Montreal's Uyghur activists push for wider awareness

Today on Metropolis Savanna Craig returns for our segment Hello, Good Byline where we check in with CUTV’s journalists to discuss things they have been covering.

Today Savanna discusses a protest she attended that was organized by Montreal’s Uyghur community. the protest was a commemoration of the Ghulja Massacre that occurred 27 years ago in 1997  Ghulja, in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of Chinaprovince, otherwise known as East Turkestan to Uyghurs.

The Uyghurs are a muslim turkic group that resides in and around China’s western frontier. The global population is around 500,000 with most of the diaspora residing in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Krygyzatn and Turkey. Canada’s population of Uyghurs is around 2,500.

Savanna discusses the small protest, numbering in the dozens, and their push to maintain awareness of this massacre of dozens of Uyghurs by Chinese state forces. The attempts to maintain visibility and awareness of the Uyghur cause comes at a time after multiple human rights organizations have brought attention to what some are calling concentration camps in Xinjiang. Many of the Uyghur diaspora speak of incidents where in the hours or days around a planned protest, they receive calls from anonymous numbers. Activists call these phone calls a type of intimidation and harassment they believe to be connected to their protest actions. This heightened paranoia and suspicion comes with the fact that many Uyghurs here lose contact with relatives in China as they are disappeared by police.

Savanna and Kalden also discuss the reaction against Uyghurs and other groups that shine a critical light towards China. Using comments on tiktok as a jumping off point the two reflect on the colonial nature of the Chinese state and how some compare and contrast the Palestinian struggle and the uyghur struggle in order to lessen support for the latter.