By / June 4, 2025 / Essay, Essay in English / 8 minutes of reading
Before it was terminated by the Trump administration, the Radio Free Asia Uyghur service was vital for persecuted Uyghurs to communicate their plight to the world.
Nowruz is the name of March in Uyghur. It means the beginning of a new day and a new year. March 21 is always the biggest cultural day, which symbolizes a new day, a new beginning, and a new life in Uyghur. It is the first day of the year according to the traditional calendar popular in Central Asia and the Middle East.
Unfortunately, March 2015 was not the beginning of the new day for the Uyghur diaspora in the US. It meant losing voice in the middle of the dark, endless nights of ongoing genocide. For Uyghurs, the new year started with the termination of the Radio Free Asia Uyghur service, which told Uyghur plight for 26 years, the only voice in the free world. The Radio Free Asia Uyghur service was terminated on March 15, and its Uyghur broadcast stopped .
When I first listened to Radio Free Asia in December 1998, I was a master’s student in Urumchi, which is the capital of the colonized Uyghur homeland, which is far from Beijing, a distance of two thousand kilometers. It was a dark, cold early morning in Urumchi; three of us listened to it on the playground secretly, and we celebrated with one another. We whispered, “Our voices are from Washington!’ as if it was the voice of someone who was coming to save us!
It was not really clear. We could not hear RFA Uyghur reports because of disturbing voices and interruptions with Chinese drama sounds. We tried for a week, and it was almost the same. In the end, we decided to buy a new shortwave radio, but the shortwave radio was sold out of the stores near Xinjiang University, where a few thousand students were studying.
In the 2000s, When I was teaching in proper China as a lecturer, I kept listening to the RFA. It informed me about what tragedies were happening in my homeland, which was the CCTV, Chinese Central TV never mentioned. Through listening to the radio, I learned what type of human rights, constitutional rights, and international rights we have, and I have learned how those rights were being violated and what repressive policies were being implemented against only Uyghur citizens.
I shared what I learnt from the RFA with my students secretly. I shared the news about the helpless Uyghur father from Ghulja, whose six-month pregnant daughter was taken to hospital for forced abortion by the local authorities. He saved his daughter and grandchildren by talking to the RFA in the 2000s. After the news was reported, the US parliamentarian mentioned the issue to the Chinese officials, and the Uyghur was saved. My students who were listening to me had tears in their eyes. They said there is justice in the world, and there is a media outlet in the world that can be the advocate and voice of the oppressed Uyghurs.
When I shared the very same human rights violations with my Chinese colleagues, some of them felt surprised, and some of them suspected my intention. After my explanations, they said they had no idea about those tragedies happening to the Uyghurs. Once, after I shared the news about stolen Uyghur kids in Chinese cities, my colleagues contacted local authorities and the media. In a few weeks, the media reported the issue, which led the local authority to solve the problem. They rounded up those Uyghur kids and took them back home at government expense.
On July 5 2009, hundreds of students protested in front of the government building in Urumchi. The protest turned into a riot after a police crackdown. After the event, local Uyghurs identified that 35 Uyghurs were being forcefully disappeared, and thousands of people were being injured and arrested. The RFA kept reporting about them and telling their stories. Because of those efforts, the names of those victims were being mentioned on UN platforms at international conferences.
In November 2009, US President Barack Obama visited China. We heard from the RFA that human rights activists in the USA lobbied him to mention human rights violations against Uyghurs in China. Because of pressure from US politicians, the Chinese government released Ilham Tohti, who had been detained for his remarks about July 5. Before Obama’s visit, Ilham Tohti returned home. I felt supported and encouraged.
In June 2011, I returned from the USA to Urumchi and met those people whose loss the RFA had reported on July 5. They lost their kids, family members and relatives in the jails. They welcomed me to Urumchi, Kashgar, Hotan, and Aksu, which are the major cities. They held my hand and looked into my eyes. From their whispers, I interpreted that they believed all of the detainees would be released one day, like Ilham Tohti if the US administration put pressure on China.
I got arrested on August 19, 2013, in Kashgar and detained in Urumchi for running schools and Uyghur language kindergartens. The RFA was the first media to inform the world, and it kept reporting about it until my release.
When the unprecedented mass arrests started in 2017, the RFA was the first media outlet to report how many people were being arrested, how many detention facilities were being built, and what was happening inside those internment camps. As a consequence, the RFA journalists paid a heavy price, their family members were arrested, and some of them got long prison terms.
In 2017, before the Chinese government started a mass incarceration campaign against the entire Uyghur population, the police collected the short wave radio door by door to prevent people from listening to the RFA. The authorities arrested people who listened to the RFA, and thousands of people were detained for being acquaintances of the reporters in the RFA. I learned this when I did a survey on 300 Uyghurs who left China in recent years.
The RFA Uyghur service has played a pivotal role in exposing vital human rights violations since it started. Especially since the unprecedented human rights crisis that was inflicted on the Uyghurs and other Turkic ethnic groups in 2017. In 2018, the United Nations claimed that more than one million and 8 hundred thousand people were being detained. In 2021, the United States accepted it as a genocide and a crime against humanity. December 9, 2021, the Uyghur tribunal in London also claimed it was genocide and a crime against the humanity.
The termination of RFA funding is eliminating the Uyghur voice in the middle of ongoing genocide. Instead of stopping the genocide, it will encourage the genocidal Chinese regime to move forward. Except for the RFA, there is no Uyghur media to expose the world how the genocide are being committed and its consequences. Without the RFA, there is no media to reach out to the Uyghur homeland directly in the Uyghur language, and there is no media to let Uyghur people listen to the news happening outside of China. Terminating the Uyghur service will lead to the wiping out of the Uyghur language from the Uyghur diaspora.
At this moment, almost every Uyghur family has at least one family member in jail. 87 percent of them are experiencing psychological problems. The RFA is the place to keep updating their voice. It is the place where their stories are broadcast. But now the service is no longer available. This amounts to neglecting what is happening to the Uyghurs inside China, extinguishing their only hope, and eliminating their reason to believe there is justice in the world.
Uyghurs were the victims of the Cold War between the USA and Communist countries. Radio Liberty Uyghur’s service was terminated in 1979 because of the deal between the United States and China. History is repeating itself, and Uyghurs are once again the victims.
According to Uyghur folklore, the Uyghurs were kept in the mountains for hundreds of years. They were in complete darkness and couldn’t see the sun, the moon, the stars, the sky, and they were living like shadows. They had been trying to escape, but no one could. One day in March, there was a light shining on the land, and a blue wolf walked out of the light. The wolf led the Uyghurs from the shadows in the end, and since then, they have celebrated that day as a symbol of survival and called it Nowruz – New Day. But this Noruz was the opposite. There is no light shining on the land. The Trump administration just extinguished it.