like myself live in
the free societies Jim showed us some
images the Chinese government
effectively created a police state
those Uyghurs who did not get locked
up in the camps have gone through a
surveillance state one of the American
experts so specialized in Xinjiang legal
issues like in the current environment
that of North orient even reviving the north
orient situation so anyone anyone can
be taken in to prison camps based on
those questions that they have to answer
travel history founded connections past
writings past expression of their
appreciation of the culture Uyghur
religion or being devout Muslim
even in private can be be reason for them to
take him to the camps so psychologically
emotionally the Uyghur people have been
broken in the society and outside of
China the Chinese influence has been
also exported in countries like
Australia the United States and Europe
the Chinese government quite comfortably
reaching out to Uyghur immigrants Uyghur
community members pressuring them to
stay silent otherwise there will be
repercussions retaliation against their
family members so in response to these
atrocities and crisis the United States
government has started to speak out
since last April initially a senior
official
Laura Stone from the State Department
suggested that global Magnitsky should
be looked at and implemented and then
followed by senator Rubio and others at
the US Congress publicly making
recommendations so I'm gonna go over a
few things that are happening in
response to the the atrocities taking
place in Uyghurs homeland East kyrgyzstan
before I move on and I'll actually
briefly talk about why certain
countries and governments are not really
taking up this cause as things stand the
United States government has been
regardless of what your opinion is on the Trump administration they should
be given credit for what they have been
doing on behalf of the Uyghurs in the
legislative and executive branch of the
government some of the Chinese
government policies especially the
influence campaign around the world have been
so effective particularly in developing
countries and Muslim countries in some
Muslim governments in some Muslim people
around the world actually come up in
defense of the Chinese government's
treatment improve occurs even Palestine
last November at the UPR Universal
Periodic Review in Geneva defended
phrased Chinese government's treatment of
the Uyghur Muslims and also recently
Saudi prince future custodian of the Two
Holy Mosques went to Beijing and
publicly praised Chinese government's
treatment of Uyghur Muslims the legitimate
question for him could be what is wrong with my name his name is
Mohammed bin Salman very simple and
also is hoping to grow a beard he would
have been a prime target than the
Chinese government's mine
based on this de-extremification
measure that they implemented in April
2017 Mohammed bin Salman could have been subject to detention facilities so even that kind
of mild form of response expressions of
concern have not been done by some
government officials that enjoys certain
level of influence over Chinese politics
today only turkey and malaysian prime
minister  publicly
expressed concern but let's don't forget
expressing concerns is one thing but
taking governmental action is 
another so we've been hearing people
expressing concerns the last two years
almost so where is the action where is the
outcry is this because the Uyghurs
happen to be wrong type of Muslim China
happened to be wrong type of adversary that you take on so where is the outcry
if anything like it remotely close to
what is happening to Uyghurs is
happening in other countries to other
people we would have seen the UN
Security Council call for emergency
meeting we would have seen ambassadors
being recalled but we haven't seen
anything like it
to this day just last week another
government official at the event where they
were releasing the human rights report
without making specific reference to the
Nazi Germany said since 1930s the world
has not seen anything like it so so the
narrative is pretty clear
I personally losing patience I you know
I work with deadlines every day I'd like
to get things done being part of this
public advocacy campaign myself since
last spring I'm just dying to see
somebody show a Churchillean
leadership and and do something about
this so the United States government is
considering two things namely one
there are two pending legislation in the US Congress one is
called Uyghur Human Rights policy act of
2019 it was introduced by senator Rubio
and Menendez of New Jersey one Republican one Democrat and
then there's companion bill currently
this bill has about 25 sponsors
I checked the status last night it has
25 sponsor that include some of the 
the presidential candidates
Elizabeth Warren Gillibrand so when you
look at it it's pretty nice composition
of bipartisan support and also there's a
companion bill which is also receiving
broad support this bill was introduced
by Christopher Smith Republican from New
Jersey and Tom Suzie from New York the
Democrat this bill is currently have 39
sponsors including Speaker Nancy Pelosi
we hope that this bill will pass
sometime in the next few months if Nancy
Pelosi it includes some of you
Ilhan Omar the new congresswoman
has been making headlines lately
so is Rashida Tlaib so there's something is happening in
the US Congress and also in addition to
this bill these two members of Congress
brad Shearman and Ted Yoho introduced
their own version of the Uyghur Policy
Act this one has 12 sponsors eventually the
two bills might be merged because
there's some overlap and the in the text
so so what do you do you you could do a
few things if you see if you don't see
your Congressman or Senator in this list I'd like you to
make a phone call and ask them when
they're gonna sign up we only have 39
sponsors on the house side 25 on the
Senate this needs to be done sometime
soon even though the US government
cannot go to China to punish a
government official this would be a historic
and very significant event to both
Uyghurs here and Uyghurs in China this
has very
provisions including
it has very specific provisions that
could be immediately implemented
including the implementation of the
global Magnitsky Act
you probably heard this term I can
explain to you what that is maybe in
terms of QA but this is one of the tools
that the US government has its its
disposal to punish human rights abusers around the world it's not a
punitive it's but it's more like a
deterrent effect we have two legal tools
that will restrict human rights abusers'
travel freedom of movement and freeze
bank accounts if they have any in the
United States and also this will appoint
a special coordinator at the State
Department which will be very similar to
the one that has been vacant for the Tibetan
people at the State Department but this
is all very significant provisions in
the proposed law and also one other
thing that getting there is getting a
lot of support is the last one in
requesting or requiring the law
enforcement to investigate the Chinese
influence harassment campaign of
Uyghur Americans or permanent residents
in the country so this is a very
significant legislative development in
addition to your support of these bills
I would like you to also use your
community in various Muslim communities
or others to advocate that others begin
involved under the normal circumstance
we would have seen movement in various
US campuses that we have not seen in the
same way that people show support to the
Palestine cause in the past so and also
organizing this kind of events could be
very helpful and finally I have to say
this very shamelessly that
we need a lot of financial support we means
the organization that I'm affiliated
with we currently lack of resources and
manpower we need to have at least 10
full time staff to work on the cause
right now but we have five full-time two
part-time paid by ADD annual grant
research grant and the private donations
I will end my presentation here I enjoy
Q&A much more than delivering
speech so I'll be happy to questions that you may have to help you understand the present.
[applause]
