Halfway around the world, an exiled Uyghur linguist opens his laptop, connecting to students scattered across three continents for a language lesson that could have gotten him killed back home in Xinjiang. Abduweli Ayup spent 15 months in a Chinese prison for the crime of teaching children their mother tongue. Now he continues to teach, but the surveillance systems that drove him from his home have learned to follow him in exile.

Meanwhile, in rural Europe, a teenager felt so alienated by environmental catastrophe and urban modernity that he joined an off-grid settlement promising a return to "natural" living. His new community, with its disturbing historical “blood and soil” echoes, operates with the same transnational infrastructure as those fleeing persecution: Telegram networks, international gatherings, dispersed organizing.

And across the United States—once the ultimate destination for those fleeing authoritarianism—journalists, activists, and dissidents increasingly ask themselves a question that would have seemed absurd a decade ago: Where do we go when this place falls?

Each of these stories reveals a different piece of the puzzle: how displacement operates in our time, what sanctuary means, and what it costs to stay connected while trying to escape. Together, they map a fundamental transformation in how power operates in our era. 

Understanding displacement in the 21st century has become central to understanding power itself: how it is exercised across borders, how resistance operates, and how communities reorganize around new forms of belonging. This is why we are launching “The Age of Exile”—a special series investigating displacement in the modern world. For our journalists, exile is not just a humanitarian crisis or a theme. It's a lens through which to see how the world is changing.

The changing nature of exile

Whenever I think of exile, I think of my childhood. I was 10 years old in Tbilisi, then in the midst of civil war, and life had become a long series of goodbyes. We watched our world empty out, family by family, week by week. There was no gas, no electricity, no food—just violence, darkness and bread lines stretching for hours. Every week, another family would come to say goodbye: aunts, uncles, school friends, the family from the fourth floor. They were leaving for anywhere that wasn't falling apart.

Those gatherings, in rooms thick with cigarette smoke and the smell of bubbling Turkish coffee, were layered with contradictions: their grief at leaving mixed with envy that we would remain rooted, our envy that they had found a way to escape, and underneath it all, our collective mourning for all that was being lost—not just families and individual relationships but the fabric of an entire world being torn apart.

Back then, leaving was akin to severing. Letters arrived less frequently. Phone calls were expensive, the crackling line a manifestation of the distance. Communities dispersed, connections frayed, memories faded. The families who left became stories we told about people who used to live here, whose apartments now housed strangers, whose children we'd never meet again. 

That was exile then: an irreversible absence. 

But that’s not exile now. Today’s exiles carry entire worlds in their pockets. They organize resistance across time zones, preserve languages through apps, watch homelands collapse in real time through livestreams they cannot look away from. They maintain influence and identity across continents in ways that would have seemed impossible just a generation ago. 

But the same technologies enabling connection also enable persecution. Authoritarian regimes don't need to keep people imprisoned within borders—they can subject even those in self-exile to a form of remote control, of borderless authority. Surveillance systems follow activists across continents. Transnational repression turns safety into illusion and digital lifelines become tracking devices.

As democracy retreats globally, the space for sanctuary is shrinking. There are fewer and fewer places left to go. Belarusian activists now flee to Georgia only to watch the same "foreign agents" laws that they left behind become the law in Tbilisi, Nicaraguan dissidents who seek sanctuary in Costa Rica find that the Ortega regime's reach extends across the border. Burmese refugees in Thailand face detention, extortion, and the constant threat of deportation. 

Technology has transformed exile, as it transforms everything. In host societies that feel overwhelmed by newcomers, in origin countries emptied of their young, in the digital networks connecting them, people feel increasingly displaced from the world around them, displaced from belonging itself. Some flee this alienation by seeking communities that operate transnationally, constructing new forms of identity and power that reshape host societies. Others discover sanctuary internally—what Soviet dissidents called "inner exile," the psychological condition of being present in your body but exiled from your world. When your homeland no longer feels like home even if you never leave it. When you exist geographically inside a country but spiritually, politically, ideologically outside it. This may be the most common form of exile our age creates: not fleeing across borders, but fleeing inward.

Most exile journalism tells essential stories—refugees fleeing war, journalists escaping persecution, dissidents seeking sanctuary. These stories matter. But they're symptoms of something deeper. We're investigating the root cause: how displacement itself has become the infrastructure through which power operates in the 21st century. Our Age of Exile series examines exile not as just a humanitarian crisis but as the perspective through which to understand much about how our world is changing. We’ll bring you stories from frontiers others miss: on how identity is constructed and across borders, on how communities can cohere even when scattered, and how the same technologies that enable resistance also enable surveillance. 

Read these stories and please get in touch with me to share your own. I am on antelava@codastory.com

Where and how have you encountered exile: in your own displacement, in communities around you, in the feeling of being foreign in your own country? What stories do you want to see told? What questions demand answers? Your experiences and insights will shape this series, because mapping displacement in the 21st century means listening to voices from everywhere. Help us understand what it means to construct belonging when connection across borders enables both community and control.

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It’s never entirely clear who is behind the campaigns, or if they’re actively being coordinated. But the abuse tends to flare up during moments of political scandal in India. The country’s deepening ethnic and religious divisions under the Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi are plain to see in the digital realm. Trolling of minorities by supporters of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party is commonplace. India has used diplomatic channels to brand diaspora groups as terrorists, and has used digital channels to harass and disrupt potential opponents. Singh and other prominent Sikhs in the U.K. have received messages from X — the platform formerly known as Twitter — telling them that Indian authorities have demanded their accounts be blocked.

“I think most people have got fairly thick-skinned about these threats,” said Dabinderjit Singh, a prominent British Sikh activist and advisor to the Sikh Federation U.K., a lobby group. But then the killings began, and the threats got harder to ignore. In Pakistan, two prominent Sikh separatists were gunned down, one in January, the second in May. A third, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, was killed in June in Vancouver, Canada, in what the Canadian government alleges was a state-sponsored assassination. A fourth plot was allegedly foiled by the FBI in the U.S. “Perhaps the situation is somewhat different now that those threats appear to be potentially real,” Dabinderjit Singh said. 

Adding to the sense of fear is the mysterious death of Avtar Singh Khanda, a Sikh activist based in the U.K.. Khanda, who had spoken publicly about receiving threats from the Indian authorities, died after a short illness in June. His family and colleagues are convinced he was poisoned and are demanding that the British authorities investigate his death.

British Sikhs are just the latest group to raise the alarm over the import of repression into the U.K. Uyghur exiles from China and democracy advocates who have fled Hong Kong have been aggressively targeted by people they believe work for the Chinese government. Iranian exile groups and media have been hit with cyberattacks and physical threats. Opponents of the Saudi and Emirati governments have been surveilled and harassed online. The multitude of cases show how authoritarian regimes are more willing than ever to reach across borders to target opponents living in western Europe and North America — and how much easier that has become in the digital era. 

Democratic governments have struggled to deal with these abuses, but perhaps none more so than the U.K., which is diplomatically diminished post-Brexit, gripped by constant crises, and increasingly authoritarian in its own politics. While the Canadian and U.S. governments have been vocal in their criticism of India’s transnational abuses, and worked to reassure the Sikh communities in their respective countries that they will be protected, the U.K. government has been deafeningly quiet. 

“Do one or two people have to be killed in the U.K. before our government says something?” Dabinderjit Singh said.

Transnational repression on British soil appears to be rising just as the U.K. navigates a world in which its exit from the European Union has left its economic and diplomatic powers seriously diminished. The government, now stacked with Brexit hardliners, is desperately seeking new commercial and political partners to help it deliver on the promised benefits of severing ties with the world’s largest trading bloc. 

All this has led to some uncomfortable compromises. It’s difficult to stand up to superpowers (see China) or petrostates (see Saudi Arabia) when you know you may need to rely on them for investment and trade. 

The U.K.’s particular vulnerability overlaps with an uptick in transnational repression globally, partly because technology has made attacks much easier to procure and to get away with. Lives lived increasingly online leave many openings for attack. Emails, social media accounts or cloud services can be hacked. Online profiles can be cloned or impersonated. Repression can now be performed remotely and systematically in a way that wasn’t possible back when intimidating exiles meant you had to physically infiltrate their spaces. It is also a lot harder to hold perpetrators to account. Online harassment campaigns can be dismissed as the actions of the crowd, and can be hard to definitively track back to a government actor. Perpetrators of digital surveillance too can be notoriously difficult to pinpoint.

These less visible components of transnational repression work in concert with more overt actions, often using international legal mechanisms, such as arrest warrants and Interpol red notices, to put pressure on people, limiting their ability to travel or access finances. To give themselves cover, authoritarian countries have often co-opted the West’s obsession with national security, echoing the excuses made by the U.S. and U.K. to justify their own adventurism. 

“The availability of the rhetoric around extremism and terrorism, which arose as part of the War on Terror, gives countries a common language to talk about people who are dangerous or undesirable,” Yana Gorokhovskaia, a research director at NGO Freedom House, said. “It’s a way of catching someone in a web that everyone understands as bad.”

Uyghur communities in the U.K. have long complained about abuse from abroad. They say their online accounts have been hacked, they’ve received threatening messages over WhatsApp and WeChat, and their family homes back in Xinjiang have been raided by police. As revelations about the Chinese Communist Party’s massive “reeducation” camps and forced labor facilities in Xinjiang have emerged, these threats have increased. 

China’s reach into the U.K. became even more intrusive in 2021, after the CCP’s crackdown on pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong, which was a British colony until 1997. The U.K. government — which in 2015 declared a “golden era” of Sino-British relations — failed to prevent the Chinese government from unwinding the “one country, two systems” principle that gave Hong Kong its democratic freedoms. But it did offer an escape route for Hong Kongers, more than 160,000 of whom immigrated to the U.K. on special visas. Among them were many prominent democracy campaigners and activists. 

Former Hong Kong politicians and activists now living in the U.K. told me that they have had their emails and social media accounts hacked and that they have been doxxed and, they believe, followed by Chinese agents. U.K.-based activists, including the prominent labor campaigner Christopher Mung and the former protest leader Finn Lau have been put on a wanted list under Hong Kong’s National Security Law, with bounties of HK$1 million ($128,000) offered for information that leads to their arrest. 

In April, NGO Safeguard Defenders alleged that the Chinese government was running unsanctioned “police stations” in British cities. Those allegations were picked up by the influential right-wing media as violations of British sovereignty, which seemingly prompted the government to start talking in more robust terms about Chinese interference in the U.K. 

But the response — under a U.K. government scheme called the Defending Democracy Task Force — is mostly focused on tackling the obvious national security challenges presented by transnational repression.

What it doesn’t address is core human rights issues, like protecting people’s rights to free speech, free association and freedom from harassment, said Andrew Chubb, a senior lecturer in Chinese politics and international relations at Lancaster University who researches transnational repression. Security agencies don’t have a mandate to deal with human rights violations on British soil, unless they present a risk to the state — meaning that victims aren’t necessarily treated as victims, but as “potential threat vectors,” Chubb said. People facing human rights issues need to take their cases individually to court.

Framing the response in terms of sovereignty and national security means that victims of transnational repression — and whether or not their rights are protected — are subject to the U.K.’s diplomatic interests. 

“India is important to the U.K.’s future strategy in the Indo-Pacific. And Saudi Arabia is important in the Middle East and as a buyer of weapons,” Chubb said. “There's a very strong interest to overlook human rights issues where they concern these countries, which have not been deemed to pose national security threats.”

Simply put, this means that if you’re being targeted by a country that hasn’t yet crossed the boundary from trading partner to geopolitical rival, you’re largely on your own.

The concerns of the Sikh community in the U.K. wouldn’t have reached a wider audience were it not for a brazen attack in Canada. On June 18, two hooded men shot dead Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen and Sikh nationalist, in a Vancouver parking lot. Nijjar had supported the establishment of a Sikh homeland called Khalistan — an idea that the Modi government aggressively opposes — and he was known to be on an Indian government wanted list. In October, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau publicly accused India of masterminding Nijjar’s death. The Indian government responded forcefully, expelling Canadian diplomats and denying its involvement. But a month later, the U.S. announced that it had foiled a plot to assassinate another supporter of Khalistan independence: Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a dual U.S.-Canadian citizen. The murder-for-hire scheme had been directed, U.S. Federal prosecutors say, by an Indian government official.

A week before Nijjar’s murder, Avtar Singh Khanda went into the hospital in Birmingham, U.K.. feeling unwell. Khanda, like Nijjar, was a vocal supporter of Khalistan independence, and his name was reported to have been included in a dossier of supposedly high-risk individuals that was handed to then-U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron by Modi in 2015.

Two days after Khanda was admitted to hospital, he was diagnosed with leukemia, complicated by blood clots. He died two days later. The coroner didn’t record the death as suspicious, but Khanda’s family and community couldn’t help but suspect foul play — acute myeloid leukemia, the form of blood cancer he was diagnosed with, can be caused by poisoning. For Khanda’s supporters, it was hard not to think of Russians like Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated with a lethal dose of polonium in 2006, or Sergei and Yulia Skripal, who were dosed with a nerve agent in Salisbury in 2018. 

“If it was a Russian that lived in Surrey or London, then the first thing people would think about was poison,” said Michael Polak, a barrister and human rights activist who is representing Khanda’s family. 

Polak says local police didn’t investigate the circumstances around Khanda’s death, despite his family’s pleas — something some Sikh activists say shows how little attention British authorities have paid to India’s adoption of the authoritarian playbook. 

Dabinderjit Singh, the activist, said the U.K. has been too quick to entertain the Indian government’s narrative that Khalistan separatists are terrorists and extremists. After the dossier that Modi reportedly gave to Cameron, a study was commissioned into Sikh extremism for the U.K. government-funded Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats. It found that there was “no threat to the British state or to the wider British public from Sikh activism.” But the idea of Sikh extremism nevertheless began to appear in government studies and news stories. In 2018, British police raided the homes of five Sikh activists in London and the West Midlands, a county to the west of London centered around the U.K.’s second city, Birmingham. West Midlands Police said at the time, in a tweet, that the raids were part of a counter-terrorism operation, “into allegations of extremist activity in India and fraud offenses.” No one was prosecuted on terrorism charges as a result of the raids.

While Indian media and the Indian government openly amped up the supposed threat of Khalistan separatism in the diaspora, there were covert efforts to discredit the movement. In November 2021, the Centre for Information Resilience, a London-based research organization, uncovered a network of fake accounts, “the RealSikh Network,” on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (now X), which pushed out messages portraying supporters of Khalistan as extremists. The aim of the network, the center said, was to “stoke cultural tensions within India and international communities.”

These tensions are rising in the U.K. Jasveer Singh said he has tracked what he believes are other attempts to drive wedges between Sikhs and Muslims in the Indian diaspora in the U.K. — social media disinformation that plays on lurid conspiracies about Muslim men grooming Sikh girls, and vice versa.

There are also signs that Modi’s Hindu nationalism is spreading to other countries with alarming consequences. Rising support for Hindu nationalism and the online demonization of minorities has already led to violence in Australia. In September 2022, Muslims and Hindus clashed in the U.K. city of Leicester. Analysts and academics have suggested the deterioration of relations between the two communities was partly due to the growing influence of right-wing Hindutva ideologies within the diaspora. Supporters of Hindu nationalism have routinely demonized Muslims in India, and tried to portray them as not really being Indian. 

The South Asian Muslim community in Leicester is largely of Indian origin. After the clashes in the city, the Indian High Commission in London issued a statement condemning “the violence against Indian Community in Leicester and vandalization of premises and symbols of Hindu religion,” making no mention of the violence against Muslims.

With an election coming in India, these kinds of tensions are only going to grow, Jasveer Singh said. “It's only a matter of time before we see serious incidents in the U.K., unfortunately.”

Singh said he feels that the Sikh community is a “political football,” being sacrificed to allow the U.K. to pursue its geopolitical aims. “We’re well aware this is tied up in trade,” he said. “It is kind of frustrating and suspicious that the U.K. government is keeping such a distance from saying anything, especially after we've seen massive floodgates opened by Trudeau and Biden. It’s like, now or never. So I guess it’s never.”

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Toward the end of the meal, Osman got up and said to Virta, “Go ahead and finish up, I’ll go vape outside.” He kissed her on the forehead and walked out the door. 

When Virta came out of the restaurant a few minutes later, she saw Osman talking to two men. Initially, she thought they were talking about parking spots. Then one of them grabbed his arm and started dragging him into a car.

Virta tried to get to Osman but the car sped away, leaving her standing on the side of the road with his family.

Virta, who is originally from Finland, knew that Osman had been making YouTube videos about human rights violations in Egypt, but it was a part of his life she knew little about. Osman left Egypt in 2004 after becoming frustrated with the corruption he witnessed within the government while serving as an air force captain. He is now considered a deserter. Two years after leaving his home country, he set up a YouTube channel, @SherifOsmanClub, where he routinely criticized the Egyptian government. Today, the channel has more than 40,000 subscribers. 

A few weeks before traveling to Dubai, Osman had posted a video calling for Egyptians to capitalize on COP27, the United Nations climate conference due to be held that month in Sharm El-Sheikh, to protest the state’s dismal human rights record and the rising cost of living.

In the car, Osman’s mind was spinning. When they approached a turn on the highway that leads to the international airport he began to panic, fearful that he was on a one-way trip to his grave.

“I have seen very, very, very high-ranking Egyptians that have lived in Dubai and opened their mouths with a different narrative on Egypt, and they were actually put on a flight and shipped out to Egypt,” he said, referring to former Egyptian prime minister Ahmed Shafiq, who was deported from the UAE just days after he announced he was running for president in 2017.

Osman soon realized that he was being taken to the Dubai police headquarters.

He was escorted through the back entrance of the building. Osman waited for hours while officers moved frantically around the room, giving him no information. When he asked for clarity, they told him to wait and promised to bring him coffee.

“They actually made me coffee,” he told me, laughing. Osman’s sardonic sense of humor comes out in full force when he recounts the ordeal.

Osman was eventually taken from police headquarters to the Dubai Central Prison where he was made to wait while the authorities decided if he would be deported to Egypt. On November 15, Charles McClellan, an officer in the U.S. Consulate in Dubai, told Virta that Interpol had issued a red notice and extradition case number for Osman.

A few days later, Virta sent an email to Radha Stirling in Windsor, a town in southeast England, pleading for assistance. “Sherif’s deportation to Egypt is a death penalty without a fair trial!” Virta wrote.

Stirling, the CEO of an organization called Detained in Dubai, was no stranger to these kinds of cases. Knowing that the United Arab Emirates could extradite a U.S. citizen to Egypt in the dark of night, Stirling acted quickly. She contacted the American embassy to offer advice, tried to rally support from U.S. politicians and sought media coverage of the case.

And then something strange happened. McClellan told Stirling that he’d gotten new information: According to the UAE, Osman was detained on a “red notice” issued by a less well-known organization: the Arab Interior Ministers Council. An Emirati official speaking to The Guardian confirmed the same.

When Osman learned it was not Interpol but rather the Arab Interior Ministers Council pursuing the case, his heart sank. “That’s when I was like, I’m fucked,” he told me.

A body made up of the interior ministries of all 22 Arab League states, the Arab Interior Ministers Council was established in the 1980s to strengthen cooperation between Arab states on internal security and combating crime. In recent years, it has played an increasingly visible role in extradition cases between Arab countries, particularly in cases that appear to be politically-motivated.

Experts I spoke with say that the shift has occurred as some of the Council’s member states, including the UAE and Egypt, have become notorious for abusing Interpol’s system. Although it is often portrayed in the media as an international police force with armed agents and the power to investigate crimes, Interpol is best understood as an electronic bulletin board where states can post “wanted” notices and other information about suspected criminals. Arab League states are increasingly posting red notices via Interpol in an effort to target political opponents, despite Interpol rules expressly prohibiting the practice.

Ted Bromund, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, thinks tensions surrounding Interpol may be driving increased cooperation within the Council, especially in politically-motivated cases. “My suspicion is that this Arab Ministers Council is basically a reaction to the fact that Interpol is maybe not quite as compliant or as lax as they used to be,” Bromund told me.

It was around 2018, shortly after Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi-born U.S. resident, was murdered in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Turkey, that Abdelrahman Ayyash first heard of the Council. Ayyash is a case manager at the Freedom Initiative, which advocates for people wrongfully detained in the Middle East and North Africa.

Ayyash told me that over the past year he has identified at least nine cases in which the Council was likely involved in the extradition or arrest of political dissidents, with some of them dating as far back as 2016. In one case, Kuwait extradited eight Egyptians to Cairo in 2019 following accusations that they were part of a terrorist cell with links to the Muslim Brotherhood. Ayyash suspects their arrest and deportation stemmed from a notice from the Arab Interior Ministers Council.

In a case highlighted by other advocates from 2019, Morocco extradited activist Hassan al-Rabea to Saudi Arabia after he was arrested on a warrant that The New Arab reported was issued by the Council. Hassan’s brother Munir is wanted by the Saudi government due to his involvement in the country’s 2011 protest movement. Their older brother, Ali, is already in a Saudi prison, where he is facing the death penalty. Another of al-Rabea’s brothers, Ahmed, told me over the phone from Canada that he is now extremely careful about where he travels: “For me, like all my brothers, it is extremely scary to go to any Arab country,” he said.

Agreements enabling more extradition cooperation among Arab states and other nearby countries also are being adopted widely. In 2020, Morocco, Sudan, the UAE and Bahrain signed an agreement with Israel known as the Abraham Accords, which established official relations between the signatories. Since then, Morocco and the UAE in particular have increased their use of repressive technologies developed by Israeli companies when targeting dissidents abroad. Last year, 24% of Israel’s defense exports were to Arab Accords signatories. In 2021, Egypt signed an agreement to strengthen military cooperation with Sudan after years of tensions, including a border dispute. 

Members of the Arab Interior Ministers Council are signatories to the Riyadh Arab Agreement for Judicial Cooperation and the Arab Convention for the Suppression of Terrorism, which prohibit extraditions if the crime is of a “political nature.”

Three U.N. special rapporteurs in June wrote a letter to the Arab League stating that red notices issued by the Council do not comply with member states’ commitments under international law, such as non-refoulement, non-discrimination, due diligence and fair trial.

A few weeks after Osman’s arrest, Virta returned to the U.S. for her job. She adjusted her schedule to work different hours, so she could be awake for part of the night working on his release.

Behind bars in Dubai, Osman was struggling to sleep. “The second I opened my eyes my head would go numb, the exact second my eyes opened, I realized I am in deep shit,” he told me. “I can count the days that I had a full night's sleep on one hand and have left over fingers.”

Virta was certain the UAE was going to extradite him to Egypt. But then, late one night towards the end of December, she got a call.

“I have some good news,” Osman told her. He was going to be released.

Osman was taken to the airport five days later, but it was not until the plane door closed that he allowed himself to believe he was actually going home. When the door clicked shut, he passed out from exhaustion. Osman had spent 46 days in detention.

This past July, Osman filed a lawsuit at the U.S District Court in Washington, D.C. against Interpol and its major general Ahmed Naser Al-Raisi, the UAE and its deputy prime minister, Egypt and its president Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, the Arab Interior Ministers Council, a UAE prosecutor and four other unnamed individuals. The complaint accuses them of international terrorism for their “kidnapping, abduction, imprisonment, prosecution, and threatened extradition” of Osman.

The lawsuit accuses Interpol of colluding to shift the justification for Osman’s detention from an Interpol red notice to one issued by the Arab Interior Ministers Council. An Interpol spokesperson said “there is no indication that a notice or diffusion ever existed in Interpol’s databases,” but Osman’s lawyers say otherwise.

Osman hopes that the case will push Interpol to agree to reforms, such as improving its system for reviewing cases in order to determine whether they are politically motivated. If his lawyers can prove that what the Arab Interior Ministers Council did was an act of terrorism, Osman expects this will make it much harder for Arab states to justify their participation in its functions. “Funding it would be very hard at that point,” he said, as it would effectively mean that the Arab league was funding a terrorist organization. One of Osman’s lawyers also is seeking an agreement from the UAE to stop accepting red notices for U.S. citizens by way of the Council.

Osman and Virta now live in a small city in Massachusetts, where they largely keep to themselves. “The speed limit is 35 miles and people don't say hi to each other. It’s New England, so everybody’s an asshole,” said Osman. “There’s even a word for it: ‘Massholes.’”

He sees a psychologist who specializes in post-traumatic stress disorder. Osman says it is helping him understand what feels like a “new self.”

Osman is trying to launch a cannabis cultivation business, which missed out on some vital funding when investors heard about his arrest. He stayed quiet for six months after his release, but recently went back to posting about Egypt’s human rights record online. 

“I'm back again, talking and tearing down the president and his regime and military regime without mercy,” he said. “I got the news that they are worried in Egypt about my case.”

CORRECTION (09/29/2023): An earlier version of this article described Jamal Khashoggi as a U.S. citizen. It has been corrected to reflect that Khashoggi was a U.S. resident.

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The European Centre for Media Freedom also came out in support of the Sabah journalists, condemning the detention and demanding that press freedom be upheld. But Turkey itself is a leading jailer of journalists, ranked 165th out of 180 countries in the 2023 World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders. And, according to German prosecutors, Erel and Albay were under investigation for the “dangerous” dissemination of other journalists’ personal data.

German authorities have legitimate concerns about the safety of Turkish journalists living in exile. In July 2021, Erk Acarer, a Turkish columnist, was beaten up outside his home in Berlin. Later that month, German authorities began investigating Turkish nationalist organized crime groups operating in Europe after the police found a hit list of 55 journalists and activists who had fled Turkey.

In September 2022, Sabah published information that revealed the location of Cevheri Guven’s home. It appears likely — though it has not been confirmed by German officials — that this was the reason for the arrests of Erel and Albay. Guven himself had been arrested in Turkey in 2015 and sentenced to over 22 years in prison. He was the editor of a news magazine that had published a cover criticizing Erdogan. Out on bail before his trial, Guven wrote that he gave his “life savings” to a smuggler to get him and his family out of Turkey. He now lives in Germany.

The ability of states such as Germany and Sweden to protect refugees, whether they are fleeing Turkey, China, Russia or Iran, has waned, as authoritarian leaders have become more brazen in using technology to stalk, bully, assault, kidnap and even kill dissidents. The Turkish state’s appetite for targeting critical voices abroad, especially those of journalists, has been growing for some time. As Erdogan’s government clamped down on media freedom at home, it has co-opted journalists working at government-friendly news outlets into becoming tools of cross-border repression. This has allowed the state to reach outside Turkey’s borders to intimidate journalists and dissidents who have sought refuge in Western Europe and North America.

Since last year, Sabah has revealed details about the locations of several Turkish journalists in exile. In October 2022, it published the address and photographs of exiled journalist Abdullah Bozkurt. The report included details about where he shopped. This was just a month after I met Bozkurt at a cafe in the Swedish capital, Stockholm, where he now lives. Bozkurt told me that he is constantly harassed online by pro-government trolls and because of the large Turkish immigrant population in Sweden, many of whom are Erdogan supporters, has been forced into isolation. It has had, he said, an adverse impact on his children’s quality of life.

Two years before Bozkurt’s personal information was leaked, in June 2020, Cem Kukuc, a presenter on the Turkish channel TGRT Haber, said of Bozkurt and other critical journalists: “Where they live is known, including their addresses abroad. Let’s see what happens if several of them get exterminated.” Just three months after that broadcast, Bozkurt was attacked in Stockholm by unidentified men who dragged him to the ground and kicked him for several minutes. “I think this attack was targeted,” Bozkurt told the Committee to Protect Journalists, “and is part of an intimidation campaign against exiled Turkish journalists with the clear message that we should stop speaking up against the Turkish government.” Bozkurt deleted his address and vehicle and contact information from the Swedish government’s registration system after the 2020 attack, but both Sabah and A Haber, another pro-government media outlet, still published his address last year.

Sabah and A Haber are both owned by the sprawling Turkuvaz Media Group. It is “one of the monopolistic hubs for pro-government outlets,” said Zeyno Ustun, an assistant professor of sociology and digital media and film at St. Lawrence University in the U.S. The group’s chief executive is Serhat Albayrak, the brother of a former government minister, Berat Albarak, who is also Erdogan’s son-in-law.

Turkuvaz says that its newspapers have a collective readership of 1.6 million. In April, a month before Turkey’s tense general election, in which Erdogan managed to secure his third term as president, Turkuvaz’s channel ATV was the most watched in the country.

A few days before the second round of the presidential election, in late May, I met Orhan Sali, the head of news at the English-language broadcaster A News and the head of the foreign news desk at A Haber. To enter Turkuvaz’s tall, glass-paneled headquarters on the outskirts of Istanbul, I had to pass through three security barriers. An assistant took me to Sali’s spacious office on the third floor. Sali, who was born in Greece, is small with an incongruously graying beard on his round, youthful face. He wore a crisp, white shirt. On a shelf near Sali’s desk sit a couple of awards, including at least one for “independent journalism,” he told me.

In the same breath, Sali also said, “We are pro-Erdogan, we are not hiding it.” He acknowledged that there is a risk in publishing the names of journalists critical of the Turkish government but said it was not unusual. “If you read the British tabloid newspapers,” he told me, “you will find tons of pictures, tons of addresses.” 

This is not entirely accurate, according to Richard Danbury, who teaches journalism at the City University in London. “It is not true,” he told me, “that even tabloids as a matter of course publish people’s addresses and photos of people’s houses, particularly if they have been at risk of being attacked.”

But Sali was unconcerned. He approached a panel of screens covering the wall. Some of these channels, he said, are hardline and totally supportive of Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the main opposition candidate in Turkey’s recent election. “All of them,” he told me, “are terrorists.”

In the lead up to the presidential election, Turkuvaz outlets such as A News and A Haber gave Kilicdaroglu little to no coverage. Erdogan, meanwhile, received extensive coverage, according to Reporters Without Borders. One pro-government channel, TRT Haber, gave Erdogan 32 hours of airtime compared to just 30 minutes for Kilicdaroglu.

Sali, who seems to have a penchant for deflecting criticism of Turkuvaz’s journalism by comparing it to that of the British press, told me he sees no problem with this lack of balance. “The BBC,” he said, “is supporting the ruler. Who is the ruler? The king. You cannot say anything against the king, can you?”

At least seven journalists who have had their addresses published by Turkuvaz outlets are alleged by Erdogan’s government to be followers of the Islamic cleric Fetullah Gulen, who is suspected of having orchestrated a failed coup against Erdogan in 2016. Since the coup attempt, Erdogan’s government has imprisoned hundreds of critics they refer to as “FETO terrorists,” a derogatory reference to Gulen supporters. Cevheri Guven — the editor whose address in Germany was published in Sabah in September 2022 — is often described in pro-government media as the Joseph Goebbels of FETO, a reference to the Nazi propagandist.

“The 2016 coup had a major effect on the media landscape in Turkey,” said Joseph Fitsanakis, a professor of intelligence and security studies at Coastal Carolina University. “At that point,” he told me, “Erdogan made a conscious decision, a consistent effort to pretty much wipe out any non-AKP voices from the mainstream media landscape.” The AKP, or the Justice and Development Party, was co-founded by Erdogan in 2001.

In October 2022, the Turkish parliament passed sweeping legislation curtailing free speech, including implementing a vaguely worded law that effectively leaves anyone accused of spreading false information about Turkey’s domestic and foreign security facing three years in prison.

Before Erdogan’s rise to power, Turkey did not enjoy total media freedom, said Ustun, the media professor at St. Lawrence University. But, she told me, during his 21 years in politics, “there has been a gradual demise of the media freedom landscape.” Following the widespread protests in 2013, referred to as the Gezi Park protests, and the 2016 coup attempt, “efforts to control the mainstream media as well as the internet have intensified,” she added. The overwhelming majority of mainstream media outlets are now under the control of Erdogan and his allies.

Henri Barkey, a professor at Lehigh University and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations, told me that Erdogan has “muscled the press financially” by channeling advertising revenues to pro-government outlets such as those owned by the Turkuvaz Media Group. Erdogan, Barky says, has also weaponized the law. “They use the judicial system to punish the opposition press for whatever reason,” he told me. “You look left and you were meant to look right, and in Turkey today that is enough.”

The media has, for years now, been used as a tool of transnational repression, says Fitsanakis. In 2020, for instance, the U.K. expelled three Chinese spies who had been posing as journalists. But, Fitsanakis adds, since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, intelligence services in Europe and North America, fueled by a heightened awareness of the threat emanating from Moscow, have been collaborating more closely to remove Russian spies from within their borders. 

The actions of other diplomatic missions too are being more closely monitored. Turkey, one of the most prolific perpetrators of transnational repression, according to Freedom House, has found itself a target of Western surveillance, making it harder for the state to place intelligence operatives inside embassies. In lieu of this traditional avenue for embedding intelligence sources in foreign countries, Fitsanakis believes, governments are turning in greater numbers toward friendly journalists. “It’s the perfect cover,” Fitsanakis told me. “You have access to influential people, and you get to ask a lot of questions without seeming strange.”

Erdogan’s re-election, experts fear, could mean he will further clamp down on democratic freedoms. Barkey believes there will be a brain drain as more intellectuals and critics leave Turkey for more congenial shores. But the evidence suggests that an emboldened Erdogan can still reach them.

“We might see a lot more emphasis on silencing any kind of opposition to Erdogan in the coming years,” Fitsanakis told me. “And because much of the opposition to Erdogan is now coming from Turks abroad, that fight is going to transfer to European soil.”

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Hundreds of Uyghurs fled China in 2014, as the Chinese authorities launched a crackdown on the Muslim-majority ethnic group native to the northwest region of Xinjiang. The aim, the government said, was to stamp out extremism and separatist movements in the region. The authorities called it the “strike hard campaign against violent terrorism” and created a program of repression to closely monitor, surveil and control the Uyghur population.

The authorities bulldozed mosques, saw any expression of religion as extremist and confiscated Qurans. By 2018, as many as one million Uyghurs had been sent to so-called “re-education” camps. Across the region, an extensive high-tech system of surveillance was rolled out to monitor every movement of the Uyghur population. This remains the case to this day, with the Chinese police in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, reportedly requiring residents to download a mobile app which enables them to monitor phones. 

Back in 2014, Uyghurs seeking to flee the burgeoning crackdown were forced to take a notoriously dangerous route, known as the “smugglers’ road,” through Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand into Malaysia — from there, they could reach Turkey. Though Malaysia had previously deported some Uyghur Muslims to China, in 2018, a Malaysian court released 11 Uyghurs on human rights grounds and allowed them safe passage to Turkey. By September 2020, despite Chinese anger, Malaysia declared it would not extradite Uyghurs seeking refuge in a third country. 

But before they could make it to Malaysia, many Uyghurs were detained by the immigration authorities in Thailand and returned to China. Human rights groups condemned the deportations, saying that Uyghurs returned to China “disappear into a black hole” and face persecution and torture upon their return. 

Hashim Mohammed, 26, was 16 when he left China. He spent three years in detention in Thailand before making a dramatic escape. He now lives in Turkey — but thoughts of his fellow inmates, who remain in Thai detention, are with him every day. This is his account of how he made it out of China through the smugglers’ road. 

Hashim’s Story 

On New Year’s Day, in 2019, I was released from immigration detention in Istanbul. It was late evening — around 10 p.m. It was the first time I had walked free in five years. And it was the end of my long journey from China’s Uyghur region, which I ran away from in 2014. 

It started back in the city of Urumqi in Xinjiang, 10 years ago now. I was 16 years old and had recently begun boxing at my local gym. In the evenings, I started to spend some time reciting and reading the Quran. The local Chinese authorities were beginning their mass crackdown on Uyghurs in the name of combating terrorist activity. Any display of religious devotion was deemed suspicious. 

The local police considered my boxing gym to be a sinister and dangerous place. They kept asking us what we were training for. They thought we were planning something. They started arresting some of the students and coaches at the gym. Police visited my house and went through all my possessions. They couldn’t find anything.

After some time, the gym closed — like lots of similar gyms all over the Uyghur region. People around me were being arrested, seemingly for no good reason. I realized I couldn't live the way I wanted in my hometown, so I decided to leave. 

At that time, thousands of Uyghurs were doing the same thing. I had heard of a smugglers’ route out of China, through Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and eventually to Malaysia. From there, I’d be able to fly to Turkey and start a new life. We called it the “illegal way.” It’s very quick once you leave China, it only takes seven days to get to Malaysia. 

At the border leaving China, we met with the smugglers who would get us out. They stuffed around 12 of us into a regular car, all of us sitting on top of each other. I was traveling alone, I didn’t know anyone else in the car. 

I remember one guy, Muhammad, who I met in the car for the first time. He was from the same area as me. He was with his wife and two kids and seemed friendly. 

The road was terrifying. There was a pit of anxiety in my stomach as the smugglers drove through the mountainous jungle at night at breakneck speed. I watched the speedometer needle always hovering above 100 kmph (about 60 mph), and I couldn’t help thinking about how many people were in the car. We heard about another group, crossing the border into Cambodia in a boat, who nearly drowned. After just seven days, we reached Thailand and the border with Malaysia. We sat in the jungle, trying to decide what to do — we could try climbing the border fence. 

But we also saw a rumor on WhatsApp that if you handed yourself in to the Thai border police, they would let you cross the border to Malaysia and fly onward to Turkey within 15 days. People on the app were saying some Uyghurs had already managed it. At this point, we’d been sleeping outside, in the jungle, for days, and we believed it. We handed ourselves in, and the police took a group of us to a local immigration detention center in the Thai jungle. 

Fifteen days slipped by, and we began to realize that we’d made a terrible mistake. With every day that passed, our hope that we would get to Turkey slipped away a little further. No one came to help us. We were worried that the Thai authorities would send us back to China.  

I was put in a dark cell with 12 guys — all Uyghurs like me, all trying to escape China. Throughout our time in jail, we lived under the constant threat of being deported back to China. We were terrified of that prospect. We tried many times to escape.

I never imagined that I would stay there for three years and eight months, from the ages of 16 to 19. I used to dream about what life would be like if I was free. I thought about simply walking down the street and could hardly imagine it. 

There were no windows in the cell, just a little vent at the very top of the room. We used to take turns climbing up, using a rope made out of plastic bags, just to look through the vent. Through the grill, we could see that Thailand was very beautiful. It was so lush. We had never seen such a beautiful, green place. Day and night, we climbed up the rope to peer out through the vent. 

We knew that the detention center we were in was very close to the Thai border. One guy who I shared the cell with figured out something about the place we were in. The walls, he said, in this building built for the heat were actually very thin.

We managed to get hold of two tools. A spoon and an old nail. 

We began, painstakingly, to gouge a hole in the wall of the bathroom block. We took turns. Day and night, we had a rota and quietly scraped away at the wall, making a hole just big enough for a man to fit through. There was a camera in the cell, and the guards checked on us frequently. But they didn’t check the bathroom — and the camera couldn’t see into the bathroom area, either. 

We all got calluses and cuts on our hands from using these flimsy tools to try to dig through the wall. We each pulled 30-minute shifts. To the guards watching the cameras, it looked like we were just taking showers. 

The guys in the cell next door to ours were working on a hole of their own. We planned to coordinate our breakout at the same time, at 2 a.m. on a Sunday. 

We dug through as much of the wall as we could, without breaking through to the other side until the last moment. There was just a thin layer of plaster between us and the outside world. We drew numbers to decide who would be the first to climb out. Out of 12 people, I drew the number four. A good number, all things considered. My friend Muhammad, who I met on the journey to Thailand, pulled number nine. Not so good.

That Sunday, we all pretended to go to sleep. With the guards checking on us every few hours, we lay there with our eyes shut and our minds racing, thinking about what we were about to do.

Two a.m. rolled around. Quietly, carefully, we removed the last piece of the wall, pulling it inward without a noise. The first, second and third man slipped through the hole, jumped down and ran out of the compound. Then it was my turn. I clambered through the hole, jumped over the barbed wire below me and ran.

The guys in the next cell had not prepared things as well as us. They still had a thick layer of cement to break through. They ripped the basin off the bathroom wall and used it to smash through the last layer. It made an awful sound. The guards came running. Six more guys got out after me, but two didn’t make it. One of them was Muhammad. 

The detention center we were in wasn’t very high security. The gate into the complex had been left unlocked. We sprinted out of it, barefoot, in just our shorts and t-shirts, and ran into the jungle on the other side of the road, where we all scattered. 

I hid out for eight days in the jungle as the guards and the local police tracked us through the trees. I had saved some food from my prison rations and drank the water that dripped off the leaves in the humidity.

It’s impossible to move through the undergrowth without making a lot of noise — so when the police got close, we had to just stay dead still and hope they wouldn’t find us. At one point, we were completely surrounded by the police and could hear their voices and their dogs barking and see their flashlights through the trees. It was terrifying.

Finally, after days of walking and hiding in the undergrowth, we made it to Thailand’s border with Malaysia. It’s a tall fence, topped with barbed wire. I managed to climb it and jump over — but the guy I was with couldn’t make it. He was later caught and sent back to detention.

In total, there were 20 of us who had managed to break out of the Thai jail. Eleven made it to Malaysia. The others were caught and are still in the detention center in Thailand. 

After spending another year in detention in Malaysia, I was finally able to leave for Turkey. After two months in Turkish immigration detention, I walked free. I had spent my best years — from the age of 16 until 21 — in a cell. I feel such sorrow when I think of the others who didn’t make it. It’s a helpless feeling, knowing they’re still in there, living under the threat of being sent back to China. 

Now I have a good life in Istanbul. Every morning, I go to the boxing gym. I’d like to get married and start my own family here. But half of me lives in my home region, and my dream is to one day go back to my home country.

Muhammad, my friend who I met on the smuggler’s road, is still in the Thai jail. He’s such an open and friendly person, and he was like my older brother inside. When the hope drained out of me and I broke down, he always reassured me and tried to calm me down. He would tell me stories about the history of Islam and the history of the Uyghur people. I’ll always be grateful to him for that. I think about him, and the other Uyghurs still trapped in Thailand, all the time.

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As a people subject to ongoing repression in China — or genocide, as a U.S. congressional committee heard in Washington, D.C. last week — it could appear the Uyghurs have found peace in Turkey, a space where they can preserve and even revive their language and literature. 

But on Tuesday, March 14, the Kutadgu Bilik bookshop was raided by the Turkish police. They dragged books out in large bags to a van parked outside.

The first time the police raided the shop in August 2022, they confiscated hundreds of books. This time, members of the Uyghur community protested. Some lay down in front of the police van to prevent it from leaving.

“This shop is a solution for us,” the owner, Abdulla Turkistanli, told me, a day after the police raid. “We can teach our next generations here, we can keep our culture alive.”

Uyghur bookstores in Istanbul play a vital role in sustaining the culture, in giving Uyghurs across generations and continents access to their language and history. Estimates of the Uyghur population in Turkey vary from over 50,000 to around 150,000, making it probably the largest community of Uyghurs outside their traditional home in Xinjiang, a vast region in northwest China that borders several Central Asian countries, Russia, Pakistan and India.

For close to a decade now, the Chinese state has been conducting a violent crackdown on its Uyghur population. This campaign, which has increased in intensity since 2017, extends far beyond China’s borders. Uyghurs in the diaspora are subject to surveillance, while their families back home are sent to re-education centers and prisons where many have been tortured and raped. Uyghur literature has also been a prime target, with dozens of renowned writers, poets, publishers and academics disappeared into the labyrinthine system of internment camps. 

This has all but destroyed the small trickle of books coming out of the region, severing a critical link between those who escaped and those still trapped inside.

Turkistanli, the bookshop owner, wears his exhaustion on his face. Years of pressure from the Chinese state have left him depleted of energy, if not of the will to keep fighting. On the night of the raid earlier this month, he was rushed to a hospital with heart problems. It has been, he told me, a chronic ailment, first sustained after he was imprisoned in Kyrgyzstan after leaving Xinjiang in 2008. He says he was tortured by Chinese officials and injected with a mysterious substance. 

Speaking on March 23 to the newly formed U.S. bipartisan committee examining the rivalry with China, Gulbahar Haitiwaji, a Uyghur woman who was detained in a Chinese re-education camp for three years, said that the detainees were told they were being vaccinated when they were injected with undisclosed drugs but were actually being sterilized. 

Turkistanli was eventually able to leave Kyrgyzstan for Turkey. In 2013, he opened his first bookstore. At the time, he said, Uyghurs could travel more freely between Istanbul and Xinjiang. The Uyghur diaspora would return from each visit laden with books. In this way, hundreds, if not thousands, of books were removed to safety.

Over the years, the Uyghur diaspora community in Istanbul has added thousands of volumes to the Kutadgu Bilik collection. But the cost of reprinting these books is high. There are usually only two to four copies of any given title in Turkistanli’s shop. The Turkish police, when they raid the shop, say that Turkistanli does not have the copyrights necessary to reprint books. Acquiring the copyrights, Turkistanli told me, is impossible without the cooperation of Chinese authorities. Even contacting the authors of the books, if they are in Xinjiang, is impossible. Turkistanli estimates that around 90% of the books in his shop were written by people who have been swallowed up by the prisons and re-education camps.

He believes that the Turkish police are acting under pressure from the Chinese state when they raid Uyghur bookshops. In this environment, he told me, he does not know how much longer his shop can stay open.

It is a fate that other Uyghur booksellers in Istanbul also face.

In the district of Zeytinburnu, the once bustling heart of Uyghur life in Istanbul, Abdulhalil Abithaci told me he would soon be closing his bookshop. The pandemic, he said, and Turkey’s underperforming economy has meant that many Uyghurs — who tend to make less money than the general Turkish population — cannot afford to buy books anymore. Many, he adds, are leaving Zeytinburnu for less expensive areas, while others have left Turkey altogether to seek a better life further away from China’s reach in Europe, North America and Australia.

The first wave of Uyghurs came to Istanbul in the 1950s, escaping religious persecution under a newly formed communist regime in China. Subsequent periods of repression drove more and more Uyghurs to flee abroad. The fall of the Soviet Union brought a new era of controls, as the Chinese state increasingly sought to “Sinicize” Uyghurs by forcing them to assimilate into mainstream Chinese culture. 

For the few able to escape China’s harsher crackdowns since 2017, Turkey has been a place of refuge. As Turkic people, Uyghurs and Turks share historical, linguistic and cultural ties, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was once seen as an advocate for Uyghurs. But as Ankara has sought closer ties to China, the situation for Uyghur refugees has become more precarious.

Turkey is home to the largest number of refugees in the world, with millions escaping war in Syria in particular. The Turkish government, though, is itself a notorious conductor of cross-border repression, especially targeting suspected followers of a movement led by the Muslim preacher and scholar Fethullah Gulen who has been based in the United States for over two decades. According to a report by the think tank Freedom House, Turkey was second only to China between 2014 and 2021 in perpetrating acts of “physical transnational repression.”

It is because Turkey so often acts to repress dissent beyond its borders that it acts as a willing accomplice to other repressive regimes, including China, says Howard Eissenstat, a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute and an associate professor of history at St. Lawrence University. “It boils down to a transactionalism,” he told me, “that both China and Turkey see as part of international relations, since neither is concerned with the rule of law.”

Many Uyghurs living in Istanbul fear that the threat to their safety is growing, as Erdogan and Chinese President Xi Jinping become closer. Seyfullah Karatug, for instance, told me he feels his life as a Uyghur refugee in Istanbul depends on the whim of an unpredictable Turkish state. The fear of arrest or deportation constantly hangs over him.

I met the 24-year-old Karatug at the Uyghur bookshop Kutadgu Bilik, the day after the police raided it. One of his eyes had been blackened during the protests from the night before. Karatug told me he visits the store almost every day. As the only Uyghur bookstore in Sefakoy, Kutadgu Bilik closing would be a personal disaster. That’s why Karatug raced to the store when he received a WhatsApp message that it was being raided by the police.

When he asked the police if they had a warrant and filmed them manhandling protestors, a policeman punched him in the face. Video footage seen by Coda Story, as well as a hospital report, corroborates Karatug’s claims. Karatug told me his father had sent him and his brother to Egypt in 2016, fearing for their future in China. The brothers have had no contact with their family since late 2017, when they believe their father was arrested. Knowing the sacrifice his father made, Karatug told me, made him determined to keep his language and cultural traditions alive, to pass them onto his younger brother. It’s why Uyghur bookshops are so important to him.

For now, though, Kutadgu Bilik at least remains open. Once Abdulhalil Abithaci’s bookshop in Zeytinburnu closes, though, there will only be two Uyghur bookshops left in Istanbul. The impact will be felt beyond the streets of the Turkish metropolis, hurting the Uyghur diaspora around the world.

“Books are very important for the survival of our culture and people,” Dilnur Reyhan, a Uyghur sociologist based in Paris, told me over the phone. “If the bookstores in Istanbul do not survive, it will be a major blow. That is why I think the Chinese state ordered this attack, and the Turkish authorities executed it.” Reyhan, who edits a Uyghur-French magazine, added that the war in Ukraine had driven up the price of paper, putting the hope of creating new Uyghur bookstores away from Turkey further out of reach.

One Uyghur software developer, Memeteli Niyaz, has built a website that has around 3,000 free ebooks on it, 600 of which were sent from within China by an anonymous source. But Niyaz has already been forced to migrate the website to a new host after the one he was using received copyright complaints. He fears his website, too, will inevitably be shut down. 

A week after the raid, I visited Abdulla Turkistanli again. He told me that some Turkish writers had come to the shop and encouraged him to carry on providing books to Istanbul’s Uyghur community. Turkistanli had just donated hundreds of books from his shop to the community, something he does every year at the start of Ramadan. This year, he was more generous than usual.

If the store is raided again, he told me, it is better that the books are already spread throughout the community, where there is at least a chance they will be read, enjoyed and protected.

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The human rights court had determined that states that are party to the European Convention on Human Rights, which includes virtually all European nations except Russia and Belarus, cannot extradite people to China unless the Chinese government can demonstrate that the extradited person will not be tortured or be subject to inhuman and degrading treatment. This shuts down extraditions to a country that does not allow international scrutiny of its penitentiaries, underscoring international concern over the Chinese government’s widening dragnet that tries to bring home dissidents and critics living in exile.

But China still has the capability to tie down its citizens in lengthy legal battles by issuing Interpol red notices — an international alert that requests other countries find and arrest suspects who have fled abroad for extradition or other legal actions — while also deploying an array of illegal tools of repression. Despite Europe's attempt to close the door on China's extradition campaigns, Beijing has ratified a spate of new extradition treaties with countries outside of Europe.

In Liu v. Poland, the human rights court, which is based in Strasbourg, France, ruled that extraditing Hung Tao Liu, a Taiwanese man who had appealed his extradition from Poland, would place him at a significant risk of ill treatment and torture. 

The judgment “substantially reduces the chances of extradition of persons to the PRC”, said Marcin Gorski, referring to the People’s Republic of China. Gorski is a Polish professor of law at the University of Ludz who represented Liu in the case.

China alleges Liu led a major telecommunications fraud. In an earlier case, the Spanish government in 2019 extradited 94 Taiwanese citizens to China as part of the same probe. The human rights court’s ruling covers anyone facing extradition to China, whether they are wanted for political reasons or for white-collar economic crimes.

China’s attempts to bring home dissidents and critics who are Chinese citizens living abroad have been intensifying over the past decade in tandem with China’s integration into the global financial system and its emergence as a world power, according to Nate Schenkkan, a senior director of research at Freedom House whose work focuses on authoritarianism.

Beijing has pursued dissidents in all corners of the world, triggering a response from the U.S. The White House has sought to control technology exports that can be used by China to conduct acts of repression while boosting the capacity of domestic law enforcement agencies to deal with the targeting of Chinese dissidents on U.S. soil. Members of Congress have introduced a bill that would define and criminalize transnational repression in federal law.

Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine last year was a wake-up call for Europe to the security threat posed not just by Moscow but by Beijing. But it has been left mostly to courts to protect people from China’s expanding reach.

European officials are failing to take action when it comes to the threat posed by China, often relying too heavily on the legal system to sort out the problem, said Laura Harth, the campaign director at the China-focused organization Safeguard Defenders.

While in many cases it is unlikely that China will be successful in its extradition attempts, the burden of defending themselves means the targets are quickly bogged down in costly legal battles, said Harth.

Europe’s human rights court has come under criticism from governments in recent years, accused of politicizing the domestic affairs of countries in Europe. The U.K. has made attempts to ignore the court’s rulings on granting prisoners the right to vote, and ministers have flirted with the idea of quitting the European Convention in response to the barriers it poses to the U.K.’s controversial plans on national immigration policy.

But for now, the court’s ruling on Chinese extraditions seems to be respected.

A Chinese businesswoman last summer was detained while passing through Italy. She was on her way to collect her kids from a holiday with their father in Greece. China had issued an Interpol red notice for her arrest and then requested her extradition.

Enrico Di Fiorino, a lawyer representing the businesswoman, said the European Court of Human Rights ruling was an important part of her defense and was likely to have played a role in winning the case.

Di Fiorino’s client is now free from extradition in Italy, but if she travels to other European countries, she is still at risk. If an Interpol red notice is issued against her while she is in a country that the Chinese government has an extradition treaty with, she risks being caught up in another lengthy legal battle. Hung Tao Liu, in the Poland case, spent five years in prison while litigating his extradition.

Formal extraditions comprise a small part of China’s larger campaign to silence and intimidate its dissidents into returning home. Coercion and harassment make up the bulk of China’s tactics. In fact, extraditions accounted for just 1% of the overall number of people returned to China. Involuntary returns, which include kidnappings, accounted for 64%.

Dissidents in Europe live in a climate of fear, frequently surveilled while their families back in China are harassed by the state. Several European countries have been investigating these more clandestine operations, most notably the use of overseas police stations, which can be used to silence Chinese dissidents living abroad.

Italy has been accused of hosting 11 overseas police stations. Chinese dissidents in the country are relieved by Italy’s court ruling while still fearful of China’s reach, said Harth.

In December, China ratified extradition treaties with Kenya, Congo, Uruguay and Armenia.

For Reinhard Butikofe, a German member of the European Parliament, this is concerning. But he cautioned that Europe should get its own house in order before European politicians can criticize other countries for cooperating with China’s extradition strategy. “I think before we can credibly approach anybody else, we have to clean up our own act first,” he said.

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That was in 2015. A little over seven years later, the Egyptian economy lies in tatters. The canal project, a white elephant, is now a symbol of El-Sisi’s failed economic policies and his inability to deliver on his grand proclamations.

Alongside Egypt’s economic crisis — exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — is an ongoing human rights crisis that is receiving far less attention. 

On March 5, an Egyptian court sentenced over a dozen activists to prison, a decision that human rights groups around the world described as unwarranted and unjust. According to Human Rights Watch, the sentences were the outcome of “an unfair mass trial of 29 men and women solely because of their peaceful activism.” Many of these activists are subject to extended pre-trial detention periods and denied due process.

The Egyptian authorities also routinely go after journalists in these roundups and mass detentions. Reporters Without Borders bluntly describes Egypt as “one of the world’s biggest prisons for journalists,” ranking the country as 166th out of 180 countries included in the latest edition of its annual World Press Freedom index.

Earlier this week, three journalists, all women, from Mada Masr, arguably the last independent Egyptian news outlet, went on trial for supposedly offending members of parliament. The journalists had reported on serious corruption charges leveled against members of a political party that supports El-Sisi. Lina Attalah, Mada Masr’s editor-in-chief, who has taken full responsibility for the story, said it was “a shame that journalists who do their job in a professional manner should face complaints which could threaten their freedom, at a time when we need to… welcome any work critical to those in or close to power.”

But the opposite is true in El-Sisi’s Egypt. The detention of critics is entirely arbitrary and unpredictable.

One activist, now in France after spending over two years in an Egyptian jail, said that he’d “seen people in their hundreds that were arrested basically because an officer stopped them in the street, checked their mobile and checked their Facebook account and found a joke, or a post, or even a like on a post or a joke.”

Since El-Sisi became president in June 2014, human rights groups say he has imprisoned possibly tens of thousands of dissidents and activists with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been declared as a terrorist organization. Mohamed Morsi was the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate in the 2012 presidential election, becoming the first ever democratically-elected president of Egypt. He was deposed in 2013 in a coup led by El-Sisi, who was then the defense minister and de facto chief of the Egyptian army. The Muslim Brotherhood has since been declared a terrorist organization in several other countries, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, where it is seen as a threat to authoritarian rule. 

Both countries have long propped up Egypt’s failing economy with loans and bailouts, amounting to tens of billions of dollars over the last decade. Just last month, the Egyptian president acknowledged the importance of his Gulf allies at the World Government Summit in Dubai. “The most important point here,” he said, “is support from our brothers.”

But that support, Saudi Arabia has hinted, will now come with “strings attached.” Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, the Saudi Arabian finance minister said his country was “working with multilateral institutions to actually say we need to see reforms.” Commentators in both Saudi Arabia and Egypt have engaged in a flame war of late, with one Saudi academic describing Egypt on Twitter as a “captive of the International Monetary Fund.” The academic’s tweets were later deleted but he blamed the Egyptian army’s chokehold on the economy. 

While El-Sisi has consistently pinned the economic crisis on issues arising from the double whammy of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, experts have long argued that the Egyptian military’s advantage in almost all sectors has made ensuring sustained growth, revenue generation and foreign investment very difficult. The military, said Sarah Saadoun, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, “have a competitive advantage in the market, in both overt ways like tax advantages and less obvious ways like access to permits.” It means that the military is “gobbling up these huge public contracts. But what is the public actually getting from them in return?”  

Addressing the military’s competitive advantage has become a priority for the International Monetary Fund, whose loans to the Egyptian regime — amounting to over $20 billion since 2016 — have helped keep the economy afloat. The IMF, whose stringent conditions have often attracted criticism within developing countries, is intent on forcing El-Sisi to expand Egypt’s private sector. Saadoun says the IMF’s conditions are a step forward. “You need transparency, accountability, and not to be owned by the military,” she told me. 

Military mismanagement of the economy is a running theme through much of the commentary on Egypt’s economic woes. “There's this huge spending spree that's basically been ongoing, since Sisi became president,” Timothy Kaldas, a fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, told me. “And Egypt's external debts have grown by over $100 billion. What has been accomplished in that time?”

Much of El-Sisi’s spending has been on giant infrastructure projects, like the expansion of the Suez Canal. He has funded the building of a new “administrative capital,” of Africa’s tallest tower and of what will, later this year, become the world’s longest driverless monorail system. All this as the Egyptian pound has lost half its value against the dollar in just one year, making imports unaffordable and sending the prices of staples soaring. “None of these mega projects make economic sense,” Kaldas told me. “Why on earth would you build these things except for vanity?” 

Among the “deep structural reforms” that the IMF recommended in January were the reduction of “public debt vulnerabilities” that included investments in such major projects. The Egyptian economist Wael Gamal told Al Jazeera that these Egyptian national projects “eat money.” They have, he added, “a very weak economic rationality and do not create sustainable jobs.”

As Egypt is nudged toward making systemic changes to its economic policies, it appears to continue to get a free pass for its human rights violations. In November 2022, Egypt hosted the COP27 climate conference in the resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh. Activists and some media outlets took the opportunity to put El-Sisi’s appalling human rights record under the spotlight, but world leaders ignored the steady drumbeat of condemnation. U.S. President Joe Biden announced a “$500 million package to finance and facilitate Egypt’s transition to clean energy” but made no mention of prominent activists, journalists and writers languishing in Egyptian prisons.

A couple of weeks after Biden’s appearance at COP27, Sherif Osman, who called for protests at the conference, was arrested in Dubai and threatened with extradition to Egypt. Osman, a former officer in the Egyptian army, is an American citizen. He had made videos from his home in the U.S. for his YouTube channel in which he criticized El-Sisi’s regime and urged people to “wake up and take to the streets.” Osman was arrested on the street in Dubai, in accordance with a request from Egyptian authorities, and held for 46 days before being eventually deported to the United States.

Back in 2019, at a summit in France, then-U.S. president Donald Trump was waiting to meet with El-Sisi who was running late. “Where’s my favorite dictator?” Trump was heard asking, to the shock of Egyptian and American officials in earshot. “No more blank checks for Trump’s ‘favorite dictator’,” tweeted Biden just months before he took office. In truth, though, while the Biden administration has blocked some aid payments to Egypt on account of El-Sisi’s human rights record, it is a fraction of the annual $1.3 billion that the U.S. extends in military aid.

Mohamed Mandour, a fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, told me that the sum blocked by the Biden administration revealed the priority the U.S. placed on human rights in its dealings with Egypt. “Ten percent of their relationship,” Mandour said, “has to do with human rights.” The other 90%, he implied, takes precedence. Amr ElAfifi, a researcher at the Freedom Initiative, an advocacy organization for the rights of political prisoners in the Middle East, told me plainly that the “Egyptian authorities have grown to understand that they can do whatever they want when it comes to human rights and they won’t be held accountable.”

This week, Lloyd J. Austin III, the U.S. Secretary of Defense, arrived in Egypt as part of a Middle East trip that included scheduled visits to Jordan and Israel. He tweeted that the “U.S.-Egypt defense partnership is an essential pillar of our commitment to this region.”       

Whatever its economic problems, in El-Sisi’s near-decade in charge of Egypt, the country has consistently been among the top global weapons buyers. In January 2022, the Biden administration approved $2.5 billion worth of sales despite human rights concerns. In classified documents, France, another major supplier of weapons to Egypt, revealed it had participated in a secret military operation in 2016, which meant it was complicit in air strikes against Egyptian civilians. 

If El-Sisi’s authoritarian practices, particularly his relationship to the military, is significantly responsible for Egypt’s latest economic collapse, it appears it is those same tendencies that make him acceptable to leaders in the EU and the U.S. as a guarantor of stability. Egypt, for instance, is crucial to Arab negotiations with Israel.

What is clear is that the world appears to have little interest in stopping arbitrary detention in Egypt. And that El-Sisi, as Sherif Osman might attest, is increasingly emboldened to repress critics beyond Egyptian borders.

“Yes, in the U.S. you are kind of free,” Mandour from the Tahrir Institute told me. “You can speak your mind, you can advocate in Congress. But, on the other hand, the Egyptian regime will arrest your family members in Egypt and the U.S. government will not do enough to help release them.”

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The fallout from the war in Ukraine

This year, we have been tracking how propaganda around this war has been weaponized in Europe and around the world, particularly in Africa. In our weekly newsletter Disinfo Matters, we’ve stayed on the story of Russian wartime disinformation, such as the Kremlin’s use of social media to spread its narratives. We have also highlighted how Ukrainians have turned to photography and music, among other things, to mourn the Russian invasion, to express defiance and to point toward a brighter future. A major development has been the extensive, even unprecedented, use of technology like killer robots and drones in a war otherwise characterized by grinding, wearying ground battles in which heavily outnumbered Ukrainian forces have managed to force Russia to retreat from some occupied territories. While the story of the Russian invasion has been one of boots on the ground, including Russia calling up its reserves, an extraordinary and dystopic subplot is how this war, as one of our writers noted, is “serving as a testing ground for cutting edge, but unproven, technology.” Sign up here for the newsletter we are launching in 2023 that will be entirely dedicated to covering the global fallout from the war in Ukraine.  

Rewriting history

2022 has been marked by governments and regimes around the world seeking to influence, inflect and even entirely rewrite their national histories. Some of this has taken the form of quite literally rewriting school textbooks to reflect political trends and ideologies. One of our Big Ideas dove deep into revisionist agendas in Poland, Spain, the Channel Islands, Northern Ireland and Lithuania. In each of these places, uncomfortable questions are being asked about national identity. 

How, for instance, should Poland reflect on its wartime history? A right-wing government is using the country’s National Institute of Remembrance to spin a nationalist narrative about Polish heroism in the face of Nazi atrocities. It embraces and promotes a vision of Polish resistance, of ethnic Poles helping the country’s Jewish community, while refusing to countenance a serious conversation on Polish collaboration in Nazi crimes. Collaboration is also a taboo topic of conversation in Alderney, one of the Channel Islands occupied by the Nazis where they built concentration camps. Nazi crimes on British soil have been buried far into the recesses of the national memory but, some historians argue, it’s time to revive those memories. 

A simmering, resentful silence continues to hold in parts of Northern Ireland over the Troubles, decades after the Good Friday Agreement. Is it possible to simply draw a line under the violence without also finding a way for people to be told the truth, to grieve together and to move forward without burying the past? This is a question that echoes in Spain's Valley of the Fallen, where a national pact of forgetting has failed to erase the cataclysmic violence of the Spanish Civil War. People still want answers, even as others claim answers are no longer possible or too politicized. Meanwhile, the politicization of medieval symbols has created rifts between Lithuanians and Belarusians, as each nation clings to versions of its distant history as guides to present-day national identities.  

Cross-border repression 

Governments reaching across borders to harass and persecute their own citizens, whether digitally or physically, is an increasingly prevalent phenomenon that scholars label transnational repression. Some of the worst offenders include China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran. We have written about the few Uyghur journalists and translators who are able to tell their stories about the harassment they have suffered in Xinjiang. Surveillance tactics and censorship have made it difficult for members of the Uyghur diaspora to speak out against the atrocities of the Chinese authorities both within and outside China’s borders. Just months ago, the FBI indicted men it said had been helping Chinese authorities to execute a campaign to force political dissidents living in the United States to return to China. So alarmed are some members of Congress that they have introduced a new bill to jail those convicted of helping authoritarian regimes to attack dissidents based in the U.S. for up to 10 years. While this would be a significant deterrent and a recognition of the threat certain regimes pose to their own citizens abroad, questions remain about enforcement and sincerity when the United States’ close political relationships with countries such as Saudi Arabia come under pressure. This is a theme that Coda will devote much of its energy to reporting on as 2023 unfolds. 

Climate denial and pseudohealth

The ongoing Russian aggression in Ukraine and the resulting energy crisis are contributing hugely to climate anxieties, as European countries desperate for alternative energy relationships ignore their commitments to combating climate change by signing deals to exploit natural gas resources in Africa. Shifts to sustainable forms of transportation in the U.K. have stirred up virulent online debates over environmental policies. Shortages of medicines at the center of TikTok trends, such as diabetes pills touted as miracle weight loss aids, are affecting patients who are struggling to access their regular medication. Meanwhile in India, the government’s ideological priorities mean that it is pushing Ayurvedic medicines that have been insufficiently tested as a “natural” homegrown alternative to Western science. In the United States, radical anti-trans actions have been a focus of Coda’s coverage, including bomb threats to children's hospitals. Legislation passed in states like Florida have underscored attempts to push harmful rhetoric on transgender issues, rather than paying attention to experts or, indeed, trans people. 

The age of nostalgia

Our latest Big Idea series takes on our “infatuation with a mythologized history.” The series ranges widely. In Cambodia, the Vietnamese, rather than the Khmer Rouge who ruled Cambodia at the time, are blamed for the genocide of nearly two million people. In California, grieving the losses wrought by climate change revives the term “solastalgia” — the desolation felt by those who see their homes ripped away before their eyes. In Hungary, a right-wing government rejects the Europeanization of Hungary in favor of tracing its roots to a glorious, imperial Turkic past. And in Kuwait, the globalization of the 1990s was a way of life, rather than a trendy academic term, until the Iraqis invaded and forced Kuwaitis and expats alike to wrestle with questions of identity and home. Nostalgia for an imagined past, a somehow superior past, has contributed significantly to what we might also describe as an age of anger, a period in which countries around the world have become increasingly fractious and divided. Nostalgia has distorted the way in which we look at ourselves — our history and our present. It is a theme that threads through and connects many of the issues we cover at Coda and will continue to cover over the next year.

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“It was very quick and unexpected,” Lucy Usoyan told me over the phone. “You never expect to be under the foot of a president’s bodyguard.” U.S. State Department documents obtained by Usoyan’s lawyers indicate that Erdogan witnessed the attack and may have ordered it to be carried out.

Authoritarian regimes are increasingly ignoring the sovereignty of other nations to lash out at dissent abroad or locate and punish citizens who have found refuge in another country. In what experts label “transnational repression,” governments like Erdogan’s are intimidating people through online disinformation campaigns and, increasingly, by physically targeting them for violence.

The U.S. Congress has responded by introducing a bill designed to crack down on the targeting of Americans by foreign regimes. The Stop Transnational Repression Act, which aims to define and criminalize transnational repression in federal law, would impose a maximum 10-year sentence for those convicted of the crime. 

The bill “would be a very powerful deterrent to folks who want to try and undertake these actions on behalf of their governments,” Annie Boyajian, the vice president for policy and advocacy at Freedom House, said.

Figuring out how to effectively counter acts of transnational repression — which by definition are acts committed by sovereign foreign governments — is challenging for legislators. Freedom House has warned that it is difficult to distinguish “legal activity on behalf of a foreign power or entity from illegal activity, and thus to address transnational repression threats before they escalate.”

The bill has been introduced at a politically fraught moment. The bill’s co-signers are all Democrats in a House soon to be controlled by the Republican Party. And President Joe Biden’s ability to maneuver is constrained by energy politics and global pressures fueled by Russia’s war in Ukraine. In June, Uzra Zeya, a State Department under secretary, affirmed the Biden administration’s strategy to tackle threats posed by China by using tools such as imposing visa restrictions, controlling technology exports that could be used to conduct acts of repression and enhancing law enforcement.

In October, the U.S. Department of Justice charged seven individuals with conducting a campaign to surveil and coerce a U.S. resident to return to China as part of an effort called “Operation Fox Hunt.” The operation is part of a strategy designed to target people outside of China which, alongside Operation Sky Net, claims to have caught 8,000 international fugitives. The Chinese state says these individuals are accused of committing financial crimes, but some are dissidents and whistleblowers.

A weak link is federal communication with local law enforcement, analysts say. The FBI has set up a transnational repression hotline, but local police fail to “understand the full scope of the threat” posed by foreign regimes, Boyajian, from Freedom House, said. By codifying transnational repression into law, she said, the bill will encourage law enforcement agencies to take transnational repression more seriously.

Biden came under fire last week when a U.S. judge dismissed a lawsuit against the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, for the murder of U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The judge said that while he felt uneasy about it, his hands were tied because the Biden administration had made a recommendation that the Saudi leader be given political immunity.

The starkly different approaches to transnational repression committed by the Saudi royal family and the Chinese Communist Party are an indication of how efforts to stop and prosecute transnational repression are diluted by America’s wider geopolitical goals. The U.S. is currently taking an aggressive posture against China’s government, while countering transnational repression from Saudi Arabia risks souring relations with a major oil supplier.

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An umbrella term has emerged to describe how governments are locating their citizens across national borders: “transnational repression.” In a recent example in the United States, as a federal indictment outlined, the government of Iran targeted Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad, coercing her relatives and using surveillance tactics to attempt to kidnap and transport her to a country that would cooperate with her extradition to Iran.

In another recent case, a U.S. citizen was arrested on charges of spying on Uyghur and Tibetan activists with the aim of silencing their criticism of the Chinese government. Transnational repression has been especially trained on Uyghurs and journalists.

Combating transnational repression is different from counterterrorism efforts, Isabel Linzer, a Freedom House analyst specializing in transnational repression, told me. “If we're able to raise more awareness among security officials who work on counterterrorism, who engage with refugees and asylum seekers, then maybe you can catch instances or risk of transnational repression before they occur.”

In a recently released report, Freedom House found that in more than half of the cases of transnational repression, accusations of terrorism or extremism were cited to justify state-sponsored attacks across borders, allowing the abuse of another country’s security procedures to carry out campaigns of harassment and intimidation. 

Freedom House urged democratic governments to end the impunity enjoyed by perpetrators such as China, Rwanda, Russia, Algeria, Belarus, and Nigeria, and limit their opportunities to target exiles. The question for national security experts is how. Rebekah Robinson discussed options with Javed Ali, an associate professor of practice from the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, in a conversation that has been edited for length and clarity.

How in your work within counterterrorism and national security have you encountered instances of transnational repression? 

From a U.S. perspective, the number one actor on that list was the Iranian government. There have been times over the 40-year stretch when the Iranians have tried to launch terrorist attacks or assassinations against political opponents or dissidents. But the best example that caught a lot of people by surprise, and I was in government when it happened, was in 2011. The Iranians tried to basically sponsor an assassination attack against the Saudi ambassador in Washington. They didn't care; the attack would have happened in daylight in Washington, DC. There's been media reporting that the Iranian government has likewise thought about other similar types of attacks here in the United States. 

Many victims of transnational repression have been under surveillance and targeted by cyber attacks. When is this espionage? Should it be considered part of terrorism? 

When you look at the use of cyber tools to stalk, harass, bully, and collect intelligence, that wouldn't be, at least from a U.S. perspective, considered something that falls within the counterterrorism domain. But if foreign government intelligence services are using these cyber tools to go after dissident targets or opposition targets here in the United States, I would think that would fall amore in the counterintelligence world. And that is the question: what laws have been broken that could potentially build a case against one of these foreign intelligence actors or services? 

Are there ways that you can take these national security strategies to address these instances of transnational repression, or are they separate?

They're separate but related because you're trying to build an integrated strategy that brings all these different tools to limit their ability to conduct harm against us, either at home or abroad. When it comes to these kinds of operations in the U.S., we haven't seen the Chinese, the Russians, or the North Koreans try to engage in lethal assassination attacks. You're blending the counterintelligence world with cybersecurity, at times terrorism. Then you're trying to come up with a multi-tiered approach to limit these countries' ability to project their influence here in the United States. I think more of this is in the cyber world and less so in the physical world, although I don't think that's the case overseas; like, look at what the Russians have done in England twice.

Is there a deterrent that you think maybe deters Russia from carrying out these attacks on U.S. soil?

Well, I think deterrence might actually be lower now. All bets are off with Ukraine. So, I think we're in a somewhat unusual moment where the risk-taking calculus for Russia for lethal operations here might even be higher than it was in the past. We're in a different phase of conflict with Russia now. And, as things get more dire for Russia and Putin, they're not going to change the strategic balance, but they can send a message. 

Do you see that there might be a landscape shift to embolden repressive governments to take on lethal tactics in the U.S.?

I think the lethal part is still the lowest probability because it engenders the highest consequences. But the cyber world now makes it a more wide-open playing field for these repressive governments to go after targets here.

Are there policy deterrents?  

Yeah, there's a range of policy tools. You can use a naming and shaming sort of tactic. You can add more sanctions. You can do things on the diplomatic side and build pressure campaigns. With some governments, that may not really change their behavior, but you're trying to do the best you can. 

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They told him how they “dealt” with people who went to the west on intelligence missions and then severed contact with the authorities. 

“Wherever you go, we can always take you back. You have no other way except to work for us,” they said. When they dropped him off at the airport, they said, “Little brother, if you ever start to forget what we told you, just look at the moon. Wherever you can see the moon, we can find you.”

It was early 2018. The Chinese agents sent Omer to Dubai, with the hope that he would continue on to Europe to spy on the Uyghur diaspora.

He had instructions to infiltrate Uyghur groups and send back information about activists working to draw attention to the human rights crisis in northwest China.

Omer said the Chinese agents had spent months grooming, threatening and brainwashing him, and in turn, Omer persuaded his handlers that they’d produced a loyal Chinese citizen, who would be able to do the state’s bidding. 

In Xinjiang, which many Uyghurs prefer to call East Turkestan, more than a million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities are thought to have been locked up in concentration camps, as well as detention centers, prisons and forced labor complexes. 

Omer, 31, is one of very few Uyghurs to escape Xinjiang in recent years. He’s fled almost as far as it is possible to go: to Kirkenes, a remote Arctic town at the northernmost tip of Norway, just a few miles away from the Russian border. He arrived in January.

Here in the Arctic, where the northern lights flicker overhead and every sound is muted by the snow, he feels safer than he’s felt in years.

“I sleep better here,” he said. “It almost feels like I’ve come to the edge of the world.”

There are roughly 2,500 Uyghurs in Norway. With its famously egalitarian laws and democratic values, Norway — the world’s top-ranking democracy, home to the Nobel Peace Prize — seems like it should be the safest place on earth. 

It’s not — not for the Uyghurs trying to live here. 

“Close to 100%” of Uyghurs living in Norway face surveillance, intimidation and censorship from the Chinese state, according to Uyghur activists in Norway.

They describe a collective sense of unease among Norwegian Uyghurs — a feeling of constantly being watched. 

“Uyghurs here often say we would like to live free from psychological pressure, just like the Europeans do,” said Bahtiyar Omer, director of a Norwegian Uyghur justice group in Oslo (Bahtiyar Omer and Memettursun Omer are not related). “But it’s really difficult, and we never feel secure.”

Last year, his mother in Xinjiang told him that police had been visiting her regularly. She warned him to be careful in Norway. “She told me, ‘The police know everything. They even know what’s happening inside your house.’” 

He described how police will call Uyghur Norwegians via WhatsApp from inside their relatives’ homes in Xinjiang, and begin pressuring them to hand over information and stop their activism. The calls trigger tremendous anxiety for Uyghurs in Norway, who fear their families will be taken hostage if they don’t respond. 

“This is just the way the Chinese government tests out different methods and sees who can easily be controlled,” Omer said. 

The aim is to silence the Uyghurs in Norway.

In the past, Uyghurs in Europe have pleaded with their families back in Xinjiang to be careful, to watch out for the authorities and to not speak out against the Chinese line. Now, the same thing is also happening in reverse. Uyghurs inside China are warning their families abroad to keep silent, to stop their activism, and to watch out for themselves — in Istanbul and London, on the snowy streets of Oslo, and in small Norwegian towns far above the Arctic circle.

I was afraid when I came to Norway. That’s why I changed my name,” said Merdan, 34. Officially, he goes by the Norwegian name “Martin Gunnar.” But everyone knows him by his original Uyghur first name, Merdan. 

Merdan left his homeland in 2010 after being brutally tortured in Chinese prisons. 

He was living in an asylum camp in southern Norway when he got a phone call from a Chinese official who told him to keep silent about what he witnessed in Xinjiang’s prisons.

“He said if I told anybody what I experienced it would be dangerous for my family in East Turkestan,” he said.

During his early years in Norway, Merdan lived in fear of the officer’s words.

But in 2018, as the crisis in Xinjiang deepened, he decided he could no longer remain silent — even if it meant his family would be harmed. 

“No matter what we do, our parents will suffer under the Chinese government,” he said. 

Merdan began to speak out. He organized Uyghur youth activist groups in Oslo, began running an Islamic Uyghur cultural center, took media training, and built a home studio where he filmed news videos about the Uyghur crisis on YouTube. He also re-adopted his Uyghur first name.

Merdan said he has gone past the point of caring what information the Chinese authorities gathered about him. An ebullient figure with an easy laugh, he’s often seen wearing a Uyghur doppa — a traditional hat. 

He drives around Oslo in an Audi, with a Red Bull in the cupholder, his doppa on the dashboard, and an unmistakable license plate that defiantly says “UYGHUR”. He paid just over $1,000 to have rights to the vanity plate for a decade. 

“When I first got the license plate I drove five or six times past the Chinese Embassy. Because I’m not a terrorist, I’m doing nothing wrong.”

In addition to his work as an activist and filmmaker, Merdan spends his nights doing nursing training, visiting care homes and retirement residences to take care of the local elderly.

He does this work to feel a connection with his parents back in Xinjiang. “I cannot get back to my own country, and take care of my own parents. So I just think, if I can take care of other people’s parents, then I hope somebody can take care of my parents,” he said. 

In 2019, he got a video call. His father was sobbing while filming his mother, whose knees were broken and bandaged. 

“If you don’t stop what you’re doing, maybe we will come to further harm,” Merdan’s father said. “Look at your mother’s situation — it’s all because of you.” Merdan believes that his father meant the Chinese authorities would punish his mother if he carried on with his activism. 

In 2019 and 2020, his phone rang twice more. A man’s voice introduced himself as an officer with China’s security services. He asked, “Don’t you care about your parents? Don’t you care about your children?” The officer listed the names of Merdan’s children and their Oslo schools.

“They threatened me, suggesting ‘maybe I would get into a car accident’ or that ‘thieves might come into my house while I was on night shift,’” he said. 

The agent told Merdan that he knew about his loans from Norwegian banks, and proceeded to list the amounts. 

He offered to send Merdan money, indicating that in return, Merdan would spy on other Uyghurs, and stop his activism. Merdan refused. Instead, he installed multiple surveillance cameras around his house in Oslo.

“I told him, are you stupid? You don’t need to send money to Uyghurs to spy on me and collect my information. You might as well just give all the money to me! I’m making videos about what we are doing!” Merdan said. “Everything is open, we have nothing to hide!”

Merdan believes the Chinese authorities are setting up spies with the aim of creating rifts within the Uyghur community.

Uyghurs spy on each other, he explained, “not because of the money. They do it because they’re scared that their parents will get tortured or arrested, sent to the concentration camp or the jails.” 

“Nobody can trust anybody,” he added. 

The Chinese embassy in Oslo has been a source of anxiety for Uyghur Norwegians, who report regularly receiving automated calls from embassy phone numbers, informing them they need to come in and retrieve “emergency documents” or face being blocked at the border. One Uyghur man described getting as many as 20 calls in a matter of weeks while he was a student in high school.

The Chinese Embassy in Oslo denied all claims Uyghurs made of being tortured in prisons, coerced to spy, hacked, threatened, or contacted by the embassy or the Chinese authorities. “What you mentioned are totally groundless rumors and lies fabricated by anti-China forces,” a spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “There is no evidence so far to support any of those accusations. In front of indisputable facts, a lie repeated a thousand times will remain a lie.”

In 2019, Oslo-based researcher and law student Muetter Iliqud, 24, began writing anonymous articles about Uyghur human rights issues for a Norwegian website run by Uyghurs. 

But her efforts to keep her writing secret were in vain. Several months after she began writing, her grandmother, living just outside Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi, got a knock on the door. The Chinese National Security Bureau officers had arrived with printed versions of Iliqud’s work.

“I have no idea how they figured it out,” Iliqud said. Her grandmother received a warning from the police, who also asked her for Iliqud's contact details in Norway. “She ended up in trouble because of my anonymous articles.” 

When Iliqud heard about these visits, she felt a wave of guilt. “I felt like it was my fault that my family was threatened. But then I kept telling myself that I did nothing wrong.”

Iliqud stopped using a pseudonym, and instead became more vocal. “I realized there was no sense in being anonymous, because they can just find out anyway,” she said.

Iliqud works for the Uyghur Transitional Justice Institute, a project that gathers data about Uyghur disappearances in Xinjiang. Harassment, surveillance and hacks are an occupational hazard for the Institute. 

In 2021, when Iliqud gave expert evidence at London’s Uyghur Tribunal, which was investigating whether China’s actions in Xinjiang constitute genocide, her phone bleated out alerts that she was being hit with brute-force hacking attempts to her social media and email accounts.

“China, Iran and other authoritarian states use their intelligence services to identify and spy on dissidents and refugees in Norway, and will continue to do so in 2022,” said Martin Bernsen, senior advisor at the Norwegian Police Security Service. He added that their aim was to “eliminate” political opponents. 

He described how regimes like China's often will infiltrate exile communities’ events and activist groups, while foreign intelligence officers try to gain access to Norwegian immigration databases.

Last autumn, 101 Uyghurs arrived in Norway from Turkey. As life under Recep Erdogan’s regime has become more difficult, with the looming prospect of an extradition treaty between Ankara and Beijing, there has been an exodus of Uyghurs from Turkey.

They bought a ticket from the Turkish city of Antalya to Belgrade, Serbia, with a stop-off in Oslo. Chinese citizens don’t need a visa to Serbia, so they were allowed to board the plane, and disembarked during the Oslo stopover. 

Memettursun Omer was one of the people on board.

When he was a child in Guma, a county in Xinjiang’s Taklamakan Desert, Omer’s parents told him stories about places in the far north, where there was no darkness in summer, and no light in winter, and where during Ramadan, people sometimes had to fast for 20 hours a day. 

Omer thought it was a fantasy — something the adults had just dreamed up.

In January, he was posted to the Arctic border town of Kirkenes, where the Norwegian immigration authority has just opened up an asylum reception center, alongside around 60 other Uyghurs.

During his first few days there, the sun did not rise at all. “I never dreamed I would end up this far north,” he said.

He spent days walking around the icy border town in the blue twilight of the polar winter, gazing out at the desolate wilderness.

“I’ve lived my whole life surrounded by people. But here, there’s hardly anyone around. It’s all so different,” he said. 

“I thought to myself, will this be my life forever?” He posted videos of the northern lights on Instagram.

As a young man, Omer loved China. His WeChat pages were frequently peppered with Chinese flags, and as a chef training in Beijing, he had a lot of Han Chinese friends and colleagues.  

“I was always against Uyghur people who were standing up to the Chinese,” he said. “I believed the Chinese government wouldn’t do anything to innocent people. And I never thought they would do anything to me — because in order for that to happen, I’d have to do something bad.”

Omer was arrested in Xinjiang in 2017 after traveling abroad. Uyghurs in Xinjiang are invariably targeted by police following foreign trips, which Chinese authorities claim is grounds for arrest on suspicion of terrorist activities. He spent more than ten months in detention centers and high-security prisons.

He was tied to a tiger chair, interrogated and electrocuted. At night, as he slept, 360-degree cameras watched him from all sides. If he turned over in bed, the camera would whirr to follow his movement. If he moved again, a guard would yell through the speaker system to keep still.

His interrogators told him “we are going to be best friends.” He was forced to meet regularly with them, and field their questions about his relatives living in Europe.

He managed to convince the agents that his father was a prominent activist in Germany, with influence within the World Uyghur Congress, a leading Uyghur human rights organization. 

The Xinjiang agents hatched a plan that he would infiltrate the group and send intelligence back to his handlers.

“They wanted me to go to Germany, and get in with their group, collect phone numbers and addresses, find out which flights they were taking, which restaurants they ate at,” he said. He was instructed to pass back information via regular WeChat video calls. 

Over and over again, Omer said he was threatened about what would happen if he dropped his handlers. 

“You need to remember, your older brothers are still here in Xinjiang,” the agent told him. “If you just disappear, we can make them suffer.” They forced him to sign a deposition admitting he was a terrorist. “Wherever you go, we can use this to show you’re a criminal, and bring you back to China.” 

Despite their threats, Omer had no intention of becoming a spy. He planned to escape the agents' control as soon as he left China.

He flew to Dubai, where he immediately called his father in Turkey and told him what was going on. From there, he went to Istanbul, where he attempted to start a new life. 

As spring arrived in Istanbul in 2018, Omer reunited with his father, found a job as a chef, and got engaged. He tried to forget what the Chinese agents had told him. But it proved difficult: he was continually dogged by desperate calls and messages from his handlers. He keeps the voice notes on his phone to this day. 

Sitting in his living room in Kirkenes, he played them one by one, as snow floated down outside. The tinny voice of the official rang out into the room. 

"We didn’t send you out there so you could behave like this,” the official drawled in one recording. “You’re forgetting who you are.”

During phone calls, the threats began. “You don’t need us to tell you how we do things. We’ll kill you — even if you’re in Germany. We’ll deal with this problem according to our own rules.”

The messages “had a psychological way of crushing your mind,” Omer said. “I felt like I was still in prison. I was scared and paranoid every day. Even thinking about it now, I’m afraid.”

In the summer of 2018, Omer gave the voice notes to Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur-language service, which serves the Uyghur diaspora. RFA published the messages, and promptly the calls from China stopped. 

Omer’s handler attempted to contact him again just once more, with the message “don’t be like this, little brother.” 

Omer responded with a "winky tongue face" emoji. 

Although the messages went quiet, Omer lived in fear that Turkey wasn’t really safe — that he might be spirited back to China at any time, trapped once again in Xinjiang. 

In September 2021, Omer flew to Norway. 

“We don’t have a choice in coming here. There's no other way. We cannot go back,” Omer said. 

Two weeks into his time in Kirkenes, Omer saw his first sunrise. Now, as the spring equinox approaches, the days are getting longer. Kirkenes lies at such an extreme latitude that for six days each month, the moon can’t be seen.

The Chinese agent’s words — that the state would be able to find Omer wherever the moon shines — are beginning to fade.

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China's repression of journalists

Immersive simulation attempts to pierce apathy over the Uyghur genocide

Emin Ozmen / Magnum Photos

Threatened, harassed, punished: The Uyghur translators defying China to tell Xinjiang’s story

Frankie Vetch

Why targeting ethnic minority journalists is central to China’s crackdown on the press

Erica Hellerstein

The post China’s crackdown on Uyghurs reaches the Arctic appeared first on Coda Story.

“It is this feeling that we Uyghurs cannot escape China wherever we go,” said Buzainuer Wubuli (Zeynure Obul). “Uyghurs in our homeland are being disappeared in prisons and camps. Outside the country, Uyghurs are not allowed to live in peace anywhere.”

For the past 10 years Wubuli’’s husband has faced constant harassment and detention by Turkish authorities — further evidence of China’s reach in Turkey, according to Wubuli — pushing him to finally leave the country with a plan for his family to follow. He was unaware that China had issued a red notice for him and was arrested in July 2021 while in transit in Casablanca. Today Idris Hasan is being held in a Moroccan prison.

Following international outcry, Interpol canceled the red notice for Hasan. However, Moroccan authorities decided to follow through with Hasan’s deportation in light of a recently signed extradition treaty with China. Hasan would be the first Chinese national extradited under the treaty that was signed in early 2021. The UN Committee Against Torture has pressured Moroccan authorities to pause the extradition while it reviews Hasan’s case, a process that could take weeks, months, even years.

This has left Hasan’s wife and children living in limbo. However, Wubuli has launched her own campaign of resistance for her husband’s release.

This is her story.

The post China ordered a Uyghur journalist extradited to Xinjiang. His wife has taken to the Istanbul streets to stop it appeared first on Coda Story.

“For the simulation part, we want visitors to actually feel the experience,” said Idris Ayas, 29, who came to Istanbul to study law 10 years ago. “By touching the Tiger Chair, by visiting the forced cotton-picking farm, the forced abortion room and the concentration camp cells, visitors actually feel that these things are really happening in 2022.”

Steps away from Istanbul University, the Uyghur Genocide Museum is a student-led exhibition organized in the quiet courtyard of the East Turkistan Foundation. The Uyghur student group created the series of “simulation” rooms according to testimony from last summer’s Uyghur Tribunal in London and other first-hand accounts gathered by the group.

The students behind the Genocide Museum, nearly all of whom have relatives or parents detained in Xinjiang camps, are well aware of the challenges of creating such a space.

An exhibition is visual by nature, yet since 2017 Xinjiang is effectively a black box to the outside world with Uyghurs living abroad losing contact with family members and foreigners or journalists largely barred from traveling to the region. Today images from Xinjiang, and its network of re-education camps, are largely gathered from space via satellites.

“My father and mother tried to come to my graduation ceremony in 2017,” said Ayas. “But at the beginning of 2017, all the borders were closed. Their passports were confiscated. After September 2017, I lost contact with my family members.”

On several occasions, Omar said the group gave visitors checklists from “48 Ways to Get Sent to a Chinese Concentration Camp.”

“They would check off if they prayed, or grew a beard, if they’ve been out of the country, if they use WhatsApp. 99% of the people found that they have all the criteria that qualifies them to get into one of these concentration camps.”

The student group spent their summer vacation planning the project, opening the space last fall. So far they say feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with the majority of visitors made up of Turkish students and international tourists.

“We knew the Olympics were coming and we thought it was a good opportunity to educate people about our cause so they can start acting while the world is directing their attention to China,” Omar said.

“There is a lot of disinformation about Uyghurs, especially in Turkey,” said Ayas. “Others said, I know there is a genocide happening there, but after I touched the Tiger Chair, I felt how horrible this is.

“It’s a shocking truth for visitors to actually accept it.”

The exhibition is ongoing, open every day (call ahead for the simulation rooms to be opened) and has no end date. Starting in March, the students plan to update the exhibition and add new items to the museum.

“We named it the Uyghur Genocide Museum, but it’s not a museum,” Ayas said. “It’s not a history, it’s an ongoing genocide happening in our hometown.”

China's repression of journalists

China ordered a Uyghur journalist extradited to Xinjiang. His wife has taken to the Istanbul streets to stop it

Katia Patin

Threatened, harassed, punished: The Uyghur translators defying China to tell Xinjiang’s story

Frankie Vetch

Why targeting ethnic minority journalists is central to China’s crackdown on the press

Erica Hellerstein

The post Immersive simulation attempts to pierce apathy over the Uyghur genocide appeared first on Coda Story.

Translators and interpreters like Mahmut have been indispensable for non-Uyghur journalists reporting on the Uyghur genocide. With more than one million Uyghurs imprisoned by the Chinese state, Mahmut’s ethnicity alone means that in Xinjiang she has a significant chance of being arrested and sent to a camp.

Journalists — and advocacy groups, police-makers, and academics — are forced to rely on a small number of dedicated bilingual Uyghur-English speakers. Experienced translators estimate there are 10 to 20 people in the world capable of and willing to do public Uyghur-to-English interpretation, meaning to expose themselves to working in the view of the public —and under the gaze of the Chinese state. 

In the past several years, meticulously reported journalism has sent out global shock waves, and has fueled a movement to hold China accountable. Journalists have contributed essential reporting to public understanding of the scale of abuses in Xinjiang. Their ability to work, however, is hampered by the risks facing the Uyghur language translators they must hire to conduct their interviews and research. 

Journalists reporting on Uyghurs say they confront a growing risk to their physical safety from China’s security apparatus, online trolls, and numerous other sources. Uyghur language translators face these same risks –and more because of their families living in Xinjiang. Uyghur translators almost always have close family and other relatives and friends living in China and they, as much as the translators living abroad, are vulnerable to state reprisal, which can include torture and imprisonment.

That has meant that Uyghur translators are in a “dire shortage,” said Elise Anderson, an American scholar and Uyghur translator. Anderson is among an even smaller number of non-Uyghurs fluent in the language who are willing and able to work as translators. 

In fact, there are many fluent Uyghur-English speakers outside China. There is a growing diaspora of native speakers in both languages who have interpretation-level fluency, such as Uyghur university students studying in the West. There are an estimated 12,000 Uyghurs in Europe. Many are young, however, and Uyghur students say they are especially vulnerable. Many young Uyghurs study and work at universities and institutions where China has significant influence.

Mahmut is a well-known singer — a member of a group of London-based musicians from across Central Asia. She also runs the U.K. office for the World Uyghur Congress, an international advocacy organization founded in 2004. But she spends a lot of her time traveling internationally to interpret for journalists, academics and NGOs wanting to speak to former detainees about China’s sprawling network of detainment camps.

My eyes are weary from looking out for you.
My hands are sore from praying for your return
My heart bleeds from being torn apart,
My dear son, when will you return?
Everyday I wait on the road,
Yearning for your appearance all day long
the nights are sleepless until dawn breaks
My dear son, when will you return?
Without you by my side I am alone
No food can pass my lips as my throat is too dry
I worry if you have eaten or not
My dear son, when will you return.

Born in a town called Ghulja in Xinjiang, near the Kazakhstan border, Mahmut last returned home more than 20 years ago. Six years ago, the Chinese state prohibited her family from visiting her in the U.K. Five years ago, China launched the rapid construction of an enormous web of detainment camps under the Chinese Communist Party official Chen Quanguo. Four years ago, Mahmut heard from her brother for the last time. He said, "Leave us in God's hands. We leave you in God's hands too." Often dressed in stylish Uyghur-patterned clothing, Mahmut is a target of the Chinese state.

“When I had cancer in 2013, I sent a letter from the oncologist who stated the seriousness of the disease and said that I need family to look after me,” she said over the phone. “Even with that letter, they wouldn't allow any of my nine siblings to have a passport and travel.”

In late 2016, Mahmut’s family stopped answering her phone calls. Her brother informed her that any association was too dangerous. She says that some people she knows who traveled back to Xinjiang were stopped by state security police and enquired about her work in the U.K.

“The families of people who are active, they are considered to be significant people, and are surveilled more heavily compared to others, and so in order to avoid really severe punishment, the only thing they can do is to completely cut off or declare that she is not my sister anymore,” Mahmut said.

The Chinese state has a long history of oppressing its Uyghur minority, including a crackdown on Uyghur culture and religion during Mao’s 1966 Cultural Revolution, when longstanding Han prejudices against minority beliefs were reinforced. Repression of Uyghurs has accelerated in the 21st century, first as part of the United States’ post-9/11 War on Terror and then following 2009 riots in the city of Urumqi.

These events combined with some high-profile terrorist attacks, committed by Uyghurs, led to President Xi Jinping announcing a “People’s War on Terror” against Muslim minorities. A rapid build-up of surveillance in the region followed. By 2021, the independent Uyghur Tribunal had declared that China was committing a genocide against the Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities.

As pressure increases on Uyghurs within China, so too has transnational repression. The lawyer Rodney Dixon, representing two Uyghur advocacy groups, has repeatedly sought to bring a case to the International Criminal Court alleging that Chinese agents have been operating in Tajikistan to deport Uyghurs and convert others into being informants.

Deportations of Uyghurs to China have been occurring in multiple countries. In December 2021, a Moroccan court approved the extradition of Idris Hasan, who had worked at a Uyghur diaspora newspaper in Turkey and also worked as a translator. 

Among the few younger Uyghurs willing to take the risk of working as a translator is Arslan Hidayat, a 34-year-old Uyghur-Australian activist and YouTuber who speaks fluent English and Uyghur.

Pro-Beijing online influencers have tried to discredit Hidayat, who says that when he is not being accused of working for the CIA or the National Endowment for Democracy, he is accused of supporting ISIS or Turkestan Islamic Party, the loose successor to the obscure East Turkestan Islamic Movement, an organization that the U.S. had labeled a terrorist organization. “We are labeled as sell-outs and puppets of the West,” said Hidayat.

Hidayat says if he tries to respond to his online attackers, trolls will unleash a torrent of new allegations. The only successful tactic is silence. Still, he frequently posts videos on his channel Talk East Turkestan.

Hidayat believes public translation work forces translators into the role of activists, opening up translators to new risks. Hidayat has never received direct threats, but when he recently returned to Australia after living in Turkey, his mother received phone calls from several of her friends warning that her son was linked to terror groups around the world. She believes these friends had been contacted by the Chinese embassy in Australia.

Of greater concern for Hidayat, like all the ethnic Uyghur interpreters and translators I spoke to, is that he still has family in China who have been interviewed by police and have been forced to distance themselves from him. “I must be doing something impactful for them to approach my family in this manner,” he said.

Zubayra Shamseden has similar experiences, receiving messages that discredit her translation work, and since 2015 she has not spoken to her family back home. One of her brothers is a political prisoner and her entire family is under constant surveillance. “Because of my work my family is paying a heavy price, but they are willing to sacrifice for what I do.”

Other translators work behind the scenes. I spoke to two translators who anonymously work on testimonies.The targeting of translators working with journalists is a facet of China’s larger project to erode or even extinguish the Uyghur language, say scholars. The Uyghur language has been banned from schools, Uyghur language newspapers have closed, and Uyghur language books are largely missing in Xinjiang while intellectuals are being targeted for punishment.

“Many Uyghurs have found safe havens abroad, but they're still dealing with educational systems that do not have a space to accommodate the Uyghur language. Language is one means of intergenerational transmission of knowledge and ways of life,” said Elise Anderson, the Uyghur-speaking researcher at the Uyghur Human Rights Project. “People have been forced into a situation where no matter where they are in the world and no matter what they're doing, it's very difficult for them to pass on their native language to their children in the way they would most prefer.”

China’s repression of journalists: no more borders, no more constraints

China’s crackdown on Uyghurs reaches the Arctic

Isobel Cockerell

Immersive simulation attempts to pierce apathy over the Uyghur genocide

Emin Ozmen / Magnum Photos

Why targeting ethnic minority journalists is central to China’s crackdown on the press

Erica Hellerstein

The post Threatened, harassed, punished: The Uyghur translators defying China to tell Xinjiang’s story appeared first on Coda Story.

When the journalist arrived, he was greeted by a person who didn’t look familiar. He wasn’t a childhood friend. Instead, the man told the reporter, he worked with one of China’s state security agencies. He explained that before their meeting, he had paid a visit to some of the reporter’s family members back in Tibet — who were fine, he assured him — and then waved over two men sitting at a nearby table. The trio then besieged the journalist with questions — “Who are your sources in Tibet? How do you get your information?” — but the reporter refused to answer and hurried out of the hotel.

A few weeks later, he was ambushed on his walk home from work. According to one of the reporter’s former colleagues, two men sprung out of a vehicle, thrust a black hood over his head, and pushed him into the car. The van drove around for hours as the men interrogated the reporter about his contacts in Tibet and searched through his phone. Again, he refused to answer. After several hours, the kidnappers dropped the reporter off near his house, warned him not to turn around for five minutes, and sped away. 

According to a U.S.-based Tibetan journalist who had worked with the kidnapped man, this was the end of his colleague’s career in media. He was terrified that his journalism work could put him and his relatives back in Tibet in harm’s way. “He was so worried about his family he quit reporting right away,” he explained. “He said, ‘I’m not going to risk my life and my family’s lives.’”

The U.S.-based Tibetan journalist, who was privy to the events leading up to and including the kidnapping, asked for anonymity and to withhold the location of the kidnapping to protect his colleague’s identity.

Fear of retaliation against family members back home, which forced the Tibetan reporter out of his media job, is a key feature of China’s pressure campaign against diaspora journalists and writers, particularly for members of religious and ethnic minority groups like Uyghurs and Tibetans. 

They are among the 55 ethnic minorities in the country outside of the Han Chinese majority, who make up more than 90% of the population. Under China’s President Xi Jinping, Beijing has pursued a sweeping policy of "Sinicization” aimed at assimilating the country’s ethnic minorities into the dominant Han culture. This approach includes a crackdown on local languages and religions and has been accompanied by wide-ranging and ambitious initiatives by the Chinese government to silence its critics. Both efforts can be seen as separate expressions of the same larger goal: to create a homogenous national identity defined by the state, with no room for alternative points of view. People who challenge the government’s sanctioned identity narratives can be subject to pressure, even when they live far away from China.

Borders do not necessarily constrain the government’s reach.

Writers and journalists from the country’s ethnic minorities, therefore, find themselves at the hostile intersection of China’s multi-pronged war against independent speech and identity. 

In Tibet, which has been under Beijing’s control for decades, the Chinese government’s long-simmering campaign of cultural erasure can be seen as a progenitor of the oppression it later unleashed on Xinjiang, which has been described as a genocide by U.S. officials. There, more than one million Uyghurs have been sent to concentration camps and the relatives of exiled reporters face relentless persecution, intimidation, and harassment. Many people I interviewed pointed out that the former party secretary in Tibet subsequently became the Chinese party secretary of Xinjiang. In Tibet, he expanded policing and cultural assimilation, and developed a widespread surveillance system. Experts say he continued to implement those same policies in Xinjiang. While the repression and government justification for it is distinct in each respective region, some see Tibet as a testing ground for the campaign later deployed in Xinjiang.

Beijing’s pathology around minorities’ distinct cultural identities is rooted in an understanding that they can act as a counterweight to the government’s desire to control the narrative. “They recognize the power of words and culture as an animating force,” said James Tager, the director of research at PEN America. “And they have these policies of culture diminution or cultural erasure, particularly in Xinjiang, and similarly, somewhat less intense but somewhat more sustained, is the effort to diminish Tibetan culture. Peaceful cultural advocacy is potentially criminal in China.”

According to the U.S.-based nonprofit Freedom House, “China conducts the most sophisticated, global, and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression in the world” — referring to the suite of tactics from surveillance technology to physical violence, intimidation, and harassment that governments use to persecute citizens of their own countries who live overseas. In China, the targets of this campaign include ethnic minorities like Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Inner Mongolians, as well as Han Chinese reporters and writers covering China critically. Their experiences are a case study of what a well-resourced regime can do when it weaponizes technology, repression, and fear to create a sweeping information suppression apparatus that reaches around the globe. 

“The full scope of censorship needs to be understood as not only what is explicitly being banned but by the message that the targets of the censorship internalize. It’s called the chilling effect,” explained Tager. “And many writers across cultural and social spheres will feel chilled because they know that people who are seen as too critical of (Chinese Communist Party) governance may put their family members within China at risk.”

For Tibetan diaspora journalists, threats of retaliation against family members remain a powerful tool in the transnational repression playbook. The region has been under China’s control since the 1950s, when it was invaded by the newly formed People’s Republic of China. After an unsuccessful uprising against Chinese rule in 1959, the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, fled to India and set up the Tibetan government in exile, where some 90,000 Tibetans currently live, and which remains a focal point for the exile media community as it seeks to cover one of the world’s most restrictive media environments from outside. 

Tibet is ranked as the worst place globally for civil liberties and political rights according to Freedom House — tied with Syria and above South Sudan, Eritrea, Turkmenistan, and North Korea. Media outlets within Tibet are controlled by China, international broadcasts are routinely jammed, foreign journalists must apply for — and are often denied — permission from the Chinese government to go to the region, and Tibetans who pass information to foreign media risk arrest. Today, human rights groups and exile journalists say it has effectively become walled off from the foreign press. 

“Nowadays people tend to think that because Tibet is not coming up too much in the news, it’s because nothing is happening in Tibet. That’s not true,” Kalden Lodoe, the Tibetan service director at Radio Free Asia in Washington D.C., told me. “The information flow is totally blocked there.” 

For journalists covering it from afar, like Lodoe’s team, “we feel like we are digging into a very strict police state where people are watched constantly,” he added. “It’s escalated and it’s only going to get worse. They have created this fearful society where if you have any contacts outside you will be in trouble.”

Authorities impose harsh penalties on Tibetans who communicate with journalists or family members living overseas who send information to exile media. According to data provided to Coda by the India-based Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, over the last decade, 98 Tibetans have been detained for contacting journalists and source intermediaries outside the region. Sixteen are currently imprisoned and serving their sentences. Prominent cases include Kunchok Jinpa, a Tibetan tour guide who was detained in 2013 and later sentenced to 21 years in prison for “leaking state secrets” by providing information to foreign reporters about protests in Tibet. Jinpa died last February while serving his sentence due to reported paralysis and brain hemorrhage. Another well-publicized case is the imprisonment of Tashi Wangchuk, a Tibetan language advocate who was released from prison in China last year after spending five years behind bars over a charge of “inciting separatism" based on an interview he gave to The New York Times.

Some diaspora writers and journalists fear their work could expose relatives and sources in Tibet to detention or arrest, and sources in exile can be wary of communicating with the press for the same reason. They say that exiled journalists’ and writers’ family members still living in Tibet come under pressure from Chinese authorities. 

Sonam Tobgyal, a researcher with the U.K.-based human rights nonprofit Tibet Watch, said families living in exile with relatives still in Tibet have received threatening calls from unknown numbers after news leaks from the region that officials suspect they are connected to. “They will say, ‘If you do this again, your family is in your hands,’” he said.

“This is how they threaten, saying, ‘You are responsible for the safety of your family.’”

In Xinjiang, the relatives of diaspora reporters are also under siege. As of March 2021, more than 50 family members of journalists with Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur Service have been arrested by Chinese officials, according to the broadcaster, including relatives who have gone missing.

“The tactical maneuver is to make everyone think twice before they think or write or publish and to think about whether there could be negative consequences for their family members, their friends, and their communities,” said Sophie Richardson, the China director at Human Rights Watch.

In Tibet, the relative of one Radio Free Asia reporter was severely beaten and detained for a week after speaking to the news service, according to Lodoe. Two additional relatives of the same reporter were arrested and imprisoned for sharing information with the agency, and the family members of other Radio Free Asia’s Tibetan journalists have gotten visits from local officials. “People are very scared,” he said. “For example, our reporters in Washington, D.C., their families have told them, in coded language, ‘we are fine, please don’t call us.’ It’s not just one or two. Many reporters will not even talk to their parents nowadays.”

The lingering possibility of family and source retaliation carries a heavy psychological toll for exiled Tibetans working in the public eye. A Tibetan writer based out of India, who asked to be anonymous to protect his family’s safety, told me authorities have stopped by the home of his family members still in Tibet and interrogated them about his work and his whereabouts. “I recently got a message from my sister saying, ‘don’t come back to Tibet,’ the police were searching for me,” he said. Because of the risks, he added, “I hardly communicate with my parents. If I talk with them, we talk about sensitive issues in a code way.”

In the months before the Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008, Tibet was gripped by anti-government protests marking the failed 1959 Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule. Eager to avoid bad international press in the lead-up to the games, Beijing moved swiftly to stamp out coverage of the protests, barring foreign reporters from entering Tibet and censoring and blocking international news reports and broadcasts. Tibetans who passed information to foreign media faced stiff penalties, including detention and imprisonment. Later, China responded to the unrest by ratcheting up control of the media and expanding surveillance and policing, according to human rights groups. 

Experts and journalists I spoke to said the situation in Tibet has worsened in the fourteen years since the protests, aided by a sophisticated surveillance dragnet in which police, cameras, facial recognition, online surveillance, and self-censorship are ubiquitous. “China is more effective now because they’re employing their whole state and human resources to spy, monitor, and surveil everything,” said Tibet Watch’s Tobgyal.

“It’s very difficult and it’s not getting better, but more disastrous.”

The Chinese messaging app WeChat has complicated the communication landscape for people within and beyond Tibet. The platform, which is China’s most popular messaging app, has given a place for diaspora Tibetans and their loved ones at home to stay in touch, while simultaneously exposing them to government surveillance. A 2020 report by the Canada-based cybersecurity research organization Citizen Lab found that the platform surveils accounts from outside of China and uses that content to train censorship algorithms deployed on accounts registered in China. Tibetan WeChat users have reportedly been detained for sharing photos of the Dalai Lama, spreading “rumors” about coronavirus on the app, and setting up a chat group without registering it with local authorities as required.

Despite the privacy and security risks, the app became widely adopted by Tibetans overseas, with an estimated 70% of the diaspora population using the platform as of 2019. In 2020, however, India banned the platform — a move Tenzin Dalha, who researches Chinese cybersecurity with the Tibet Policy Institute, said has presented communication barriers between exile reporters and Tibetans and their contacts back at home. Some use virtual private networks, or VPNs, to get around the ban, but others do not have the technological know-how to figure it out. For the latter group, Dalha explained, “their communications completely broke down since the Indian government banned WeChat. There’s become more like a communication vacuum between inside and outside Tibet.”

Now, as all eyes are on Beijing for the Olympics, sources I talked to describe a complete information blackout from Tibet. Updates from the ground have halted, leaving family members living overseas in complete darkness about what’s happening at home. 

“We don’t know what’s happening inside Tibet,” Tobgyal told me. “If you have family in Tibet, it’s scary. You aren’t able to talk to them and you don’t know what’s going on. So you have to anxiously wait.”

Beijing’s clampdown on press freedom in Tibet has broadened over the last several years. It now sweeps up writing that’s not politically inflected. Even a year ago, there were a handful of websites in Tibet that published content about Tibetan culture, language, and the environment, according to Tseten Wangchuk, a senior editor with the Tibetan Service for the U.S.-funded international news outlet Voice of America. Now, Wangchuk said, “They all shut down. I think there used to be a borderline, a gray area where you could talk about the environment, Tibetan language, and things like that. Now it seems like nobody can write about anything — any topic — that’s outside of government control.”

There are clear links between China’s hostility toward Tibetan cultural writing and its Sinicization campaign, which has sought to eradicate the distinct religious and cultural identities of Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Mongolians. PEN’s James Tager said that Beijing sees cultural promotion as a threat. “Beijing tends to view expressions of culture through the lens of potential criminality. Particularly in ethnic minority communities, they treat cultural promotion, cultural engagement, cultural activism, as a substitute for political activism that they see as threatening and illegal.”

The assimilation project has taken aim at mother tongue education for ethnic minority groups. Under China’s “bilingual education” policy, schools in Tibet have shifted to teaching in Mandarin over Tibetan, according to human rights groups. A recent report by the U.S.-based Tibet Action Institute found that roughly 800,000 Tibetan school children are enrolled in boarding schools where they are taught primarily in Chinese. “Wait another 10 years and almost no one will speak Tibetan anymore,” said Human Rights Watch’s Richardson.

In Xinjiang, China’s campaign of repression, surveillance, and cultural erasure has been described as a genocide by the Biden administration. Chinese officials have sent more than one million Uyghurs to concentration camps, demolished mosques, and banned Uyghur language education in schools. Uyghurs living overseas, including prominent journalists, are subject to intimidation and threats. According to Alim Seytoff, Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur Service director, eight U.S.-based reporters for the news division have family members in Xinjiang who are in detention or have disappeared. Seytoff said some of those reporters had relatives approached by Chinese authorities. “They basically said, ‘Tell your relatives in America working at Radio Free Asia to stop telling the world what’s happening,’” Seytoff said.

And in Inner Mongolia, the Chinese government in 2020 rolled out a new policy phasing out language instruction in schools from Mongolian to Mandarin, setting off massive protests. Enghebatu Togochog, director of the U.S.-based Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center, said the policy generated such fierce blowback because language is seen as the final symbol left of Mongolian’s distinct cultural identity. Already, Togochog said schools have implemented the language change and said the organization has heard of instances in which officials have taken down Mongolian language signs. 

“Right now what we are facing is wholesale cultural genocide,” he said. “First our political rights were taken away. Then our way of life was completely changed. Language is pretty much the last defense of Mongolian identity, so just get rid of that and these people will become Chinese.”

China’s crusade against free expression has turned the country into the most aggressive jailer of journalists in the world. The regime has placed at least 127 reporters behind bars — more than half of whom are Uyghur — according to the global press freedom group Reporters Without Borders, which ranks China 177th out of 180 in its World Press Freedom Index. Beijing’s clampdown on the press has escalated dramatically under Xi Jinping’s leadership, who, Reporters Without Borders argues, has “restored a media culture worthy of the Maoist era, in which freely accessing information has become a crime and to provide information an even greater crime.”

Crucially, this campaign is not just limited to China. Over the last decade, China has invested heavily in its global media footprint, acquiring shares in foreign media outlets and vastly expanding the reach of international TV broadcasting. The state-owned China Global Television now airs in more than 160 countries while independent Chinese media overseas has shrunk.

Cedric Alviani, Reporters Without Borders’ Taipei Bureau Director, who has written extensively about press freedom in China, characterized Beijing’s approach to the press as: “If you can’t kill it, buy it.” The outcome, he added, “is that now, in 2022, there’s very few Chinese language overseas media that are critical of the Chinese regime.”

Adversarial reporters or journalists who cover Beijing's policies in an unflattering light outside the country have come under diplomatic pressure from Chinese embassies overseas, including foreign reporters like a Swedish journalist who received a threatening email from the Chinese Embassy in Sweden in 2021, accusing him of spreading anti-Chinese misinformation and demanding he cease his coverage or “face the consequences of your actions.” 

For journalists with Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur Service in Washington, D.C., the risks of the work are well understood.

“Our reporters understand the difficult situation we are in,” Seytoff told me. “But in spite of the detention and the disappearances of our loved ones, in spite of the fact that China is committing genocide against our people, and in spite of all of this tremendous psychological pressure on us, I think we have kept our cool. We are deeply devoted to journalism.”

China’s repression of journalists: no more borders, no more constraints

Immersive simulation attempts to pierce apathy over the Uyghur genocide

Emin Ozmen / Magnum Photos

Threatened, harassed, punished: The Uyghur translators defying China to tell Xinjiang’s story

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