Rahima Mahmut is one of the few Uyghur translators willing to work in the open. Her commitment to enabling journalists to cover the Uyghurs exposes her family back home in China to enormous risks, where a vivid picture has emerged of systematic torture and sexual violence, forced sterilization, “reeducation,” and child-parent separation.
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.
China’s repression of journalists: no more borders, no more constraints
Governments targeting journalists for repression and violence is nothing new. Journalists had been killed for chronicling Hitler’s crimes against humanity and exposing Stalin’s Holodomor, the intentional mass starvation in Ukraine. In 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist critical of Saudi Arabia’s government was dismembered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
But China’s campaign to intimidate and silence journalism and speech around the world has altered the global repression calculous. Gone are the guard rails that imposed some limits beyond discrete episodes of harassment, efforts to undermine an individual’s credibility, or even targeted assassinations. Instead, a new regime has emerged that ignores national borders and a sense, however wobbly, that there are constraints.
There’s a new term that captures the new war on freedom of expression: transnational repression, and it encompasses high-tech surveillance, shocking acts of transgression against international laws and norms, and old school mafia tactics of threats against family back home.
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.
