Watching denialist trolls deliberately target and detail Xinjiang experts, academics and those Uyghurs brave enough to speak out on here is appalling. But my sense remains that the real enemy is public apathy and unconcern

People are not without empathy. But the situation in Xinjiang isn’t massively legible. At the most basic level, the majority of people don’t know how to pronounce the words ‘uyghur’ or ‘Xinjiang’. That sounds almost ridiculous but I think it’s very important

The vast majority of people I know, even very politically aware people, simply don’t feel confident talking about this issue. And the historical situation of the Uyghurs isn’t immediately legible to people whose sense of politics was shaped by Europe and America in C20th

I wrote this piece, in part, to try and provide a way in for people who, like me a year ago, just don’t know anything about it. https://www.economist.com/1843/2020/10/15/if-i-speak-out-they-will-torture-my-family-voices-of-uyghurs-in-exile

Because once people know what’s happening, they do care. That’s my experience. Once you look at this hard, you basically can’t look away. And I’ve also noticed there is a groundswell of support for the uyghurs that isn’t translating into high-level press/media conversations

I lost count of the number of Uyghurs I met who said some variation of ‘people ask me “uyghur - what’s that?”’

That’s a huge problem. What the Economist did last week, putting them on the cover (like the NYT did last December) is of inestimable value for public awareness

Because people aren’t monsters. But if they see two words they can’t pronounce in a headline, you’re gonna have to fight very hard to get them to click on that article rather than any other. (‘Unpronounceable names - in THIS attention economy?’)

The most important step in this process, and the hardest, is persuading Uyghurs themselves to speak out. That’s already happening more and more, as the records at @shahitbiz demonstrate.

It’s impossible not to see that Uyghurs abroad feel that the state has a gun to the heads of their family. But the utterly brutal reality is that staying silent will not protect the people they love.

In fact, as several reports in the media and the records of @shahitbiz confirm, speaking out makes it MORE likely that the people they love will be released, unthreatened, safe.

I am, definitively, rambling. But I think denialists are a tiny, aggressive, widely disliked minority, whereas the uninformed comprise the majority of the UK, European, US population. As the majority of Uyghurs continue to stay silent, those are the people we have to reach.

Anyway, I’m going to do a thread at some point this week with my ‘beginners guide to Xinjiang’ list of articles. I have it vaguely mapped out, but if you can think of any that are particularly clear and unmissable, please do pop them in the DM so I don’t forget them.

And lastly I don’t want to overlook the way that experts - @Nrg8000 and @xu_xiuzhong are two that come to mind - have been continually and distressingly harassed throughout their brilliant work, including while they debunked the false claims made by denialists