 First of all, thank you all for coming, for braving trains, weather, viruses, the whole lot, and for turning up today. We're sat day morning. We're expecting people to sort of trickle in a little bit more. But thank you guys for turning up on time. So my job, my name's Tim Pringle. I work here at SARS in the Department of Development Studies, and I'm also the editor of the China Quarterly. And so my job here at the moment is basically to welcome you, to thank those who need to be thanked, apart from yourselves, and to basically give a little introduction. So I'm not going to take up a lot of your time at all before we move on to the first panel. So first of all, I'd like to thank the SARS China Institute for hosting and funding this event. Funding has also come from five other institutions. We'll come to that in a minute, but the lion's share comes from the SARS Institute. And so our thanks, not only for the cash, thank you for the cash, of course, but also for the fantastic support we've had from Aki Elbozi and Lisa Whittington in organizing and getting all the bios together, putting the program together, sourcing out the catering as well. The idea itself comes from what we might call a gang of seven of us who have been watching or observing what's been happening in Xinjiang over the past two or three years, and for some of us for much longer than that as well. The institutions that are supporting this or the universities apart from the SARS and the SARS China Institute are King's College London, London School of Economics, the University of Edinburgh, and Queen Mary University. First year of London. Special thanks need to go to Rachel Harris, who has really been a driver of this event, I think, and Sophia Woodman, who has also been a driver of the event. So I'd like to single out those Rachel and Sophia for the fantastic work they have in keeping us all together, keeping the Skype meetings that have gone into organizing this efficient and well-run, and here we all are today. So thank you to all of us, but thank you particularly to Rachel and Sophia. Special thanks to all the speakers who are here in person. We have got at least two speakers who are speaking via video link or Skype or whatever it's called. Fingers crossed, that is going to work. I'm sure it will. One of those speakers is she's coming from the state, so she can't make it anyway. And the other speaker is not feeling so well, so he has taken a wise decision not to risk public transport. I'd also really like to thank the audio visual team, the AV team, particularly Gary and Tam, for the fantastic work that they've done in getting the livestream up and running and in sorting out the audio visuals or the technical work there, too. That has been really, really good. It hasn't been without problems, I know, but we're here and they've done it. And I know Gary in particular, but he's missing a great rugby match to be here. And so thanks very much, Gary and Tam. And thanks, too, to the catering folks who turned up at half-eight this morning to set up the catering, only to find it true, so our style that they were short of a table to put everything on, but we sorted that out. So thanks to you guys as well. A little bit of announcement, what's it called? Housekeeping, a little bit of housekeeping, yeah. We have three panels today. We have between three and four speakers on each. They're going to talk for probably between eight and 10 minutes, no longer than 10 minutes. We have deliberately set aside time for discussion. So that depends on you guys, not just questions, but also contributions and disagreement, which, of course, will be civil, polite, and well-informed, I'm sure, but so to make this work, we don't want just to have speakers doing that bit than a couple of questions. We want to make this a genuinely participatory event. And also, you'll see from the last session as well, we're looking to the future as well. We want this crisis in Xinjiang and beyond is continuing to get worse. And so we're looking to the future and ideas of how we can respond to this. So yeah, thanks to the panelists, but thanks to you guys in advance for your questions, contributions, et cetera. Bit more housekeeping. Lunch, we've got sandwiches. They are turning up hopefully. No, we know sandwiches. The sandwiches are canceled. My God, the sandwiches are canceled. So what I meant to say is you brought your own sandwiches, of course, like silly me. Okay, so that was a surprise. Got tea and coffee, tea and coffee is a sandwich surprise. I don't know, it's with surprises and no sandwiches. Surprise to me. Okay, now the live stream, one more thing about the live stream is for the, to those guys, to folks who are listening on live stream, on your screen, I assume on the bottom right hand side of the screen is a chat button. So if you have questions that occur to you during the talks, ping those questions off to us. Sophia is monitoring the chat stream there and she will present the questions. So please, those of you watching us on live stream, please do possibly participate and add your questions too. The event is, as you know, it's being recorded, obviously. We will edit it a little bit, make it a bit neater and we'll send out a link later on in a week or so, so it's time. So I think I've covered everything there. Before we move to Aziz Ezelkun, a well-known Uyghur poet, writer and researcher, why are we here? I think obviously you all know why we're here. We've seen the program, you're following this and are involved in this very, very closely. What is happening in Xinjiang? People are saying it's unprecedented. I think what makes it, we've seen equally bad things happen historically as well, but what is making it possibly unprecedented in the real sense is the modern technologies of repression and surveillance against a background of what appears to be a xenophobic view, a xenophobic approach to Muslim minorities around the world, not just in China, but around the world. We only have to look at the borders of China to Myanmar or Burma to see what was happening, what is happening to the Rohingya people there. It seems to be a growing trend or a growing occurrence that this kind of repression of Muslim minorities, which is now reaching extraordinary levels in Xinjiang, is becoming almost normalized. I think that's what we're here today to do, to stop, to discuss academically, in a scholarly fashion, how we can denormalize it, how we can stop it becoming the norm, how we can prevent the giants of technology, be they from the states or be they from China or be they from wherever, from the UK, from using that technology to corral, to monitor, to survey, and eventually to imprison Muslim minorities and, indeed, other minorities around the world. That is what we're here today to try and confront that reality and present a counter-narrative that leads to the curbing of this kind of state surveillance, aided and abetted, as I said, by voracious private companies who are seeing opportunities for control and surveillance that historically really generally are unprecedented. So that's, I think, is why we're here, why we're here. Possibly are most important, or all the panels, I think, are very important, but panel three is where we kind of look at how this surveillance, this repression, this use of modern technologies either in authoritarian settings in China but also in liberal democracies as well. Obviously, they're becoming manifested far more sharply in those authoritarian contexts, but they are not irrelevant in liberal democracies as well. And panel three looks at how that surveillance, that kind of repression, how it can spill over. Well, we're just spilling over into forms of cultural genocide and more. So that's enough from me. I'm not a singe-giant expert, I'm not an expert in anything, I see, but far from being a singe-giant expert or indeed an expert on surveillance. But I'm now going to hand over to Aziz, who is going to start us off. Aziz, are you, Aziz there? I'll quickly intro. Aziz was born in East... Aziz, sorry, Aziz, sorry, terrible pronunciation. Aziz Elkun, who's from East Turkestan in the Uyghur Autonomous Region, a graduate from Xinjiang University. And without further ado, I'll pass you over to Aziz. Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone. Okay, let me briefly tell you about the current Uyghur tragedy and how it affected the Uyghur people. And of course, it's affected on my family and on me. Over the past century, countries have used the tool of nationalism to pursue their interests. Nationalism is about people, land and the relationship between them. Nationalist propaganda seeks to define a special relationship between a unique people and a particular territory. The Uyghurs are one of the many peoples who have been left out of this need equation. Under the apartheid policies being pursued by Chinese President Xi Jinping since 2016, millions of Uyghurs are suffering in human treatment in intimate camps within the Uyghur region. Uyghurs in exile are also suffering because China has cut off all communication between Uyghurs at home and abroad. I want to use this opportunity to tell you my own story as I am in front of your effect. As an example, how Uyghurs in exile have become so desperate in response to China's ethnic cleansing policies. In my second year of university in 1989, I was 21 years old student from Xinjiang University in Urumqi. I participated in this student protest calling for equal rights, freedom and democracy for the Uyghur people. This incident became a problem for me later after I graduated. I was fired for my job and accused of separatism and I have to leave my homeland. I lived in the U.K. since 2001. My father was born during the time of Republic of East Turkestan in 1946. I was born, my father and I were citizens of People's Republic of China, residents of our historic Fatherland East Turkestan. But China renamed it Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in 1955. My father died in November 2017. I could not get a visa to attend his funeral as a British citizen. Soon after that, my communication with my mother was cut off. I could not know if she was in a camp or even still alive. I wrote a story named an unanswered telephone call. I produced a short film based on the story. I still felt stressed and sleepless nights. In April 2019, I discovered from Google Earth that the tomb of my father and the whole graveyard had been destroyed. My father stayed in his tomb for only 623 days. Chinese government said this was to modernize us. I felt as if my father's body had been brutally torn out of its resting place in our Anster's land. After my recent interview with CNN about the destruction of my father's tomb, the Chinese Global Times, CCTV, and China Global Television Networks specially responded, spreading false information about the destruction of my father's tomb by forcing my 78-year-old mother to give an interview. I learned from friends living outside from the region that my mother was alive and that my sister had been detained in an internment camp for more than a year and a half. I still have no news of my other relatives, thanks to the Chinese Global Times TV Networks report. I have now heard my father's voice for the first time since December 2017. I wrote an obituary for my father when I got news of his death. Now I would like to read part of it for you. Dear father, you were a gardener with green fingers. When the stones grow, you won't be there to prune them. You were a doctor. You cured so many patients. Now my heart is broken, but you are not there to cure it. You left today in your coffin heading towards your tomb. Your son could not carry you because it was not beside you. When seven spades of soil were dropped on you, people said farewell to you, and I was not there. Let Elkin cry now because he has lost his father. I could not see you alive for the last time. I wrote this poem soon after I hit my father's death. Everyone single we were in exile today can tell like me a similar story of lost and disappeared friends and families. This is a time of crisis. This is a time of tragedy for the we were people, around 20 million population. And I just, with this opportunity, I would like to tell we were not minority in their homeland. I would like to thank the organizer of this conference. And I hope you will have a meaningful discussion today. Thank you very much. Thank you, Rachel. Thank you, Tim, Aziz and Tim for the introduction, but also the organizers for bringing us together. The first panel is about Xinjiang, but beyond that also. This is why two out of three speakers, they're going to possibly focus beyond Xinjiang in terms of the ways in which Islamophobia, globalized Islamophobia, terror, surveillance is not only taking place in one particular territory and over one particular people, but it's also increasingly globalized phenomenon. That's a focus. Now, I mean, the way I could see when Tim talked about how it's unprecedented, what's happening, but also not unprecedented, the ways in which, for instance, while the repression is old, surveillance of old kind is old, but there's also a new element, right? And this is connected. I was thinking my own work is primarily on Tibet. And I could see that what's happening in Xinjiang, of course, is what was happening to Tibet and for a long time. And it's not a surprise, therefore, that the Communist Party chief in Xinjiang, what they call Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, is the one who showed his capacity to pacify people through what they did in Tibet Autonomous Region, right? That's one. But also, Aziz, when he talked of something very personal, but also very political, I was thinking of the ways in which he talked of repression over the living, but also over the dead. So even the dead are not left alone, right? That's what we are finding. So this is what's happening is unprecedented, in fact, in various senses, but also something that gets of significance to the wider world to understand. Now, we have three speakers here. And in fact, we'll start with Rachel Harris. I'll ask each speaker to introduce themselves in 30 seconds. And then they have up to 10 minutes to speak. So after eight minutes, I'll remind you, two minutes left. And 10 minutes, we end, right? So we'll start with Rachel. Then it would be Asim Qureshi and then Nithasha Kall. Rachel. Great. Thank you very much, Divyesh. So my name is Rachel Harris. I teach in the School of Arts here at Zoas. And I have been doing ethnographic research with the Uyghur communities in Xinjiang, or East Turkistan, and also in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan now for quite a lot of years. My own more recent research project has been about Islam in China. So I'm glad to be the first speaker today. I want to address squarely why we are talking about Muslim minorities in this conference. I've had quite a few people ask me why we are emphasizing religion in this conference. Personally, I think it's very important to start from here. Why do we want to make the links with other Muslim minority peoples? People have said to me, oh, it's not about Islam. It's about culture. It's about ethnicity. So how much can we say that this is about Islam? Or rather, how much and in what ways can we say that Islamophobia underpins this crisis? And to what degree is this brand of Chinese Islamophobia linked to forms developed in the West and circulating the globe? So this, I think, is the question for our first panel. So the Chinese government certainly says that it's all about Islam, right? It claims the campaigns in Xinjiang are needed to root out what it calls the three evils. It links terrorism, separatism, and religious extremism. It says the camps are intended to combat extremist Islamic ideology, which it says has poisoned the minds of people and led to widespread violence. So those are the claims. So what does the Chinese government mean by extremism and terrorism? Actually, we know from these recent leaked documents that Xi Jinping himself was closely involved in the development of this policy. Xi actually visited Xinjiang in 2014. And his remarks around that time suggest that what he was particularly alarmed about was what he saw among the wider population there. And that was the broad revival of Islamic faith and public piety. So beginning in the 1980s, really, Xinjiang or East Turkistan, just like other parts of the China, Central Asia, and the Middle East, they saw a broad-based Islamic revival. And as part of my own research on Uighur Islam over the past 10 years, I spent a lot of time in southern Xinjiang in rural areas. And I observed the rise of these new sensibilities amongst Uighurs, people returning to a religious lifestyle. You could see it in projects of community mosque building, the turn to regular daily prayer, fasting, forms of Islamic dress, and many, many debates about how to live a good Muslim life. So we've seen many government sources which have identified, say, the 75 types of behavior that show religious extremism, and thus a reason to send people to the internment camps. And these have ranged from praying, eating halal, fasting, growing a beard, giving up smoking and drinking, or listening to religious media. So it's been very clear that rather than targeting the small number of people who might reasonably be judged to be vulnerable to radicalization and violent action, the anti-extremism campaign in Xinjiang aimed to eliminate all visible and audible expressions of Islamic faith from the landscape. So people also ask me, okay, so if it's about Islam, then why not the Hui? Why not the Muslim Chinese? Why haven't they been targeted? They're Muslims too. They've also experienced a big rise in piety and a big interest in globally circulating reformist styles of Islam. The Tablighi Jama'at was still active amongst the Hui. So what I think really is that we're looking at a racialized form of Islamophobia. I think that fears of Uyghur and Kazakh religious extremism build on a seam of racism in China. You can find it very easily on social media. These peoples, they look different from the majority hand. They smell different. They can't speak the language properly. Onto this discourse of difference, it was easy to impose the discourse of Islamic extremism and terror. So what kind of violence actually occurred? Over 2014 and 2013 to 14, close to 100 violent incidents were reported in Xinjiang. They were represented as terrorist incidents by the Chinese media. But most of these confrontations were actually sparked by aggressive policing. So police entering people's homes and forcibly removing women's veils, for example, was often a flash point. And we should remember, of course, that most of the people that died in these incidents were themselves Uyghurs. Yes, there were a small number of incidents which did look like premeditated, organized violence against civilians. So the Kunming train station attack in March 2013 that left 31 dead. The Urumqi market's attack in May, where two cars plowed through the marketplace, killing 43. What we really need to understand is how and why this small number of incidents were used to justify such massive, invasive and violent methods of control over the Muslim peoples of Xinjiang. After all, violent incidents also occur in other parts of China. So why was Islam framed as the root cause of this violence? Why, for example, did policymakers not discuss whether getting police to stop harassing civilians might be a good way to stop violent responses? Why did they need to mobilize a People's War on Terror in Xinjiang? Of course, as Aziz has already suggested, it's about territory, right? And this, of course, is the same in many other disputes involving Muslims and other minority peoples across the world, Palestine, for example, obviously. Xinjiang is a resource-rich territory located on a sensitive frontier with Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia. China, I think, viewed religious revival as a threat to stability, its development projects, and its expanding influence through the Belt and Road Initiative. Xi Jinping's primary motivation there is to pacify and fully control that territory. I think it's worth thinking about the self-immolations in Tibet that began in 2009. China also designated these acts as terrorism. That wasn't because of the way these Tibetan protesters chose to die. It wasn't because they might harm anyone, except themselves. It was the perceived threat it posed to China's territorial sovereignty over Tibet. The same logic governs the designation of terrorism in Xinjiang. And Emily Yeh, who wrote about this, remarked that the linkage between terror and territory is not coincidental. Maintaining these bounded spaces of territory requires the constant mobilization of threat. We see this also in the writing of Tal al-Assad. He's argued in the context of America's own global war on terror that the discourse of terror creates a state of crisis which allows the state to reorder and control everyday social relations. And indeed, we can see how China's adoption of the rhetoric of terrorism in Xinjiang was directly linked to the discourse of the US-led global war on terror. Just two months after the September 11 attacks on the United States, China announced the existence of a global network of Uyghur terrorists supported by hostile foreign forces which posed a major threat to China's security. This timing was no coincidence. It was a clear move to buy international support for its measures of control in Xinjiang. How am I doing with time? Good. I will say a couple of words then about the language of Islamophobia. Arun Kundani has written about the language of radicalization in the West. He's noted how rarely it considers how the actions of governments might actually provoke violence. Always in this discourse, the root cause of violence is situated in individual psychological or religious journeys, far removed from social and political circumstances, and always the Islamic faith is itself viewed as the precursor for violence. In Xinjiang, we find a very equivalent process of pathologizing Uyghur faith and identity. Xi Jinping himself, as we've seen, has used very frequently this language of infection by the virus of Islamic radicalism and the need to quarantine and cure the whole Muslim minority population of Xinjiang. Of course, this has new ironies given the current corona virus outbreak. Great, thank you. But of course, also it is no laughing matter what's going on there in the region at the moment and there are new very terrible fears about what might be happening in the camps if the virus takes hold. So a final word then about disciplining Muslims and human re-engineering. We know a lot about the ways in which the cure for this ideological virus is being administered in China, in Xinjiang. Detained in the camps are reciting patriotic slogans, they're singing revolutionary songs. Children have been taken to orphanages and educated to regard the religion and identity of their parents as backward and dangerous. Xinjiang authorities have been encouraging ethnic intermarriage, offering cash incentives to handmen to marry Uyghur women, strangely not the other way around so much. The re-engineering project extends to the innermost bodily aspects of Uyghur identity by targeting halal eating practices, serving pork to the camps detainees. Pork has also been distributed to poor Uyghur families as part of poverty relief efforts. So these radical efforts, I think, are aimed at breaking down core aspects of faith and identity, and these are of course inseparable. And the way that this has been rolled out across the broad population of Xinjiang has only been possible because of the regime of terror which has been enforced by the system of detention camps. So I think the question for us now is really the concerns. The China's methods of control may form a model for other governments. We know of the particular terrible crisis now unfolding in India, for example, and I think perhaps my colleagues may be able to better address that than me. So thank you very much. Thank you, Rachel, for starting with East Turkestan, and we also say East Turkestan, or Xinjiang, but it's Turkestan. And then we move on to Asim Qureshi. Asim, the challenge I have is I can't show you the sign for eight minutes. So you'll have to watch your time, better yourself and discipline, right? Asim, and if you could start with introducing yourself and then please speak for eight to 10 minutes. Thank you. For the invitation to the Chinese Institute or the other institutes that are inviting me, I'm really sorry that I clumped in with you today. I thought it was probably prudent to stay at home in case you guys saw me coughing and sneezing and reaching for tissues and start panicking about, you know, whether or not you're going to get infected by any. So yeah, my name is Asim Qureshi. I have spent the last 17 years doing ethnographic work, studying the impact of the war on terror around the world. So my doctoral studies and various kind of journal part and pieces and books that I've written have all focused really on this one area. Predominantly I focus in my working practice on despondency cases so I get involved with legal teams doing complex terrorism trials, trying to understand the complex motivations on why people get involved in political violence. So like Rachel ended, I actually was going to start my presentation by speaking about pathology because I think that's really centered to understanding how Islamophobia within a counter-terrorism context within this larger superstructure of the war on terror, how it operates. It really is about how Muslims are seen to have a disease that's attached to them. I mean, I know it's a very medical term, but when we understand how it operates, I think it is really the most appropriate term that we can use for understanding the connection between counter-terrorism and Islamophobia. I think the best way to maybe start this is really describing an experience that I had at the airport. So some of you may be aware that under schedule seven of the terrorism act 2000, the police and the border agency can they can stop you and they can ask you questions, which you are obliged to answer, the refusal to answer a question is considered a terrorism offense. So you have no right in that moment to silence. I could like, I could come to so as right now, not that I would, but shoot somebody in the head and I would have a right to silence in that moment. I would have a right to have a way of present with me as I was interrogated about whatever I did, but at any point coming in or out of the UK, they don't have that right. So when I was stopped, I asked the police officers whether or not it was an intelligence led stop, did they have some specific information about me or my travel that they had found problematic and had needed to actually identify. And they said, no, no, sir, it's a suspicion to stop. And then I laughed and said, well, it can't really be suspicionless, can it? I mean, you have to have some kind of metric by which you were measuring why you deemed it was necessary to stop me. So I said, either it's my melanin or it's the length of my beard or it's where I've traveled to. Like there has to be something there. And we kept on going around in the circular argument with them trying to say, no, no, sir, it's completely suspicionless. We don't do these profiling exercises and whatever else. And then of course, you get into an interrogation room where they're interviewing about various things. And then they'll ask you questions like, so what type of Muslim are you? I was like, well, I'm a Muslim, Muslim, right? I'm a Muslim who practices his faith, but are you Sunni, are you Shia? And I kept on saying to them the same thing whenever they would ask these questions, whether it was about my faith or it was about my positions on conflicts in the Middle East or whatever it was, which is the legislation requires them to investigate whether or not I've been involved in the preparation, the commission or the instigation of an act of terrorism, right? So every time they would ask one of these questions, I would respond by saying, how does this help that investigation? How is the asking of this question relevant to this investigation that you are carrying out of me? And they would say, oh, well, it's because of the way that people talk about Islam. And I said, no, it's the way that you talk about Islam. Muslims don't talk about Islam like this. We actually have very, very normal conversations in our daily life. It doesn't really revolve around whether or not our live practice has to do with whether or not we're extreme or about to commit an act of terrorism in any way. So what I was trying to maneuver them towards was at least an acknowledgement that what they were involved with was a profiling exercise. And of course, many terrorism experts and even counterterrorism officials have acknowledged that this stop is not about keeping Britain safe. It's very, very much about a data gathering exercise, what they're trying to do with the tens of thousands of Muslims that are stopped. And these are British citizens, by the way, because non-citizens are stopped under immigration legislation, not this particular piece of counterterrorism legislation is to gather data about us, to profile us, to understand our networks. And I guess I'm in a bit of a different situation where I know my rights. This is an aspect of counterterrorism policy that I've studied, that I understand how it works. Not to say that it's not traumatic. Throughout the whole process, I had an elevated heart rate. I felt a sense of extreme anxiety and unease, even though I knew what was going on. So can you imagine what it's like for people who don't, who don't have the access, who don't have access to that kind of information, who aren't aware what their rights are? It's a deeply troubling experience for many of them. And when you consider that this is happening in its tens of thousands each year, then I think that that is something that we really need to think about. But what I wanted to say further than that, and using that as a tool to jump into the rest of this presentation, is that this isn't just about melanin. It is about culture, ideas, and belief. When we look at the way that the CIA in the black sites use torture, they didn't just torture these men that were being accused or being involved in various acts of terrorism. They were using cultural cues. They were bringing in people who looked like magicians in order to try and harm them. So there is this idea that we can use your culture, we can use your belief system against you. And the war on terror specifically itself, it overrides all the traditional boundaries and political divides that we have. So while John Bolton, for example, is talking about Bashar al-Assad being part of the axis of evil, this is going back to like 2005, they're simultaneously taking people like Mahara Arra within their Syrian prisons on behalf of America to torture within their prisons. Libya was a rogue state, but Tony Blair was willing to work with Gaddafi in order to deport Libyans that were living in the UK because of the excuse of terrorism. We see with India the narrative of the war on terror, both in Occupy Kashmir and within India itself being used. And of course, our topic today, which is China's treatment of the Uighur in East Turkistan, the excuse of terrorism has a hegemony across the way in which the war on terror operates. So that is central to the war on terror and Islamophobia, that as a narrative, as a discourse, it is all prevailing, that it doesn't matter what context you're in, that once it's evoked, a state of exception then emerges, which then justifies a panoply of counter-terrorism offenses, which really target Muslim ideas, their beliefs, their cultural practices. We see this probably most in the prevent strategy in the UK and what's now known as the global countering violent extremism movement. So in the UK it's known as prevent, but elsewhere it's known as CVE, where what they're trying to do is exercise pre-crime. So the UK's really been the front runner in this practice. They say, well, we wanna stop terrorism before it occurs, but in order to do that, we need to empower the whole of society to take these pre-crime approaches, which means that we have to train public sector workers to spot the signs of radicalization before they emerge. Now, with the UN having placed CVE at a global level, so a UN resolution, Security Council Resolution, requires every single country to have a CVE program. What you have is each country using this idea of pre-crime in order to quell and crush any kind of dissent, because what they do is that they use CVE as a narrative to say any kind of dissent to the state is potentially problematic in the future and therefore needs to be crushed in advance. And of course, with the rise of algorithms and the way that they used a very good book is Saphir Noble's Algorithms of Oppression, we can see that actually a lot of this stuff is now being automated. Of course, the context of the Uyghurs is the perfect example of that. I'm running out of time now, so I guess, yeah, I wanna just end by saying, you know, Rachel mentioned that extremist ideology has been cited by the Chinese government. You know, that narrative doesn't start in a vacuum. We have to understand how that narrative connects, you know, all the way back to George Bush's evocation of a crusade back in 2001 to see that this is a linear narrative that they've all built on one another in order to justify their repression of Muslim minority communities in whatever context they are throughout the world. So I'll end there and hopefully I look forward to engaging in some discussion during the Q&A. Thank you very much. Thank you, Arthim. Now we have our third speaker, Natasha. Natasha, call. Thank you, the BH. So thank you for giving me this opportunity to reflect on something that I haven't explicitly, that is explicitly not my area of expertise. I write about, I teach politics and international relations at Westminster. I'm a senior lecturer. And my work has been on the rise of the global right on Hindutva in India, a lot on Kashmir. So, and I theoretically think about these things too. So what I'm going to try and do in the next 10 minutes is organically try and relate the bed of nails that I have as it were, which is what I have been thinking and writing about to this new magnet that has been brought into my thought process of trying to relate it to what's going on in the Chinese context, because as I said, I normally think about democracies that are undergoing this shift. Okay, sorry, I forgot. I need to also introduce myself. I'm a novelist and a writer. I have a website, it's netashacall.com. So, okay. So I think that listening to the previous two speakers and specifically Rachel talking about Xinjiang, I was struck by many of the things that resonated with the sort of surveillance and repression that I have been reading and writing about. So for instance, this idea of the dead, of punishing the dead body in the Indian case, the one of the sort of the famous cases is that of a Kashmiri person called Abzil Guru, who was hanged on the basis of circumstantial evidence in an, he was the only person actually who was hanged in that, as a result of that attack on the Indian parliament in 2001. He was hanged on the basis of circumstantial evidence and the court judgment in the orbiter noted that this must be done to satisfy the collective conscience of the nation. And there were numerous lawyers, and there is a whole body of work that actually says that hanging was deeply problematic. And it was done for reasons that you would not expect judiciary to act in those ways. So there's the case, and not only that, his body was buried in prison. His family was not informed when he was executed and buried. And since then, from 2009 onwards, any mention of all of that brings up charges of sedition. So in 2016, at a university in Delhi called Jawaharlal Nehru University, which has been the focal point of a lot of current government, right, when governments attacks on people. So at that university, some students were apparently saying, chanting slogans in favor of Kashmir and of, you know, and about Abzil Guru, and as a, apparently, and as a result of that, even if they were doing that, as a result of that, they were charged with sedition and recently the newly elected Delhi government, which is not even the BJP, has approved, the Ahmadmi Party has approved that case to go ahead. So there is this kind of stigma attached to anyone, anything that talks about the rights of people in these peripheries of effectively what are post-colonial nations, but these peripheries are almost like colonial laboratories. So what we see in Kashmir is not that dissimilar to what I hear about in other places. There is the collective punishment. So the issue of Kashmir, of course, for a lot of people around the world only came into prominence last August with what was the constitutional coup. So the overnight, the autonomy, the constitutionally guaranteed even de jure autonomy, which had been substantially eroded anyway, was taken away overnight by a lot of military, but you know, extra tens of thousands of extra troops being brought in and the entire region placed under effective lockdown. So again, collective punishment of the entire population with no taking of the consent of those people. So the legal status of an entire population was altered overnight by a country that claims to be a democracy and the population's consent was not taken into account, their leader's consent was not taken into account and six months on various forms of this block, this communications clamp down have been in place. So it was actually nearly two months before the landlines were made functional and that too just before a congressional hearing at the US Congress, at which I spoke myself. So this idea of shutting down people's voices, not allowing journalists, the journalists in, setting up only media facilitation centers where only specific journalists were allowed to access that place and only do so for 15 minutes at a time. And even when the internet is switched on, there are only specific numbers of sites that you can access for months and months, people were not able to access any prepaid mobile phones. There were shortages of medicine in the first few weeks and people suffering that kind of hardship and a doctor who was warning, who was speaking to the media about it was whisked away on camera. People who were detained were some of the people, elderly female protesters for instance, who actually gathered publicly once a month to speak about enforced disappearances. They were made to sign written documents that say that they won't be speaking to the media. So there's a whole kind of range of similarity in this kind of action, but also that it's done by a country that claims to be a democracy. So this idea of what has been happening in Kashmir is not too dissimilar and Kashmiris as a population there and with Kashmir Valley at the focus are Muslims. So Kashmiri Muslims happen to be the worst kind of Muslims for a right wing ruling government because for them and for their project of India as a Hindu nation, these people are a radical other. There are also the Indian Kashmiris. Now I want to just, when you spoke about this idea of whether it's a religion and whether it's ethnicity, I mean that's actually a really interesting question because if we look at this even in the context of other places such as India, there's that question of to what extent is it a Muslim issue? Are these people asking for their rights? Are they problematic because they're doing that or because they're Muslim? And to what extent is the response mediated by their religion? Well interestingly enough, Kashmiri Muslims in terms of their struggle do not and even like solidarities do not have Indian Muslims speaking up for them. So even though the Indian state constantly, especially in the post 9-11 Islamophobic global moment, continues to use their Muslim always already nature of what they're saying is because they're Muslim and therefore always already extremist, whether while that is always used, the Indian Muslims do not support, do not come out in solidarity with Kashmiri Muslims. Historically has not happened because it's a political dispute. It's people asking for their rights. Of course, the fact that they happen to be Muslims means that there are ways of legitimizing other kinds of subjugation and suppression of them. And sorry, one of the things I forgot to mention earlier, any number of people, all of the prominent leaders, civil society activists, everyone, people placed on no-fly lists, even now, topmost bureaucrats, political leaders placed under house arrest or detained under public safety acts and either hundreds or thousands, we don't know, but of children, young people and others being taken away to prisons, including outside of the state and where their family members have not been able to get in touch with them. So this is all ongoing. It's still a part, it's very much happening now. And accompanied by the fact that Muslims in India do not see that struggle as being in common, accompanied by the fact that the leaders of India and China are quite happy to meet and liaison trade and at that level, that relationship does not have a problem. So there's kind of, it's interesting how there are different kinds of affinities and mutually shared perception of interests. So there's that. Then there's the issue of the Indian Prime Minister Modi, as all of this has been happening, being on very good terms with various leaders in West Asia, Middle East, being in fact honored and given medals and awards by several countries there. So this idea that there is some kind of a Muslim world, a Muslim struggle that is a part of this or Muslim solidarity, global, that kind of civilizational problematic thing does not really hold up in this case, at least not in a straightforward manner. So it's not as if Muslim countries are speaking up about Kashmir. It's not that Muslim countries do not want to have these profitable economic relationships with India. It's not even that, but on the other hand, countries like China, say for example, who have their own issues such as these in Tibet, Xinjiang, et cetera, are quite okay to not say anything in the Indian case. So the traditional ways in which you would imagine relationalities developing does not hold in this case. Now theoretically I would argue, and that's I guess the thing that I can say more about in the Indian and the Xinjiang case, but in this case I would say that one of the axes of thought for me has been to see the ways in which all of these cases show us that neoliberalism and nationalism are not mutually opposed. They in fact are working together, and I mean I cannot summarize it here, but essentially that the governmentality that enables these repressions to happen is actually co-constructing ideas of the economy and of the nation in how they seek to construct these subjects. So I theorize this in terms of a post-colonial neoliberal nationalism, a governmentality of, and why post-colonial not in the sense that formerly colonized. Post-colonial in the sense that it's a kind of, so we all live in a post-colonial world I would argue, because we live in a world that has been marked by a certain colonial experience, a large scale colonial, Lee enforced transformation of the world, which very perversely has been understood in such a way that colonialism has been seen as a moral wound for the colonized rather than for the colonizer. So that then enables manipulation of imaginaries of pride and futurity, both on the part of the colonizers and former colonizers and the colonized, so that a Trump or a Brexit proponent can, if they choose to say, we'll go back to our glorious imperial past. And likewise, people in other parts of the world can weaponize that same history and say, well, we were pure before and these leaders are going to get us there. So it plays into that messianic political theology of this project that's going to be the savior person led by the savior person that will deliver. So I think that that's, for me, that's an interesting way in which the standard idea of state market, West non-West can be sort of worked through by looking at how these logics, and I would like to, since I am absolutely out of time, I think one minute, I would like to just close with, again, try and draw attention to, these are things, of course, that met much longer discussion as we shall have, but close with the idea of the learning that is happening between these global projects. They do have a lot in common. My definition always of these projects in different parts of the world is that we are witnessing globally the rise of electorally legitimated misogynist authoritarians who claim a monopoly on nationalism, and this is very relevant in the Indian, Brazilian and other cases, claim a monopoly on nationalism so that they delegitimize others who question them on issues as anti-national, come to power claiming to challenge neoliberalism but profit from crony capitalism. And that's what they have all in common. They learn from each other. So the pellet guns, the pellet blindings that were used against Kashmiri Muslims in 2016, leading to the first summer of mass blindings, that those pellet guns later, now we see, have been used in Chile. So there is a commonality also, of course, of the physical manufacture of this technology of killing and of surveillance. There have been companies like Cisco, which I was recently reading, it has been said that they are the ones who are providing the technological means to place these lockdowns, to make these massive surveillance things. And likewise, in the Xinjiang case, in the Indian case, detention camps in several Indian cities are now ready or nearly ready. And millions of people in the idea is that millions of people will be placed into these camps as their citizenship gets verified. But if they are Muslims, they cannot claim the right to actually be in the country because that's the idea, to change citizenship from being something that is non-religious to being religious. And when that happens, you have this deliberate creation and production of statelessness, of differential levels of citizenship, combined with technologies of absolute subjugation and as exemplified in the Kashmir case in the most extreme, pellets, camps, databases, and switching down different kinds of modalities of switching down the internet, like in Iran, like in Hong Kong, like, do we shut it down for a long time? Do we shut it down for a little amount of time? What do we do when we shut it down? When do we, how do we bring it on in steps? The arbitrariness. So I would say that there are also these physical commonalities in these projects. Thank you. Thank you, Natasha, again. And it always feels bad to ask people to, let's say, end when they're all talking about such important things and, but that's the challenge which we all have. Before I throw it open to discussion question, I have a question for each speaker and if you could respond very quickly and then we open it up to others. In fact, I'll start with Natasha, right? Could you say a bit more about the violence, the anti-Muslim program that's taking place in Delhi and how, in a way, that may or may not be connected to what we are talking about here. Say it. Yeah, so President Trump followed on, following on from President, from Bolsonaro, President Trump recently visited India and at the time of his visit when he was in Gujarat and then in Delhi, there was an alternate, of course, people's resistance spectacle which was, which has been crushed with brutal violence in a program and how do we know that it's a program? So you have any number of people in India saying, oh no, it was both sides, both sides were at fault. But the both sides argument does not hold up because there is considerable evidence, including video evidence and self-professed people saying that, confessionally saying that, that the police in uniform was acting to, on the side of the Hindutva, on the side of the Hindutva, the extremist Hindu rioters. So you have images of the policemen in uniform prodding people who are laying prone on the ground in injured states, who are Muslims, asking them to sing nationalist songs and taunting them with the word Azadi, the word freedom, which is also something that originally comes from this Kashmir context and gains prevalence. So these are Muslim and right. You cannot have a more stark demonstration of the utter dehumanization that this rhetoric has enabled. It is no different than what happened in the 20th century in multiple respects. So the thing that is, and on top of that, the courts are not doing what, so there is judicial quietude, the courts actually refusing to hear petitions, transferring a way of judges who were trying to take this seriously, bringing that transfer forward. So there is a, there is also the way in which this is sought to be done, not in contravention of the law as it were, but by also subverting the law itself, the institutions of judiciary and legal redress, subverting them alongside as everything gets drawn into what this project is that we see unfolding in Delhi. So a large numbers of people were killed, but this was a deliberate attack on Muslim, on mosques, people trying to put flags. That does not mean, of course, that every Hindu, you know, Delhiite was part of it. No, of course not. There were people who had significant risks to themselves who were trying to not do this. But when it comes to the state, when it comes to the role of the police forces and the judiciary, we see this clearly something that is, you know, that is very communal and that is very Islamic, directed at Muslims and Islam. Okay, thank you. Asim, in your context, I mean, you'd give a lot of examples from your own life, but in general of how the way the rich pathologization of Muslims take place is right, and you focus a lot on how the security surveillance operates, the state operates. Could you say a bit more about what you didn't touch upon is how the majoritarian community in Britain or elsewhere, how do they internalize that Islamophobia of the state? So a bit more about how the majoritarian community, the Islamophobia interacts with and engages with Islamophobia of the state. Sure, thank you. And a very quick apology. The speakers can't see me, but I'm like constantly rubbing my nose with tissue, so I know it's not a great look, so my apologies for that to the audience. Yeah, I think this is an important question because actually one of the things that we now encounter within the counterterrorism discourse is this idea that, oh, we're not exceptionalizing Muslims, we're interested in the far right too. And I think that's important because when we talk about these issues, we have to think about a hegemony of narratives. So within the Muslim community, for example, I think we can quite, most Muslims in the UK can point out all of our mosques. It's a very small community. It's only three million, and we only have one or two degrees of separation between us. We know that our organizations and our mosques do not preach hatred against other communities. There's no mosque that you can point to in the UK that says go around bombing the wider British public. This is something that we are very familiar with. We know that the message that's going out on the Friday khutba each week is very, very consistent in relation to this. People who take this narrative, of course they do take it because if there is violence in the UK, they take it from outside. So they're trying to find meaning from outside of the formal structures that we have. Now, that can't be equated to where the far right get their message from, because what we see on the other side is a complete hegemony of narrative that comes from the very top. So when people like Boris Johnson are able to demonize Muslim women by calling them, by talking by letterboxes, by calling them ninjas, by referring to them in this very dehumanized language, but that's replicated then by a media. So even, I think yesterday, we saw Laura Scott MP trying to justify Boris Johnson's comments, but further than that, even media has Nick Ferrari saying, oh, well, those comments are, they might be robust and unfortunate, but refusing to acknowledge that these types of comments are rooted in a racist pathologizing. So this is the issue that we have that actually when it comes to these kind of, to our countries, even in so-called liberal democracies, what we have in terms of other rising is a complete hegemony of narrative that demonizes. So almost every single newspaper is willing to engage in an act of othering, whether it comes to the immigration debate, whether it comes to securitization, whatever it might be, regardless of what the actual facts are, because it has political capital to be able to talk in this way. So I think that this is part of the issue that we have. And of course, you know, if you're taking a country out of the UK and it's quite prevalent here, imagine what it's like in context like India, in context like China, where there is no bar to how you can speak about otherized communities. Like, literally, you can just say what you want and there is no come-up in spots of ever. So I think this is an important thing for us to bear in mind. Okay, thank you. In fact, for Rachel, you talked to various things and specifically you mentioned racialized Islamophobia. So in terms of Uighurs, they're not only seen as Muslim other, but also who look different and therefore Uighur, Turkic others, right? And therefore, both of them come together. Now, as part of discussion of to what extent religion is important, crucial and everything, could you say a bit about how Uighurs in your research and your found, how Uighur respond to, so there's a growing Islamic revival, right? And public piety, which China sees as a problematic and therefore imposes all kinds of repression. But how do Uighurs in general respond to the situation where majority of Muslim majority countries claiming to be Islamic of one form or the other, side with China? It's not that they're silent about Uighurs, but they actively side with China. So how do they usually respond to that? Yes, I mean, that is a question that comes up a lot. Although I must say, I hear that charge rather more from policymakers in the UK than I do from the Uighur community, interestingly. Every time I go to a government organized event an official event, the MPs here seem to be saying, why aren't these Muslim countries doing anything? Why should we? This is a very common narrative. So I hear that more actually from UK authorities than I do from the Uighur community. You know, I mean, it is a difficult and a sensitive question. You know, the Uighur community is somewhat divided in terms of where people stand on religion and faith and its expression and how best to understand and to engage with this crisis. So, you know, I think there's understanding within the community that the governments of Muslim majority countries are not the same as its peoples, right? And so we've seen, you know, many examples of demonstrations within Pakistan even in Malaysia of support for the Uighurs and protesting the atrocities that are happening there, which speak a very different story to the very observable lack of engagement from these Muslim majority countries. You know, what can you say? I mean, this is a clear question of economics and in particular, the influence of the Belt and Road Initiative. Okay, thank you very much. This is important. Now we'll take three to four comments slash questions and then I'll ask the panelists to respond. You have to raise who are the people. Okay, okay, there's so many. Do you have microphone? Maybe we can start from that side. Two people in front. Here, Harriet first and then the person next to you. Now you can introduce yourself if you want to, if you prefer not to, that's your choice, sir. My name's Harriet Evans. I work on China. And I first of all want to thank Aziz for your very, very moving introduction. I thought that that was extremely courageous and I was spellbound. I also want to thank the panel for a really, really interesting beginning to the day and I'm sorry to start with the question. I mean, you know, anyway, I've got three questions, if I may. And one is DiBiesh concerned. It's about, you know, what we can make of comparisons and similarities. And in your introduction, you mentioned that you had seen the same kind of thing in Tibet before. And I would like the other panelists' views on the similarities or not with what is happening in Xinjiang and Tibet. And Natasha, I thought your analysis was very useful in helping us understand why we don't hear more from the Muslim states about what is happening in Xinjiang. So thank you for that. But I do want to ask your collective views about the similarities between what is happening in Kashmir and Xinjiang, particularly in the use or the differential use of technology. So your reference to the establishment of detention camps, I think, you know, is there any conscious or direct engagement with what is happening in China, in Xinjiang, in setting up those camps in line with Rachel's final comment about, you know, might what is happening in, the technologisation of surveillance in Xinjiang might it become a model for what is happening elsewhere? The final question, sorry, is why, I mean, this is a great gathering here and I'm delighted that so many people are here, but why is it that the great European and British public is not saying more explicitly about Xinjiang? I mean, yes, okay. Thank you. No, thank you. Thanks. The person next year will come. Um, my name is Frank Gehle and I work on religious dialogue. Um, a question for us in Koreshi, I was very interested in his reference to a far right because there is an insidious strategy by the British government and mainland media to triangulate the problem, situating Islamist or extremist so-called and the far right extremist and place this radical, this edifying centre, this virtual centre in opposition to these two extremes. And it seems to me a complete bogus strategy. I think it was Tarik Ali who spoke of an extreme centre. It is the narrative which comes from the authorities which is actually fostering extremism as opposed to some of these partly manufactured opposites. Thank you. Yeah, we have the person there, inspectors, yes. Thank you. My name is Amin Virani and I've got two questions. The first is that, is this specifically a Uygh Sunni-related internship of a large proportion of the population in Xinjiang or are the Tajiks in the Pamir Plateau, specifically around Tashkou Gan being interred as well? And if the answers to that question is no, then is it a policy of a mindset of the government to have a Xi Sunni schism within that environment? Okay, thank you. I will come to you and the person next to him here, and then I'll come to you. Thank you. Isn't at the heart of all these variations the relationship between citizens and governments, which by the standards of the 1793 French Revolution, declaration of the rights of man and the citizen, governments around the world are sliding rapidly away from, and the debate doesn't seem, I think, this is the sort of fundamental thing. I mean, who the hell do these people think they are? The Chinese government behaves to its own people in abominable fashion as well. There's the recent case of the Englishman married to a China woman who was lifted from the street, beaten up, forced to make a confession on television to something he didn't do, and all on his own is protesting against the granting of a license to the Chinese Broadcasting Corporation in this country. I'm reminded from the Diaries of Victor Clemperer that all that time from 1933 that he lived through as a Jew. So the Germans then identified the Jews as their bacillus or whatever. There were no protests from amongst the German citizenry. There were no demonstrations, and it's like the old thing. You know, first they came for the socialists and so on, and then there was nobody to come for me. Okay, thank you. I've got a few, okay, I'll ask the panelists to respond. Then I know the two of you and then a few more. Again, if you could keep it very brief, yeah. So who'd like to start? Should I start with Asim in this case? Asim, there are specific questions to you also, General? No, all of you do not need to respond to all the questions, so you could reflect on anyone you want. Sure, thank you. I think Harry, I'll leave your questions for the other panelists. Frank, thank you for your question. I think it's important for us to bear in mind that within the context of the global war on terror and securitisation within contemporary discourse, the far right is presented as being a new phenomenon. This is consistently across the various discourses that there is a rise of far right rhetoric that is linked to acts of political violence by Muslims. This is a purposeful misreading in my mind of the way in which history takes place, in the way in which racism is structurally embedded within society. And I think in some ways it largely again places the emphasis on Muslims, that somehow we are responsible for this reaction that has emerged by these far right groups. We even see certain people of colour like Trevor Phillips and even some Muslims mimicking this narrative. I think it's important that we understand that this is an historical reading of racism in the UK that racism has never gone away. We've never been a post-racist society. Yes, there may have been some lulls in its prevalence within mainstream discourse, but the reality is that for those of us who have been involved with anti-racism work all our lives, we've never known a period that was post-racist. So this dichotomy that's presented between two extremes, between an Islamic extreme and a far right extreme, I don't think that's right. I don't think that's correct. I think what we need to do is to study racism as a specific phenomenon and we have to study the rise of political violence by Muslim communities as a separate phenomenon and not treat them as if they are the same thing or two sides to the same point, because they're really not. One is rooted in much longer and deeper history of colonialism, empire, and racism. And I think actually a recent book that I read that really goes for the heart of this very well is Nadina Nenny's book, Bordering Britain, which I highly recommend to everyone. And as for the last question about have we moved away from the ideals of the French Revolution, I think that we like to have these thoughts about a past period that we can really relate back to. But remember, the French Revolution brought with it specifically across Europe, the rise of the surveillance state. So when you had Jacobins going around and stabbing people in the streets and then slicing their own necks and coming up with the infernal bomb and bombing people, the reaction of that was to discipline Jacobin ideas within the university space to really bring about the architecture, that the current architecture that exists today of the way in which we surveil communities, the way that we use informants, the way in which we bring in repressive legislation. And I'm not saying that it would only do with glue. What I'm saying is that whenever there is something that goes against the grain, this type of surveillance architecture is a necessary component of the way that the state rallies itself in order to undermine anything that might seem seditious or subversive or any community that they might use in order to maintain their own hegemony and their own power base. So I think that's important for us to bear in mind. I'll leave the other questions for the other speakers. Thank you, Asim. Next, Natasha. Okay, Richard. Yeah, thank you very much. Those are all great, interesting questions. Perhaps I'll just address two of them to start with Harriet, perhaps thinking about Tibet. Yeah, I mean, we've both, myself and Debbie, I should have already alluded to the links between the way that policies have been rolled out in Tibet and then in Xinjiang. And I think it's very important to see those kind of links. So there is a specific link in the person of Chun Chun Guo who trialled, we like to say, these policies of surveillance, of close management of local populations in Tibet, and then were subsequently moved to Xinjiang to roll out those policies on a much wider scale. So it's absolutely clear that in the way that the Tibetan peoples are regarded by state forces and the way that Muslims in Xinjiang are regarded by state forces, there are many similarities. I would argue that the element of Islamophobia has enabled the situation in Xinjiang to get much more severe for a far greater use of state violence in Xinjiang than we saw in Tibet. Not that things were great in Tibet, of course, but it's on a much larger scale in Xinjiang. So your question about the idea of provoking a Sunnishir skism is fascinating, but it is something which is very far from any kind of conversations that I'm aware of, actually in the context of Xinjiang. I mean, I think there is perhaps a danger of taking debates and very pressing issues from other parts of the world and trying to fit them into Xinjiang. I'm not sure that that particular idea is a very good fit for Xinjiang. So yes, there is a rather small population of Shia, of Ismaili peoples on the borders with Tajikistan in Xinjiang. I don't have specific figures, but I have nothing to make me think that they have been treated any differently from any other Muslim minorities. We know that Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and I'm sure Tajik ethnic people have been detained in this just as the Uyghurs, when we speak. So commonly of Uyghurs is because, you know, they are by far the largest majority of people who have been targeted in this way. So, no, I don't think there's this kind of move to create a schism there, but it's an interesting idea. Okay, Natasha. Thank you. So I'll come to Harriet's question, and then all the others I think are from what I draw from that is kind of more general, so I'll address the general part first. I would say the link between the reason I brought up this colonial history, not in that sense of colonialism being formally over and the sort of something, which is also I think that we're picking up here, is the link between something like the ideas of race, the legacies of racism, and what we see afterwards becoming international relations. So, you know, if you look at the work that links to how something like the Journal of Race Relations becomes, you know, an IR Journal, so the world that we live in today is actually, you know, has come into being and from that history, and this is why, you know, the nation-state system, I would argue, is kind of, it reproduces this differential worth of life who decides to care about whom, when, because we live in this, you know, very heterosexist capitalist hierarchy of nation-states that where life is differentially distributed and understood, and within that, this bracketing of nation and state, of course, in all of these parts of the world, but, you know, certainly the cases that I'm talking about, this idea, this way in which people have been bracketed from imperial cartography and then mediated by post-colonial securitizations means that the nation and the state do not, you know, do not have very much in common in terms of how they function, so there's firstly that, I think at a broad level, I would also say that, you know, this, again, this idea that in some past things were okay and then we degenerated doesn't work because history is not, you know, progressive, you move forward in that wiggish sense, slavery ends, you actually have more of racism after that as a discourse. So there have always been, I would say the emperor never had any clothes and, you know, and it's always been a struggle of people in these different settings against power. So the reason why governments here there or elsewhere aren't speaking about Kashmir or Xinjiang or Tibet or, you know, whatever is because they're, you know, it's the people in each of these places who are struggling against these regimes of power and also I think we are witnessing in a, you know, what aren't, that aren't in sense a failure of thinking publicly, technology is playing a role in all of it and the biological metaphors that we use, you know, invasions and terrors and termites. The Indian Home Minister recently called these people, the people who are sought to be made stateless as in, recently as in last year, that they're termites and, you know, vermin that kind of language. So it's very palpable. It's all over the place now. So this construction of, I would say, the broadest idea is that we have this emotive politics, various kinds of fractures in the democratic imaginary and we are in these struggles, in many of these struggles, we are in the process of working through what form 21st, I would argue, what form 21st century decolonization would take. We don't yet know, but certainly the mid-20th century decolonization wasn't the last and once-for-all decolonization that ever happened and I feel like these struggles are going to lead forward into the, you know, into what will come, generally speaking. So about Harry's question, yes, absolutely. So there's what's happening in India and then what is happening in the name of India in Kashmir and there are various strands of solidarity but not completely overlapping because in some sense you have Kashmiri people saying that, you know, we've always been resisting against these things. So you don't, you know, you think that this is, you've begun to pay attention to this now because it's happening to some of you. You don't know because we've got these, you know, tens of thousands of people who have been killed since 1990s. We have, you know, eight to 10,000 people who have been in force disappeared. We have instances of mass rape, all of this there, which has never been investigated. So there's also that kind of gap between what the Kashmiris think they have been going through and which they have been going through and what India is now doing to people in India who have until now not actually been able to, not been exposed to and also been functioned in a sanctioned ignorance about what's happened in Kashmir. So the figures for Kashmir are of course horrific India, but the difference with the Xinjiang case I would say is that it is the Indian policy in Kashmir is now seeking to systematize itself a lot more along the lines of perhaps what I would, what I have read to be has already happened in Xinjiang. So they're trying to, the rhetoric is the same. We're doing this to develop them. We're doing this to modernize them. They're backward people. We're doing this to give their women more empowerment. We're doing this to address, I've written about this in different contexts, but yeah, the rhetoric is exactly the same. It's the same old colonial rhetoric, but the systematization in terms of databases, in terms of classifications, that kind of thing, the upscaling of technology, that is happening more and more. So in that, I think China would be more advanced. And the camps are in India. So the camps that they are building, the detention camps are for people in India. They are for Muslims and others in India. So there's a dual thing happening that there's Kashmir and then there's this. So the companies are what we have in common and I would not be surprised. I've actually always thought there should be economists who write about what are these companies, who are these companies, what are the actual, what is the kind of sort of the nuts and bolts, material infrastructure of terror as master narrative. Because you need to know, and if those financial economic incentives are the ones that are creating the entrenched interests to continue, then we should find a way of shifting those material incentives. You know, that would be the logical thing. I mean, you don't have to beat swords into plowshares. You just have to find out who's benefiting from making the pellets and can they make that money elsewhere so that we can try and convince people to not be blinding other people. I mean, maybe naive, but I think that's one part of what we ought to do is to have more information about the financial aspect of this. Thank you very much. In fact, before next round, I'll reflect on the Tibet-Shinjiang thing. The key commonality, the way I would see and have been looking at that, my own work is thanks to Joe's special issue where thankfully she forced me to finish my paper, otherwise I would have missed the deadline. I need that. Now, in terms of coloniality, that's a common thing. So while exact technology might be different, they learn from each other and China did try in 2008 to start portraying Tibetans as terrorists, after serving as terrorism, but they realize it does not work propaganda-wise, right? Therefore they started focusing more on separatism and extremism and they're waiting in a way for the Dalai Lama to pass away who's very clear about violence and non-violence, hoping that it would become violent resistance, then they can more easily portray it as terrorism. So that's it. But commonality between Tibet, Xinjiang, Kashmir would be the whole idea of we are doing it for your good, whether you like it or not. Paternalism, coloniality, modernization, so all of it being justified in name of liberating and rescuing those who are backward. And that's the commonality thing. In the 1970s and 90s, when you mentioned the French Revolution thing, I was thinking of reign of terror. The whole concept of terrorism comes from there, where terror is a tool used by the state against the people. Now, of course, terrorism is used in general for people's resistance against the state. But what we find, of course, is in case of China or Kashmir, sorry, in case of India, China, UK, Israel, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, all of them use terror, though they justify it as counter-terrorism. And silence of the majority, that's a wider question we all have to think of. You mentioned 1933 Germany. Some of us have done that with the, we use the word shittler for Hitler, well, for Xi Jinping, right? Hitler is alive very much, it seems. You can use in terms of Narendra Modi in India, right? We find, of course, in case of India again recent anti-Muslim violence, and we can see what's happening. So India, I would argue, India today is not 1940 Germany. India today is very much similar to 1933, 34 Germany, right? In terms of where the majority is becoming silent. They're not silent, but they're becoming silent. Either agreeing with the government or keeping quite out of fear, or just think, oh, it's too complicated, right? That's what we're witnessing. Anyway, coming back, and of course, we are not talking of how Han majority thinks of Uyghurs, and maybe that's something which will come up in the next round. We have next round of question, I know two people here. Sorry, yeah. Oh, okay. Okay, I'll give you four because you have the mic, otherwise two here and two here. I'm just relaying some comments from the live stream, and we have 48 people joining us remotely, so I thought it's good to bring some of their thoughts in. So there are a few questions directed at what we should do. I know we'll address that later, but maybe the speakers want to say something about that. So one is about should there be efforts, and are there efforts at the international level to address Islamophobia? Another is how can we raise awareness that Western companies are using Uyghur slave labor and boycott or ban their products? We might talk about that in the next panel a bit. What can Muslims in the West do to help Uyghurs? And a question on another line is did anybody mention that Uyghurs have gone to fight with groups like ISIS, and would anybody like to speak to that as if there is some reason for this kind of thing? Okay, so I... Thank you very much. We have taken comments, and we have four. Okay, yes, David. Thank you. Thanks for a fantastic panel, and particularly thank you to Aziz for the introduction. Thank you for sharing your story with us. I'm David Tobin, University of Manchester. Two questions. One is if we read the Chinese Party States explanation of what it calls the ethnic problem, which is a long-term problem in Xinjiang, beginning long before 2001, obviously we're all in agreement that it identifies identity as a problem. But in those texts, they obviously say Uyghurs are not an Islamic group, and Uyghurs are not a Turkic group, and saying those things is a terrorist act. So I wonder if you want to comment on why we focus so much on Islamophobia and less so on anti-Turkic racism, or just simply racism. And this matters in the British context very much. It matters analytically in terms of what comparisons we make, but matters in Britain very much, because until very recently, terrorism was associated with the Irish, not Islam. And of course, the Irish were called backward, uncivilised in a manner very similar to what the B.S. described. And then my second question for Azim specifically, he said we should go all the way back to 2001. I wonder why you stopped there. My Uyghur friends tell me to go back to 1759, when this began with the long march west of the Manchu Empire. So I wonder how you relate that, because you did talk about the history of race in Britain and were quite sophisticated about the way historical narratives remain a leftover of colonialism. What about Chinese colonialism? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for sharing. I want to bring up some observations of mine about what I see in the UK, about some portrayal of some child protection and also education-related news, such as the rather child sex abuse and how it was portrayed in the media as Asian gangs targeting white girls. And also what I read quite a few weeks about some adoption, white girls being adopted by Muslim couples and also the schools now required to teach British values or something. And also one more thing about the stripping of citizenship. I see that this is now happening in the UK for what's called ISIS price or something. Are we going to see more of these in global around the world? Thank you. Thank you. And Aziz and the white tissue. I have two questions. First, yes, we are overheld money talking about slumophobia when we talk about the legal crisis today. Can we remember before the world started so-called war on terror, what's happening in East Turkestan? China occupied East Turkestan in 1949 with support of Soviet Union. Over the more than 70 years, hundreds, thousands, probably millions of Uyghur intellectuals killed in prison. And when I talk this morning in 1989, we started whole in China, first time Democrat Uyghur student protest in 1985. We demanded from the Chinese government equal rights for the Uyghurs. That time, there's no slum exist. No Uyghur identity slums exist. This is the problem. That's the problem. So why we are not talking about the real Uyghurs problem about the race, ethnicity, and cultural differences? Please explain. Second, when we compare about the Uyghur tragedy now with India and Kashmir, can anyone give me example about individual rights like we are not able to call family members? Are people can talk to the families from London and reporters can get that? Thank you. Okay, thank you. And thank you very much. My name is Andre, Uyghur student. My question is a bit of a follow up about Uyghurs abroad and the current state of the diasporas. Do you know if they have any political influence abroad to address the issue with the governments? And yeah. Okay, any last question? Okay, the person there behind Harriet, yes? Thank you. My name is Jude Hallam from the LOC. It's an absolutely wonderful panel. I have a question for Natasha actually on these detention camps in India because you talk about people learning from China and given the rivalry economically between China and India, you know, I wonder if you have any idea about what are the channels through which this learning process occurs? I mean, are we talking about international meetings between security officials, security companies and so on involving both China and India? Or is India just watching very carefully what is occurring in China through the media? I mean, how does this learning process take place? And do you say the detention camps in India are almost complete? I mean, it'd be interesting to see how much even architecturally they resemble the camps in China as, yeah. Okay, thank you. Thank you. And we have actually a final question here. Yes. Hello. My name is Cannon and I'm a current master's student at LSE, also part of the decolonizing collective there. I have a comment and a question. Try to make it as quick as possible, but apologies if my perspective is quite naive still. So one is a comment on the question on why there is a lack of Western attention and condemnation in the human rights violation in the Uyghurs. For me, especially considering my own experiences, living in the UK for the past few years, I think more than anything, there is a lack of empathy to the East Asian community. I think still East Asia is a sort of, unfortunately, a place that is more of a laughter and a joke. Even talking about the coronavirus happening right now, oftentimes when the talk come out, still there's laughter more than concern and dissent. And I think that really worries me in regards to the lack of the empathy about the problem there. And I think that extends on to the Uyghurs community as well, even if there are some people very much engaged in it. And leading on from this racial othering of the region as a whole, I actually have a question to Azim. You mentioned earlier about the need to study racism and the rise of violence against the Muslim communities as separate problems, which I completely do agree in the sense that they are different. However, I also wonder, because there is continuity, this anti-Muslim sentiment has gotten fueled by the racial ostracization propagated by the West, as you mentioned, and the world in terror. And China is using the Western justification of violence against a specific community that is deeply rooted in the racist tendencies and hegemonic supremacy. And whilst I do agree that they are not two sides of the same coin, but for me, they are part of the same narrative or heavily intersects. So I just wanted to ask more if you could elaborate on the point. Thank you. Okay, thank you very much. In fact, we are running late, but then we started late. And it doesn't imply that you'll have a shorter time for coffee. Maybe I'll start with Rachel. I mean, again, you could respond to a few questions, make your own concluding remarks, or maybe throw up the question for later. That's fine. Okay, I think this question, we're going to carry on fighting about this throughout the coffee break, aren't we? So I will just address a few remarks to this question of why are we focusing on Islam. David, I read your piece and found it very interesting and thought-provoking. Why do we focus on Islam rather than, say, anti-Turkish racism? Okay. I think perhaps I would like to reverse the question and ask why so many people seem to be so keen on downplaying the question of Islam in the Uyghur situation. I have frequently felt quite strange and uncomfortable about the way that the Trump government has been one of the prime supporters of the Uyghur cause. And I can absolutely see the way that Uyghur campaigners in the States have sought to align themselves, to present themselves in a way that will be more palatable to the American government in order to earn their support. I don't blame them for that, obviously. I think when a people is experiencing this kind of desperate situation, then they need to align themselves with what power they can. But obviously I think that is quite problematic and I think that the Republican support for Uyghurs is somewhat contingent on trade negotiations with China. And so I personally think that it is really important to see what is happening to Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities within China in the context of these kind of global flows of Islamophobia. So just one more point there. I think that the issue of the very deep split between secular nationalist Uyghurs and more religious Uyghurs in the diaspora is something really that needs to be addressed. Thank you. Azeem? Okay. So thank you for your questions. David, I think this is a problem that spans across a number of different contexts where you have a specific ethnicity that is also attached to Islam at the same time. So for example, in the Balkan conflict, we had similar ideas being expressed that, well, is this about Islam? Because having done a lot of ethnographic work in the region myself, you know, Balkan Muslims would tell me that actually Islam was always finished. Like we had no idea about our own faith until the conflict started, until the genocide began. And then we started to come back to Islam ourselves and that sort of resurgence in Islam. But for then they said that, you know, while they were talking to us in some ways because of ethnicities, it was also a narrative to do with our faith as well. Even though for many of us, it wasn't a faith that we particularly practiced or expressed. It was almost like adjacent to our identity. But it became in some ways the primary discourse in the way that we were otherwise. So there are very, very interesting ways in which we need to think about how racism intersects with Islamophobia that specifically targets the religion itself. And I don't think we can easily reduce it to an ethnic issue or one to do with the faith. But I think what connects the discourse of the war and terror in particular is the faith itself. That, you know, the discourse around extremism and terrorism does bring together all of these different disparate forms of oppression in a way that is coherent. That we can see builds upon one another, whether it's through algorithms or it's through profiling stops in the street, whatever it is. That pathology generally speaking seems to be similar even if the specific pieces of legislation and policymaking are a little different one another. And, you know, I think that speaks to a little bit about why 2001, rather than further back. I mean, I can give you an agreement with you. You know, I think a couple of years ago, I read Madeline Pien's book, 100 the Name Now, do not say me I'm asking, right? But she talks about the Labour camps from the 1950s and you see some of what's happening with the Uyghur or a lot of what's happening with the Uyghur happening since that time. But I think the war and terror is a specific discourse needs to be studied and understood without doing the service to cause the long history that comes before it as well. I think that's very, very important. Glad that you raised that. Yes, absolutely, we should never speak about what's happening in the context of terror outside of what took place before the war and terror. Because otherwise, we make the same reductive argument that the West makes, which is the world started on 9-11. There was no repression. There was no violence. There was nothing before that. That's extremely important. That'd be better than mine. There was a question about child protection. The mother of child abuse and adoption of white girls by Muslim couples through to shipstripping. We're seeing all of these policies throughout the world. I don't know if you guys have seen it, but the American government has just constituted a specific group that's looking at denaturalization in the context of paedophilia, terrorism, and other forms of serious crimes. So this is really interesting. That's something that the British took on first, which is, I was a citizen stripping, which started in 2004, by the way, in the case of Abu Hanza Masri. They failed to remove the citizenship. But now we've seen over 150 predominantly Muslim. I think the only non-Muslim case we know of is Anna Chapman, who was accused of being a Russian spy. But otherwise, all the citizenship removals in the UK have been, as far as we understand it, slimmed so far. So we're seeing this taking place. And I would even suggest that the new act in India that seems to deny citizenship to certain types of groups, I see that as very, very much connected to the way that citizen stripping, that immigration laws have been constituted within the wider world. So this is one of the two things I wanted to tackle. So yeah, there was just that last question about the need to study racism and continuity. Yeah, I think absolutely we have to do that. These things all heavily intersect with one another. It's not just simple as, oh, this is just to do with Islamophobia. In order to understand how communities are up or raised, we have to go much, much further than that. And to deal with maybe quickly the comments from online. What can Muslims in the West do? Seeing as I'm practicing what I say is that it's really important that we take our ethical and spiritual concerns seriously. That means about that micro and macro levels. It is important that we ourselves think about the products that we're buying, not just simply as something that's an act of efficacy, but something that is far more spiritually tied to who we are as individuals and what we take seriously and how we show solidarity. It's not simply an act that we say, oh, is this effective? That in many ways, since that's not even a concern, this question is, what does this mean to you as an individual in terms of the relationship you have to the world, the relationship you have to God, the relationship you have to justice, violence, society. So I think that's really important for us to think about. Thank you, Asim. Natasha. So the specific, this time I'll do it inductively, the specific ones first. India, China, what do we know of the commonalities? Well, there was this policy that was, again, announced overnight, and what seemed contradictions and strangenesses in the way in which the Modi-led BJP has been functioning are actually not that part of a political strategy, I would argue. But in November 2016, they announced something called demonetization, right? Overnight, 80-something percent of the country's paper currency became worthless, and there was a lot of hardship that ensued and which was sought to be justified as purity and suffering for the nation, whatever. But in that, some of the companies, and again, I mean, there's probably work that can be more specific than I can be at this point, but the companies that the digital, the idea was to shift, the official idea was to make a strike on a surgical strike on what they called the black market on this economy. It was supposed to be following on from the surgical strike on Kashmir. So again, this resonance of metaphors. But anyway, when they did that, the idea there was that it would also, amongst other things, deal with terrorism, deal with separatism, this move to digitization. But some of the companies that were to benefit from this were companies that had tie-ups with China. So there are, and so it's not really the official kind of, you know, what the government says or what a certain politician says. It's really who has stakes in what companies and who they are in tie-ups with. So it's actually a lot more like the usual forms of crony relationships, commercial crony relationships that we would imagine across national borders. So there's that kind of thing which was argued in that case. Secondly, I think that there's also this, the role widely of China in the Indian case. It's rivalry, but not straightforward. It's almost like a complexity of oppositor. So China is both, on the one hand, something that legitimizes whatever India does because China is communist and India is democratic. And look what a wonderful democracy we are. So we're not China. Firstly, not being China in itself is a plus point. That's a good thing. But secondly, also in that, the reason I'm saying complexity oppositor, it's also, but secondly also, oh, but look at China. We've got all this democratic noise. It takes so long to get anything done. But look at the fact that in China, they can make anything happen overnight. And I see some of that actually here too. You know, when those images of that hospital built overnight were circulating and people were like, yes, this is so wonderful because anything can happen overnight in China. Like anything can be done. So there's also that thing of Modi himself being legitimized as this kind of counterweight to being almost like a Chinese style of leader who can deal with the messiness of Indian democracy because it has been given too much credence and he can just do things efficiently. And so China also acts as a positive thing in that way, like emulative thing in that imaginary context. So there's that similarity. Now the thing with the, it's a proper palimpsest here. I have to see what I have written. Okay, I don't know. But I think maybe I was trying to think of the fact of the allegations of terrorism. Of course, there are the people joining ISIS. So this is the official thing used in the Indian case as well, that these people are terrorists. No, of course, there are people who use individual people, non-state actors, who decide to use violence for political ends and belong to outwards that are classified as terrorists. But those are at the most even by official accounts of few hundred in a population of millions. And most of the people who are asking for rights are not asking for, are just asking for their rights. So it's in effect this use of terrorism. It's not that there aren't people who are terrorists, but it's the way in which it becomes something that can collectively be used to delegitimize everything else. And in the, so yeah, there was that point about how this rhetoric gets used. There was something else there, but I can't read that here now. The thing about ethnicity, I think, so I find ethnicity is a concept really interesting, but there's some new work that how ethnicity as a concept comes to be used historically. Like what's the history of the idea of ethnicity and how do we understand that through how, through how, for instance, the state gets to be seen and constructed in Africa in the 19th century. So I don't know about the, I wouldn't say that we should be too hung up on whether we look at this in ethnicity or religion terms because these have been shifting categories in terms of how the narratives have sought to deploy them. So in the Kashmir case, if you look at that from nineties onwards, and again, not coincidentally because of the end of the Cold War, it becomes a moment that becomes, the struggle gets seen as and becomes also an Islamized struggle. But before that, it was a similar kind of struggle which had various other components to it. So there were various times in the 30s and the 40s when you had Kashmiri Muslims and Kashmiri Hindus as part of the same platform asking for similar things. So very much like in certain other struggles in different parts of the world, it went through various phases through the Cold War and that geopolitical communist other then becomes the Muslim other. So now, of course, because people's mosques are shut down, they are not allowed to congregate for prayers, then they are being targeted because of their religion too, even though, of course, as individuals, they are asking for their rights as rights-bearing individuals. They're asking for freedom to self-determine. They're not saying like, give it to us because we're Muslims. They're saying it's a political problem. So the religion aspect is a part of that story because of the way in which it is represented. The point about why go back to this point or that point, the question of identity, I mean, of course not. This thing goes back to the Enlightenment subject. This thing goes back to Orientalism and the very idea of how a certain West idea of the West gets constructed within which all human rights and all of that gets aggregated to us. So all of those other people have to, who are struggling against these colonialism somehow don't know human rights. Of course they do. They are also asking for precisely those same rights that we think that no one there understood in that simplified kind of us versus them rhetoric. So totally on board with this Republican thing, there are people who will extend those solidarities for very conditional, in their view, strategic reasons which are very problematic solidarities because of the constraints they impose on the people who have to try and achieve those solidarities. Was there a, you asked me something specific, right? About phone calls. So yes, absolutely. Everything is surveilled. The landscape is completely militarized. I mean, I am originally Kashmiri, I'm British, but I'm also an animist and a humanist and I'm also not a Kashmiri Muslim. So I'm actually an ideal subject of Hindutva, like ideal subject person for Hindutva. So it's even more traitorous of me to be saying this. But no, people cannot call or, so from fifth, yeah, there was absolute, like people went, you know, you couldn't call your friends. You just saw everything. The last status scene was on 5th August. So literally everything was shut down and even before that, there have been periods of time. So this is the strange thing. You can be in 2017, one afternoon, you can be there and suddenly your phone becomes a plastic box. Like everything just gets turned off. You cannot use your phones, you cannot contact and the thing is it's arbitrary. When it happens, for how long it will go on, it's totally arbitrary. There's no accountability. And now, because more and more orders are being passed through oral means, and the police with the new changes, constitutional changes have been brought directly under the home ministry at the center, which they weren't before. So that also makes it difficult to produce the evidence because of the new means of putting forward these things. So there's ubiquitous surveillance, ubiquitous militarization, any time, ability to shut down and even now, like the limited access to what kinds of internet that people can have. And they're especially keen on people not using social media. So social media has always been these last few months, this big thing on, they can have these specific sites, but not social media because that's how they get radicalized. Social media is how they, so which is clearly something that is a learning from other contexts. Thank you very much. I know I've been a bad chair because I realize, okay, though we started late, so I can blame Tim and Aziz there, not myself, six minutes, but that's fine. You know why? Because realize that there's no lunch. Oh, there is lunch, a break, but no lunch. So we can eat into that. But before that, let me thank your, but one thing, okay, I think this is a discussion which we will have over time is around framing of the question, right? Is it Muslim minority problem? But by calling Uighurs Muslim minority, are we accepting the state language? Because of course Uighurs are not minority in the own homeland. They ought to be, it's like, that's a big debate we have, and I'm sure, right? In terms of comparison with other places, again, we would find similarities and differences. And the way I see, broadly speaking, is it about religion? Is it about race, racism? Or is it about coloniality? I use the word coloniality and even Natasha earlier and others also talked about it, in terms of how they're very similar, but very different. But one thing to bear in mind is, when Narendra Modi, who was a perpetrator of anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat in 2002, he was not given visa to the US. He would not come to the UK. The country that wooed him was China since 2002. So is that connected to what they do or not one has to think about it? But in terms of solidarity, I think I'll end with difference rather than similarity. I can see why Uyghurs would want to even get support from whoever they get, even that includes Republicans. So the luxury that, and I use the word luxury, so that's maybe where different is, oppressed people, colonized people who are being erased completely may not have the luxury to see which kind of support they get so long as they get support. We say that with Kurdish people, we see that with Uyghur people, we see that with Kashmiris, we see that with Tibetans. And in a way, therefore, rather than what the problem is, we have to also understand why they need to align with it. Broadly speaking, when you look at Uyghurs and Tibetans, and I'll end with that part, I think a big failure, apart from others, has been of the left in the West, left in India and left elsewhere. So when they would accept Chinese rhetoric of liberation, when they would accept the Chinese rhetoric as how it's all CIA funded and whatever, I mean, what else do you expect the people who are oppressed to do when the left becomes the big problem here rather than the solution? On that note, let me end this session and we have 20 minutes for tea and coffee, and then we come back and carry on. Thank you very much. And thank you to, of course, all the people asking questions in the panel. 20 minutes, yes.