Interview 1 - Arwa Rasool

The Plight of Uyghur Muslims in China:
Interview #1

For my topic of the plight of Uyghur Muslims in China, I decided to contact many organizations such as: the UHRP and the Houston Uyghur Society. Although none of them got back to me, after a long while, I was able to have an interview with someone working in Uyghur advocacy at an organization called Justiceforall. The person I interviewed was a woman named Aydin Anwar, who is Uyghur Muslims herself. Justiceforall is an organization that not only works in advocacy for Uyghur Muslims, but they also work for others as well, such as the Kashmir conflict. When interviewing her, she explained to me that her and her family have been in Uyghur advocacy and awareness since she's been in high school, around late 2015. Her advocacy has been able to make some big impacts, as she was able to create a viral op-ed about the plight of Uyghur Muslims for media outlet NowThis, and she told me she considers that her biggest success as of late. Relating to the plight of Uyghur Muslims specifically, she had told me that one of the biggest obstacles she and her colleagues have faced is that the Chinese people would send them threats and try to stop them from their advocacy and work in awareness. There was also one instance where an Uyghur girl was trying to bring awareness to the issue, and the Chinese government kidnapped her father, shaved his head, and forced him to make a video saying he's okay, and to tell her to stop trying to bring awareness to the issue. She told me that's just one of many obstacles that the Chinese try to throw in their way. One other obstacle we talked about was how many universities are backed by the Chinese, which causes their Chinese clubs and organizations to focus on everything, except Uyghur Muslims. She had said that this was the case at many universities, but that now they're trying to cut ties with China so that awareness of Uyghur Muslims can be made. One last thing that she told me that I found important was that, in this ongoing pandemic, China stopped all flights coming from Wuhan, but the only ones they didn't stop were the ones that were flying to Xinjiang. They also purposely kept open flights from the capital to Xinjiang, which meant that China was trying to get Uyghur Muslims infected with COVID-19. Lastly, when asking about how I can engage with this issue, she first said that Justiceforall has many ways to engage with the issue of Uyghur Muslims, and that just giving people the knowledge on what's happening to Uyghur Muslims is a type of engagement as well. She also offered to send me more links and information on the issue of Uyghur Muslims, to help with this Challenge Project. I think that my interview with Aydin Anwar was very insightful and helpful, since she's been in advocacy for such a long time, and because she's Uyghur Muslim herself. Her additional information and experiences was really helpful to hear, and helped a lot in terms of how I think I'm going to engage with this issue overall.

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