It is a somewhat special school near Washington, open on weekends and dedicated to members of the Uyghur diaspora wishing to speak their language, a central element of their culture and a vector for discussing the tragedies suffered by their relatives. in China.
Welcome to Ana Care and Education, a place where teaching is apolitical, insists Irade Kashgary, 29, who co-founded the school with his mother Sureyya.
Despite this displayed neutrality, older students can find a space here “to discuss in safety what is happening, the consequences they are enduring”, she adds.
The Uyghurs, Turkish-speaking Muslims and the first ethnic group in the Chinese region of Xinjiang, are victims of a fierce repressive policy.
Beijing authorities have locked up more than a million in political re-education camps, according to human rights organizations.
The Chinese government claims that these sites are vocational training centers intended to keep them away from radicalization.
At the “Ana Care and Education” school, teaching focuses on the language, history and culture of the Uyghurs, who are much more linked to the peoples of Central Asia than to the Han ethnic group, the majority in China.
Many of the pupils or students were forced to leave Xinjiang to escape the repression. School, for them, is an attempt to fill a void and this broken link with their native land, which they call East Turkestan.
“This sense of loss has fueled the need to conserve and preserve our culture and our language,” says Ms. Kashgary.
The children in exile “don’t even have any more cousins, uncles and aunts with whom to exchange, in order to keep the language alive”.
The school, located near the US capital in the state of Virginia, started in 2017 with around 20 students. They are now a hundred. Virginia has nearly 3,000 Uyghur speakers, according to community estimates.
For them, simply calling a family member back in Xinjiang can have dire consequences.
“We want to talk to our relatives by phone or internet, but it’s not possible because if we go online, there is a risk that they will be imprisoned,” said Savut Kasim, 49, whose children study here. .
“The genocide of the Uyghurs in East Turkestan is very real,” he continues. “So we try to keep our language by all possible means”.
In recent years, several Western countries, including the Netherlands, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Canada, France or the United States have denounced the “genocide” of the Uyghurs, through a motion of their parliament or a position of their government.
This desire for preservation is shared by members of a first generation of Americans who did not know Xinjiang.
Muzart, 18, learned to read and write his parents’ language at a Uyghur school. He now volunteers at a summer language teaching program in California. “We try to talk to children only in Uyghur,” he says.
Zilala Mamat, also 18, a student in Michigan, co-founded a network for Uyghur youth in 2021, forging connections through social networks around various events.
“It was missing in our community”, notes the young woman, deploring that these young people are deprived of the possibility of making trips to their family cradle.
“We are the survivors of a genocide. (…) We are different from the others,” said Asena Izgil, another 21-year-old student.
Her life in Xinjiang changed in 2017, says this exile born in the big city of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. “Friends and relatives, people we know, had problems. They were sent to camps or to prison. My father was very worried. We decided to leave”.
In contrast, on American soil, “we eat Uyghur food, my mother teaches us Uyghur cuisine, we celebrate Uyghur festivals, we follow all the religious customs that we could not follow in our native land. .. freely and without fear”.
04/24/2023 11:50:15 – Fairfax (United States) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
