Čekám, až si pro mě v noci přijdou - Zápisky ujgurského básníka z čínské genocidy – Izgil Tahir Hamut (2024)

The poet's report on one of the world's most acute humanitarian crises. A harrowing tale of a family's escape from genocide. ***** Tahir Hamut Izgil's friends disappeared one by one. The brutal persecution of the Uyghur people by the Chinese government had been ongoing for a long time, but in 2017 it took on terrifying proportions. The Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim minority living in western China, experienced echoes of the greatest horrors of the twentieth century amplified by all-knowing hi-tech state surveillance. Over a million people disappeared in Chinese internment camps for Muslim minorities. ***** For Tahir, a prominent poet and intellectual, persecution was nothing new. When he attempted to travel abroad in 1996, he was detained by the police and tortured until he confessed to a fabricated charge and ended up in a re-education labor camp. Although he had to survive there for three years, he could never have imagined how radical the Chinese government's response to the Uyghur issue would be twenty years later. Was Tahir's many hours of interrogation a first hint after he had a phone call with a poet friend from the Netherlands? Or was it when his old friend was sentenced to life in prison purely for calling for the observance of Uyghur civil rights?…