Darren Byler is an American anthropologist and author. He is assistant professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. [1] Byler specializes in the Uyghurs in China and has written about the ongoing oppression of the ethnic group in China, such as through the Xinjiang internment camps. [2]
Byler has a BA in History & Visual Journalism from Kent State University, an MA in East Asian Studies from Columbia University, and a PhD in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from the University of Washington. [3] Prior to joining Simon Fraser University, he conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Colorado. [4]
Byler has worked as an advisor with faculty members and researchers at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University to build the Xinjiang Documentation Project, a project that documents the persecution of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. [3] [5] His research has been supported by Columbia University's Global Reports series and a Luce Foundation and American Council of Learned Societies Early Career Fellowship. [3]
Byler has been frequently attacked by Chinese state media, who have accused him of being an agent of the United States government, which Byler has denied. The Global Times , a newspaper run by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), has accused Byler of being an "anti-China figure" who makes "fabricated" allegations about "genocide and crimes against humanity" in Xinjiang. [6]
A labor camp or work camp is a detention facility where inmates are forced to engage in penal labor as a form of punishment. Labor camps have many common aspects with slavery and with prisons. Conditions at labor camps vary widely depending on the operators. Convention no. 105 of the United Nations International Labour Organization (ILO), adopted internationally on 27 June 1957, intended to abolish camps of forced labor.
The Ghulja, Gulja, or Yining incident was the culmination of the Ghulja protests of 1997, a series of demonstrations in the city of Yining—known as Ghulja in Uyghur—in the Xinjiang autonomous region of China.
The Xinjiang conflict, also known as the East Turkistan conflict, Uyghur–Chinese conflict or Sino-East Turkistan conflict, is an ethnic geopolitical conflict in what is now China's far-northwest autonomous region of Xinjiang, also known as East Turkistan. It is centred around the Uyghurs, a Turkic ethnic group who constitute a plurality of the region's population.
Islamophobia in China refers to the set of discourses, behaviors and structures which express feelings of anxiety, fear, hostility and rejection towards Islam and/or Muslims in China.
The Xinjiang internment camps, officially called vocational education and training centers by the government of China, are internment camps operated by the government of Xinjiang and the Chinese Communist Party Provincial Standing Committee. Human Rights Watch says that they have been used to indoctrinate Uyghurs and other Muslims since 2017 as part of a "people's war on terror", a policy announced in 2014. 37 countries have expressed support for China's government for "counter-terrorism and deradicalization measures", including countries such as Russia, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, and Venezuela; meanwhile 22 or 43 countries, depending on source, have called on China to respect the human rights of the Uyghur community, including countries such as Canada, Germany, Turkey and Japan. Xinjiang internment camps have been described as "the most extreme example of China's inhumane policies against Uighurs". The camps have been criticized by the subcommittee of the Canadian House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development for persecution of Uyghurs in China, including mistreatment, rape, torture, and genocide.
In May 2014, the Government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) launched the "Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism" in the far west province of Xinjiang. It is an aspect of the Xinjiang conflict, the ongoing struggle by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese government to manage the ethnically diverse and tumultuous province. According to critics, the CCP and the Chinese government have used the global "war on terrorism" of the 2000s to frame separatist and ethnic unrest as acts of Islamist terrorism to legitimize its counter-insurgency policies in Xinjiang. Chinese officials have maintained that the campaign is essential for national security purposes.
Civil Servant-Family Pair Up, also known as Pair Up and Become Family, is a Chinese government policy that forces designated Uyghur families to be matched with Han Chinese civil servants, with the families forced to host the civil servants in their home. Since the late 2010s, China has vigorously promoted the policy in Xinjiang. Beginning in 2018, over one million Chinese government workers began forcibly living in the homes of Uyghur families to monitor and assess resistance to cultural assimilation as well as to surveil religious and cultural practices. According to the official state perspective, the policy is to provide Mandarin language training as a way to better integrate Uyghurs and as a means for the poverty alleviation of the region. Policies bearing the same name have also been implemented in impoverished regions in Anhui, Tibet, as well as for left-behind children, widowed elders, the disabled, and in earthquake-affected regions.
The Xinjiang papers are a collection of more than 400 pages of internal Chinese government documents describing the government policy regarding Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang region. In November 2019, journalists Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley at The New York Times broke the story that characterized the documents as "one of the most significant leaks of government papers from inside China's ruling Communist Party in decades." According to The New York Times, the documents were leaked by a source inside the Chinese Communist Party and include a breakdown of how China created and organized the Xinjiang internment camps.
Since 2014, the Chinese government has committed a series of ongoing human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities in Xinjiang which has often been characterized as persecution or as genocide. There have been reports of mass arbitrary arrests and detention, torture, mass surveillance, cultural and religious persecution, family separation, forced labor, sexual violence, and violations of reproductive rights.
The China Cables are a collection of secret Chinese government documents from 2017 which were leaked by exiled Uyghurs to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and published on 24 November 2019. The documents include a telegram which details the first known operations manual for running the Xinjiang internment camps, and bulletins which illustrate how China's centralized data collection system and mass surveillance tool, known as the Integrated Joint Operations Platform, uses artificial intelligence to identify people for interrogation and potential detention.
Adrian Nikolaus Zenz is a German anthropologist known for his studies of the Xinjiang internment camps and persecution of Uyghurs in China. He is a director and senior fellow in China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, an anti-communist think tank established by the US government and based in Washington, DC.
Rushan Abbas is a Uyghur American activist and advocate from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China. She is the founder and executive director of the nonprofit Campaign for Uyghurs. Abbas became one of the most prominent Uyghur voices in international activism following her sister's detainment by the Chinese government in 2018.
The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act is a United States federal law that changed U.S. policy on China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region with the goal of ensuring that American entities are not funding forced labor among ethnic minorities in the region. It was signed into law in December 2021 and took effect in June 2022.
Merdan Ghappar is a Chinese model and a prisoner of Uyghur heritage. He became known for his internment in one of China's Xinjiang re-education camps in 2020. Merdan managed to smuggle video footage and text messages from his internment camp to family members in Europe, who then passed the material on to the press. As of 5 August 2020, his status was unknown.
Tahir Hamut Izgil is a modernist Uyghur poet, filmmaker, and activist. A leader in avant-garde Uyghur poetry in the 1990s, he is known for poems and films strongly influenced by Uyghur life. Originally from Xinjiang, he is currently living in exile in the United States. His experiences as an intellectual during the rounding up of Uyghurs and his emigration to the west is described in his memoir Waiting to Be Arrested at Midnight, published in 2023.
The Xinjiang Victims Database is a database which attempts to record all currently known individuals who are detained in Xinjiang internment camps in China. The database has documented over 16,000 victims. It was founded by Gene Bunin, who started the database in September 2018.
Perhat Tursun is a Uyghur writer and poet. He is considered to be one of the most notable modern Uyghur writers. In January 2018, he was seized by Chinese authorities from Urumqi and was later reported to have been sentenced to 16 years of imprisonment.
The Uyghur Tribunal was an independent "people's tribunal" based in the United Kingdom aiming to examine evidence regarding the ongoing human rights abuses against the Uyghur people by the Government of China and to evaluate whether the abuses constitute genocide under the Genocide Convention. The tribunal was chaired by Geoffrey Nice, the lead prosecutor in the trial of Slobodan Milošević, who announced the creation of the tribunal in September 2020.
Erkin Tuniyaz is a Chinese politician of Uyghur ethnicity who is the current deputy secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xinjiang Committee and chairman of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, in office since 30 September 2021. He is a member of the 20th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.
The OHCHR Assessment of human rights concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People's Republic of China is a report published on 31 August 2022 by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) concerning the treatment of Uyghurs and other largely Muslim groups in China. The report concluded that "[t]he extent of arbitrary and discriminatory detention of members of Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim groups, pursuant to law and policy, in context of restrictions and deprivation more generally of fundamental rights enjoyed individually and collectively, may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity." Human rights commissioner Michelle Bachelet released the report shortly before leaving the office.