Fighting for Uyghur rights in China

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 6 May 2022

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the 1980s, the minority Uyghur community in China staged some of the first protests against the all-powerful Communist Party. The Uyghurs were demanding that the Chinese government keep its promises to protect their culture and grant them political autonomy in Xinjiang region. In 1989, many Uyghur students enthusiastically supported the pro-democracy demonstrations centred on Beijing's Tiananmen Square. One of them was Aziz Isa Elkun, who talks to Josephine McDermott.

PHOTO: A Uyghur yurt on the Xinjiang steppe (Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless
0:06.8	searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the
0:11.8	telly we share what we've been watching
0:14.0	Cladie Aide.
0:16.0	Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming.
0:19.0	Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige.
0:21.0	And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less
0:24.9	searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds. Hello and thank you for downloading the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Josephi
0:40.9	McDermott.
0:42.6	Today I'm taking you back to the 1980s when the Uyghur minority first protested against
0:47.7	the communist government in China.
0:50.0	I've been talking to Aziz Isa Elkin, who dared to take a stand and says he's paid for it his whole life.
0:57.0	It's 1986 and a group of high school students is about to take an incredible risk.
1:08.0	Under the cover of darkness, they go around the homes and offices of the most powerful people they know in Shaheer County, in Xinjiang, northwest China.
1:17.0	At midnight, that was very dark winter.
1:21.0	We traveled the four of us us to government building, county leaders building,
1:26.2	other schools building.
1:28.9	The teenagers have painstakingly handwritten dozens of leaflets with a list of demands for Uyghur rights.
1:35.4	We are demanding three democratic elections and stop serving the Uyghur homeland as a large labor camp for China and stop all immigration from the rest of China to Uyghur region.
1:49.0	This is an unacceptable act of defiance against the all-powerful Communist Party.
1:55.7	The police set to work to find the culprits by matching the writing on the leaflets with
2:00.3	their schoolwork.
	...

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