Canada, a new Uyghur homeland

On February 1, 2023, the Canadian Parliament voted unanimously to establish a program to resettle 10,000 Uyghurs currently living in precarious situations in countries that lack asylum processes around the world. When this process is complete in 2025, Canada will host the largest population of Uyghurs outside of Turkey and their ancestral homeland in Northwest China.

In the days since the vote, the news spread through the Uyghur diaspora like wildfire. From Malaysia to Turkey, Uyghurs with expired Chinese passports or no paperwork at all, or no pathway to citizenship in the countries where they are currently living, breathed a collective sigh of relief. At last, there was hope that some of them could restart their lives, find jobs, and build a future.

The Canadian Parliament began investigating the crisis confronting the Uyghur community as early as 2018. In the fall of that year, Mehmet Tohti, a courageous leader in the Canadian Uyghur community, along with other human rights organization representatives, anonymous community members, Adrian Zenz, and yours truly, testified before an international human rights subcommittee. In the years that followed, Tohti and others led an effort to push the Canadian government to intervene.

This intervention was manifested first in 2018 with the Canadian ambassador to China organizing 14 other ambassadors to China to draft a group letter directed to then-Xinjiang Party Secretary Chén Quánguó 陈全国 demanding answers regarding what was happening in Xinjiang. In the following year, Canada joined many other nations in demanding a response on the issue from the United Nations. Then in February 2021, Canada became one of the first nations to declare the state violence in Northwest China a “genocide.” While this declaration received unanimous support (266-0), many members of the ruling Liberal Party, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, abstained from the vote. While this effort was led in part by a Pakistani Canadian member of the Liberal Party, Sameer Zubari, it was not until exactly two years later that the leadership of his party finally took a stand on the issue, voting 322-0 in support of the initiative. In Zubari’s words, the difference from the previous vote was the powerful United Nations Human Rights Commission report that stated what is happening in Xinjiang “may amount to crimes against humanity.”

Uyghurs I spoke with after the historic vote to resettle Uyghurs had long been skeptical of Trudeau’s reticence. One of them told me that he thought the way Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 treated Trudeau “like a little boy” at a G-20 leader’s summit in November 2022 may have prompted Trudeau to take a stronger stance. Regardless of why, by supporting Zubari’s latest initiative to bring 10,000 effectively stateless Uyghurs to Canada, Trudeau has taken the strongest action to date of any world leader in protecting Uyghurs.

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Most of the Uyghurs who will make their way to Canada are currently in Turkey. Many of the approximately 50,000 Uyghurs there went illegally via human trafficking roots in the mid-2010s. Others went around the same time on student and business visas, and then refused to go back after it became clear in 2017 that any Turkic Muslim from China who had been living in Turkey would be detained upon arrival and treated by the Chinese state as terrorism suspects. Since 2017, many Uyghurs living abroad in similar circumstances have been deported to China from countries that did not offer them asylum or refugee status.

As the scholar Sean Roberts has demonstrated, the former category of undocumented Uyghur migrants in Turkey were assisted by Chinese traffickers in Xinjiang and Yunnan and then brought through Myanmar and Laos to Southeast Asian states, sometimes with forged documents, sometimes with no documents at all. These Uyghurs, who in large part were fleeing religious and political oppression and poverty, were characterized by the Chinese state as “extremists” and “terrorists” whose mission was to join global jihad movements. This Islamophobic framing of Uyghur desperation was echoed in 2015 by leading Western journalists such as Seymour Hersh, who characterized the Uyghur path out of Xinjiang as a “rat line” leading directly to the Islamic State in Syria. While a minority of Uyghurs in Turkey were recruited to join groups fighting in Turkey, both for and against the Islamic State, there is little evidence that shows this is why they left China in the first place. Most Uyghurs I interviewed in China in 2015 appeared to be unaware of the emergence of the Islamic State. Instead, they wanted to go to Turkey because there were more educational opportunities and greater religious and political freedom than they experienced in Xinjiang.

While countries like Turkey have offered Uyghurs limited protections — over 11,000 have been given long-term residency status — the majority of Uyghurs in Turkey do not have such protections. And because they are not officially recognized as asylum seekers, they have little legal pathway to citizenship. The same is true for Uyghurs and Kazakhs living in countries such as Kazakhstan and Malaysia. As a result, these Chinese citizens have become effectively stateless, without easy access to basic institutional services such as schools and health care.

With the announcement of the program to resettle 10,000 asylum seekers in Canada, the horizon of what is possible for many Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims has radically changed. Many of the most vulnerable are women and children who have lost their husbands and fathers to the camps and prison systems. As a member of the Turkish Uyghur community, Nursiman Abdurashid told me after the news broke, “There are many Uyghurs who do not have any documents, such as passports or residence permits, so for them it’s their best chance.” Nursiman recalled that as early as 2018, Mehmet Tohti — the Canadian Uyghur who spearheaded the program — had interviewed many Uyghurs in Turkey who were willing to make the move.

“Already back then thousands of Uyghurs were ready to go,” she said. “I’m sure they do not have too much knowledge about Canada, but they need a safe place to live.”

Protection was more of a concern than the ability to continue to live in a Uyghur community. From her perspective, this — as well as the ability to work and access services — were primary concerns. “Last year in 2022 many people fled to Europe, even some very elderly people and religious people took this risky trip,” she recalled. “At that time there was some discussion about whether they would be able to find a Uyghur community or whether they would be able to practice their faith as they did in Turkey. But this was not a strong consideration. There will be many people who will make the move to Canada.”

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Moving 10,000 people from Xinjiang to Canada is a major rebuke of the anti-Muslim racism that has produced the mass incarceration and labor system in Northwest China. As recently as mid-January 2023, a security official in Xinjiang contacted Tohti, through a cousin, to attempt to pressure him to stop this effort. The cousin told Tohti, while the security official hovered in the background, that Tohti’s parents and siblings had all been detained or had died as a result of his advocacy work. The cousin implied to Tohti that the same would happen to him if he did not step away from his work.

The Uyghurs living in Turkey are not terrorists or extremists, as the Chinese state has claimed. They are villagers and students who fled overwhelming violence for a chance at a better life. The cost Tohti and his family are bearing because of this is immense, but it will also change the lives of thousands of other families. It will not reverse the suffering that millions of Uyghurs have gone through over the past decade, but it does show that some nations are not willing to be complicit in this tragedy. There will still be many more diaspora Uyghurs in need of support. Perhaps other nations will follow Canada’s example and demonstrate their active support for Uyghur protection.

Xinjiang Column archives.