Covering a crisis from the outside is a challenging, but often necessary, job. I have never set foot anywhere near China — and yet I’ve spent much of the past year reporting on stories from inside Xinjiang, the modern-day police state in the country’s northwest. I’ve covered the Uyghur humanitarian crisis from Europe and Turkey, or by making long WhatsApp calls to Uyghurs who’ve escaped to Australia or Canada.
Naturally, I spend much of my time thinking about that silk road region in China’s far west. I think about the mostly-destroyed old city in Kashgar. I think about how the clocks in Urumqi are set to Beijing time, even though it’s several time zones to the west. I think about the yawning silence – how the air feels when at least a million Uyghurs have been disappeared into concentration camps. I think about the apricots: one Uyghur source told me those in Xinjiang are the sweetest she’d ever had. She believes she’ll never taste one again. I wonder, perhaps selfishly, if I will one day — because of my reporting, it also seems unlikely.
This week, I was in Tbilisi, Georgia — where Coda has a newsroom — exploring the eastern edge of the city, where a vast multi-million dollar Chinese development lies, part of the Belt and Road project. It’s a strange, at times eerie place. A huge, gleaming five-star hotel, echoing with emptiness. Deserted strip malls; blank shop windows. And like everywhere in Tbilisi, the odd stray dog. As the wind picked up and the sun began to set, the smell of charcoal and cumin caught the air — suddenly, a clattery Uyghur restaurant emerged from the lengthening shadows. It’s run by one Uyghur woman, who’d been living in Tbilisi for two years. I was desperate to know her story, but for that afternoon I was content to eat her food, drink her tea, and look at the pictures on the walls: Uyghurs playing the dutar; camels running through the Gobi desert; traditional undemolished Uyghur homes.
Xinjiang has been dominating my thoughts this week after having several long phone calls with Olsi Jazexhi, an Albanian-Canadian journalist and academic who went to the region in August on a North Korea-style propaganda tour. For months, Jazexhi had been reading the reports about the Uyghur humanitarian crisis, and decided to investigate for himself. “I approached the Chinese embassy in Albania and presented myself to them as an Albanian journalist. I told them I’d seen so many stories and I don’t believe them to be true,” Jazexhi told me.
