(audience applause)
Imagine that you're on your way
to drop your daughter off at school.
Every 100 yards, you pass a checkpoint
where because you're Uyghur,
the police check your ID,
iris scans,
monitoring every movement you make.
Imagine that once your daughter gets to the school,
she's interrogated with questions such as
do your parents pray at home
or read the Quran?
And imagine her honest answers
land you in a concentration camp the next day.
Imagine while you're in the concentration camp,
your daughter is taken away
and sent to a state run orphanage.
You only find out what's happened to her
when you see her face
in a government propaganda video
bragging about the orphanage system.
Does this sounds like a science fiction dystopia?
Absolutely.
Sadly, this is the life of the Uyghurs today
in China's controlled East Turkistan
which authorities call Xinjiang,
meaning new territory or new dominion.
I am standing before you as a human rights advocate,
attorney, immigrant and American
but more than any other title,
my Uyghur identity is the most important aspect
of my life today.
Uyghurs like me are experiencing cultural genocide
in Xi Jinping's, China.
Just two weeks ago,
Xi Jinping told the world
that remolding and replacing other civilizations
is both stupid and destructive ideas.
Consider the Holocaust.
Throughout the history,
crises of this magnitude
have not started overnight
or have not happened overnight.
They started small,
predicated on lies
and expanded rapidly.
China has a long history of persecuting Uighurs.
In fact, I was born in a prison camp in Kashgar
at the height of cultural revolution.
For committing the crime of being a Uyghur,
my mother was locked up, beaten and tortured.
She was forced to deliver me
while wearing a cast from the chest down.
This changed in the late '80s and early '90s.
It was a time of relative freedom
and economic progress.
I remember going to religious services with my father
on important holidays.
I witnessed the revival of Uyghur culture.
As a child,
I felt strongly the sense of relief
and joy in being able to participate in community life.
But the China of today is not the China of my childhood.
China is rapidly regressing
back to the worst version of itself.
In 2009, China began militarizing social control
in the name of combating extremism.
The regime is implementing high tech surveillance
and on a vast scale,
drastically expanding the imprisonment of Uyghurs,
and other ethnic Turkic minorities
and exporting these surveillance technologies
to other authoritarian regimes
from Cambodia to Venezuela.
Cities, towns, villages
are blanketed with surveillance cameras.
The entire population
are subject to mandatory DNA
and other biometric data collection.
Monitoring apps are installed on every phone.
Think of east German Stasi police state
with cloud competing, artificial intelligence databases
and you will have a pretty good idea
of the life of the Uyghurs today.
If this surveillance picks up something
that the government does not like,
the arrests are made swiftly
without any due process.
In the last two years alone,
authorities have detained
more than two million Uyghurs indefinitely
in the government, what they call,
euphemistically call educational transformation centers
or boarding schools.
Let's put that in perspective.
That is the half of the size of the Norwegian population.
And these two million plus people
have names, families, aspirations,
like all of us in this room.
As we speak,
China's detention of Uyghurs
is the largest internment of an ethnic minority
since World War II.
Put this in context.
At the height of Nazi Germany,
they were imprisoning as many as 750,000 people.
Scholars have compared these camps
to Stalin's Gulag,
that detained over 18 million people
during the period of 30 years.
Ladies and gentlemen,
never again is happening again today in China.
These camps put Uyghurs through conversion therapy
which I believe is a human engineering and reprogramming.
Camp survivors
said that they've been forced to study Xi Jinping ideology
and to denounce their religion,
amongst other form of psychological tortures.
Those don't follow the rules,
comply or do what the authorities told them,
suffer physical torture.
It appears from the Chinese government's official statements
and their actions
that they have found a final solution
to what officials long called
the Uyghur problem for now
without mass killing the Uyghurs.
And what is happening in East Turkistan
is not being confined there.
These cruel methods of surveillance,
AI powered racial targeting
are being exported to eastern China and other countries.
Today, 18 countries,
including Ecuador, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, the UAE
and even Germany
have already adopted Chinese surveillance techniques
to repress and/or monitor their own citizens.
In fact,
China has been promoting these methods
as a way to deal with world's so-called Muslim problem.
About 12 years ago,
the Chinese authorities confiscated my parent's passport
when my brother married
the daughter of a leader who spoke at this forum earlier.
I haven't seen my mother
since my law school graduation 15 years ago,
my parents have not met five of their eight grandchildren.
Two of those five grandchildren
are here in the audience with us.
Up until last year,
I was able to check in with my parents regularly
on the Chinese messaging app
despite the likelihood
that we are being monitored by Chinese cyber police.
Our ability to video chat
and exchange photographs
had given us a comfort and sense of connection
despite Chinese barring from us meeting in person.
But today, even that kind of basic freedom,
the right to communicate with family members across borders
has been taken away from us.
And I'm not alone.
All Uyghurs with relatives in East Turkistan,
even those who are not politically active
have been similarly cut off from their families.
Like other Uyghurs,
I worry that I won't even know when my parents die.
This is not a problem for the Chinese citizens to solve
because they have no voice in the matter.
Censorship in China
makes it impossible for Chinese citizens
to even know the existence of these camps.
This is a problem for those of us in this room
and leaders around to solve.
If you remain silent,
this problem will persist and spread.
And if you let this happen,
what does that say about us?
Many business leaders, scholars, government officials
are feigning ignorance today.
History won't be kind to those
who turn a blind eye.
Our silence is aiding the status quo.
You no longer can say you did not know
because you know now.
I don't want you to be just concerned
or feel pity for me or my people.
I want you to be outraged
and I want you to act.
Consider partnering with an organization
like the Human Rights Foundation,
make your voices heard
and speak loudly
and tell your country
that they need to stop doing business
with Xi Jinping's China.
Pressure your government officials
to stop trading with China
and companies like Huawei and Vision.
Pressure the International Olympic Committee,
demand the Chinese shut down these camps
if they still want to host the 2022 Winter Olympics.
Don't invest in the companies
building facial recognition,
racial profiling surveillance system.
Pressure your government to adopt the Magnitsky Act.
"Business as usual cannot continue."
The famous words of a clergyman
by the name Martin Miller in the Nazi Germany
have a new resonance today.
When I was growing up,
I never thought that this could happen.
If you don't stand up and fight for your rights,
this could happen to you.
(audience applause)