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  • New Internationalist

    Sayragul Sauytbay

    Jun 08, 2021 4 minutes

    China’s repression of Uyghur people has gained attention in the West due to shocking accounts of the so-called ‘reeducation’ camps. But your newly published book, The Chief Witness, indicates things started much earlier. When did you first realize the situation was critical?

    I realized it in 2006, when China launched the so-called bilingual education programme in East Turkestan.* It was called ‘bilingual’, but in reality it enforced the teaching of Mandarin across the region – it was a project to assimilate minorities. In the schools of Kazakh and Uyghur people, the natives of this land, children were forced to learn Mandarin. Everything was done to wipe out their ethnolinguistic identities.

    But let me be clear: the

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