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Campaign for Uyghurs hosted its first Uyghur Advocacy Training Workshop for young activists and students in Istanbul to challenge China's cultural genocide who are trying to choke the Uyghur nation's expectations.
Marco Respinti, writing in Bitter Winter said that Campaign for Uyghurs on March 11-12 hosted the workshop to equip young Uyghur activists and students living in Turkey with the intellectual and practical tools and skills that may enable them to make their voice heard in the most effective way. Campaign for Uyghurs (CfU) s a non-profit organization championing democratic liberties for battered people, which in 2022 was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Founded in 2017, it is chaired by Rushan Abbas, whose family's story of harassment is quite exemplary of the PRC's mischief and abuses. Presided by Rushan Abbas, and conducted by Sabrina Sohail, CfU Director of Advocacy and Communications, as well as Arslan Hidayat, CfU Program Director, the workshop featured several speakers of different nationalities, reported Bitter Winter. The participants included Hurter Ozcan, the US Representative of the Republican People's Party of Turkey and the founding chairman of the Turkish Policy Center in Washington; Uyghur scholar, writer and educator Eset Sulaiman Kutlan, now Senior Editor at the RFA Uyghur Service; Anne Basham, CEO of Ascend Consulting, a human rights advocacy firm based in Washington; Faruk Sen, chairman of the Turkey-European Education and Scientific Research Foundation; lecturer in International Relations at Marmara University, Istanbul Alaeddin Yalcinkaya; and Bahadirhan Dincaslan, the chief columnist for the news outlet "TamgaTurk" and former board member of Turkey's IYI Party. Forty young Uyghurs actively participated for two full days, asking frequent questions to speakers and even trying their own hands with a social exercise in creating an ideal advocacy campaign, said Respinti. People's Republic of China (PRC) is carrying cultural genocide against the Uyghurs by destroying the essence of a community of people, and preventing the transmission of what makes a group of persons a people (not only a mass): a culture, a language, a faith. Even if Uyghurs do not live in an Uyghur state, they are a vibrant nation characterized by specific cultural tracts and religious identity. They speak an identifying language and produce unifying literature in All this makes Uyghurs Uyghurs, while the premeditated and systematic war of annihilation that the PRC conducts against them tries to suppress their nation's identity, said Respinti. This awareness is at the core of what the world came to call the Uyghur crises, and the one main reason several organizations of the Uyghur diaspora in the world deserve credit for, is their having internationalized the denunciation of the Uyghur cultural genocide, added Respinti. Awareness is the first step in defending one's nation. The second is the reaction. If Uyghurs do not consciously stand to thwart the killing of their nation's future, the PRC will be facilitated in performing its blatant crime against humanity. Many Uyghurs bravely do just this, but what about the younger generations? The risk of losing them as a casualty of the massive attack of the Chinese Communist Party against "Uyghurness" is enormous, asked Respinti. (ANI)
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