Tuesday, June 18, 7-9 p.m. | Covenant Hall

The Inter-Congregational Partnership Committee (ICPC) invites all to a special book discussion about China’s Human Rights Violations of the Uyghur people.

Join us for a facilitated discussion about Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide by Tahir Hamut Izgil. With his lyrically powerful prose, the author provides a personal and moving look at the persecution of the minority Uyghur Muslims in northwest China. For the Uyghur people, daily life includes constant police harassment, ubiquitous high-technology surveillance, forced labor, separation of families, and detainment of millions of people. Fearing arrest at any moment, Izgil navigated a very corrupt bureaucratic process that took him years to get his family out of China. He considers himself and his immediate family lucky to have found a home in the United States. (See context info below about the Uyghur situation.)

A New York Times review can be found by clicking here.

The book and others about this topic can be found at the Montgomery County Public Library, or can be ordered from a bookseller or found on Amazon.

This ICPC event is sponsored by Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church (BHPC), Bethesda Jewish Congregation (BJC), and Maqaame Ibrahim Islamic Center (MIIC), all congregations that worship at 6601 Bradley Blvd.

Context:

Gradually the plight of the minority Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang is gaining world-wide attention. The United Nations considers the Chinese actions to be a serious violation of human rights and the United States government has declared it to be a Genocide.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese government have imposed actions that affect the Uyghurs’ religious, cultural, economic, and social lives. In order to forcibly assimilate them, the government has arbitrarily detained more than an estimated one million Uyghurs in internment camps since 2017. Chinese actions have included forced labor, suppression of Uyghur religious practices, political indoctrination, severe ill-treatment, forced sterilization, forced contraception, and forced abortion. Experts estimate that, since 2017, thousands of mosques have been razed or damaged, and hundreds of thousands of children have been forcibly separated from their parents and sent to boarding schools.

International companies are benefitting from the products produced by this slave labor as part of their supply chains. Some of these products are components used in manufacturing cars, electronics, beverages, and clothing.