 The next panel is going to use a conceptual framework of crime. And I think that in some ways that allows us to look at perhaps the harshest practices, to think about why they happen, about the motivations of state crimes being perpetrated. It allows us, of course, also to think about responsibility and blame. And then potentially, I'm sure that's a hope we could start with. It might allow us to think in terms of legal responsibility and legal liability for some of the practices we have started discussing this morning. Of course, there will, I'm afraid, be many challenges and problems as we consider these issues. And I think that I would just like to mention at this point as a China lawyer, Eva Pills based at King's College London, I would just like to mention that from a domestic Chinese law perspective, it is, in my view, and other scholars have also made this point. It is entirely possible to say that some of the practices such as the incarceration and so-called training camps and according to more and more evidence, more and more testimony, we get practices of torture, for example, crimes under domestic Chinese law. The problem, of course, with that is that there is no court, there is no process through which we could possibly pursue legal liability for these crimes. Therefore, this panel will with experts who are real experts on Uyghur studies and on state crime and criminology, international crime. This panel will sort of discuss the issues in terms of broader conceptualization of crime, as well as from a comparative and international angle. And following the practice of the morning panels, I would like to invite each of the speakers just quickly to introduce yourselves. Thank you so much, and we will start with Joe Finley. Yes, please. Would you like to perhaps go over and, because you have a PowerPoint. OK, so is that on? So thank you very much for inviting me. Thank you to the organizers for the stellar work you've done in bringing all of these experts together. It's fantastic to be here. I'm Jo Smith Finley at Newcastle University. I've been working on the Uyghurs since about 1991. I think for a long time on evolving Uyghur identities, so ethnic national gender identities, and more recently, forced by circumstance to start looking at issues of Chinese state terrorism in the context of reeducation in Xinjiang. And now, since about last summer, I'm starting to look at cultural genocide, genocide crimes against humanity, and things like this. I'd just like to add that I'm here today in a personal capacity, because I am actually taking part in UCU industrial action for fair pay, pensions, and working conditions. So while I am affiliated to Newcastle, I'm not here on behalf of Newcastle today. So last summer, I started thinking about genocide and cultural genocide. I was at a conference in Australia where a few of us began to think and talk about the concept of genocide in the context of reeducation. And a colleague, Anna Hayes, in sort of going through a number of different concepts, mentioned Bradley Campbell's work on genocide and social control. And this is what really spoke to me. And the reason why it spoke to me in the Xinjiang context is because it is about correction. It's about correction of deviant behavior. So it focuses on the perpetrator's view that victims are evil, victims are criminals, victims are deviant, and therefore they need to be corrected in some way. And we see this. So Campbell, in his work, gives examples of the moral grievances of the perpetrator. So perpetrators of genocide accuse their victims of being disloyal to the nation, of taking over and infiltrating, of being parasites and living off others' labor, of producing children that will become a potential future threat, and also even of attempting genocide against them in reverse. And those of us who are following online conversations on Chinese wayball will know that many hand people are online claiming that it is, in fact, the Muslim perpetrators who are attempting genocide against the Ham. So just to zoom in on two of those, which I think most speak to the Xinjiang situation. So Campbell gives the example of Nazi Germany in the 1940s where Jews were routinely accused of disloyalty to the German nation. We see this in Chinese state discourses, media, state-sanctioned media discourses, as in the one you see here, in example one. And to focus on a second one, again, Nazi Germany Jews were believed to have taken over German culture. And we also see this idea of infiltration in Rwanda in 1994, whereby Tutsis are deemed to be Klamish, exclusionary, and have infiltrated all aspects of Rwandan society. And we see this in, for example, the regulations on de-extremification here, this idea of halal, infiltrating, expanding, interfering with other people's secular lives. So this idea of corrective reeducation. We see this a lot. If we look at the language, we look at the discourses, we see the idea of doing things correctly, correcting behaviors, correcting beliefs all the way through the documentation. So this is taken from the infamous regulations on de-extremification from 2017. This next slide, this is taken from the recently leaked Xinjiang papers. Again, we see all the way through this, we see the idea of correction, correcting, erroneous thinking, even eradicating erroneous thinking, making people recognize their mistakes, and so on. So what does correction look like in practice? Well, we know that it involves breaking up families and communities, sending carriages into homes to identify extremist behaviors, and that this ultimately ends up in the internment of one or both parents, which disrupts reproduction and disrupts cultural transmission by separating the parents from the children. And another form of correction is correcting the Uyghur endogamy rule. So Uyghurs usually will choose not to intermarry with Han Chinese, but in the current situation, because of the atmosphere of fear and terror of being interned in a camp, women are currently being forced into this situation where they must accept a marriage with a Han Chinese person. And this is a very famous picture that was caused quite a storm on social media because of the sheer humiliation, really, on the Uyghur bride's face. So what else does correction look like? Well, places, religious places, have been corrected. So mosques have had data doors put outside them. This has terrified people into not going into the mosque anymore. The mosque has been corrected with a Chinese flag, with digital screens, with running propaganda on, about legal versus illegal religion, correct religion versus incorrect religion. Neighbourhood mosques have been covered in here. Neighbourhood mosques have been covered in framed pictures, framed prints of the regulations against extremification. The Arabic calligraphy has been torn off in front of the Haidkar Mosque in Kashgar, you see there above the doorway. These are all forms of correction. And one very extreme example on the right-hand side there is where a neighbourhood mosque in Kashgar was actually turned into a cafe bar, where when I visited it in 2018, hand tourists were drinking alcohol, coffee, et cetera. How else does the correction take form? Well, first we have empty mosques, and then it emerges that actually the state has been disappearing the mosques entirely. And we have satellite technology, which has shown the disappearance of some very important mosques like the Keryar Mosque we see here. This is a shrine I visited in Bashkiram, just outside Kashgar in 2018. It was completely empty, devoid of visitors, pilgrims, obviously no votive messages hanging in the trees or anything completely padlocked up and barren and desolate. But soon after I made that visit, again, more evidence came out via satellite that other shrines were being, if not completely raised, then at least having their most important religious buildings deconstructed, destroyed. And I think these two quotes really speak to the situation. One of them by Arayil Adawud, who is a very important Uyghur folklorist who, as we speak, still remains disappeared and hasn't been seen at all in person or on video for a couple of years now, I think. And then most recently, as Yiza mentioned earlier in his own personal case, the raising of Uyghur graveyards. So a lot of corrections taking the form of eradications, eliminations, disappearances. In terms of culture, we see the imposition also of hand secular culture as in these pictures here, where you have Chinese lanterns and Chinese couplets, spring festival couplets attached to Uyghur doors. In many cases, it's the Uyghur families who are themselves putting them up in order to demonstrate their patriotism, in order to demonstrate their loyalty. So, you know, forms of self-censorship like Darren was talking about earlier. We see it also in the beautification project in Urumqi. Lianghua, as the Chinese call it. So, whereby all of the sort of ethnically distinct Uyghur architecture that has been put up by Uyghur shopkeepers is being torn down and being replaced by this kind of standardized hand-constructed pseudo-Islamic architecture. Then with language, we've seen the gradual eradication, disappearance of the bilingual education policy and replaced by a national language policy, a Goryu, JLU policy. In this picture here, you can see the Arabic script has been literally cut out of this poster outside an Urumqi primary school. The project I'm working on at the moment is to do with this set of six primary school textbooks. These have been revised. The previous edition was from 2015. These ones are revised in 2018. And what we find in the new versions, the new editions is that Uyghur culture, Turkic and Islamic culture has been completely taken out. The only thing remaining in the textbooks are a few proverbs here and there. The word Islam is completely absent as is the ethnonym Uyghur. There are no Uyghur personal names used in any of the texts, although they sometimes appear in the exercises in the drills. All of the human characters in the texts have hand names or foreign names. And throughout the books, inner Chinese geography is highlighted, but Xinjiang geography is completely absent. And there are only a very few references to Uyghur place names. So again, disappearance and invisibilisation. An invisibilisation of the Uyghur people as a separate group and nation. And of Xinjiang the place as a separate homeland, if you like. So all of this makes me think of tabula rasa. Tabula rasa is a concept taken from studies of frontier genocide. So reading Benjamin Maidley's article, he looks at three examples of frontier genocides that took place in different times in history and in different parts of the world. And he draws together a pattern. And one of the things he recognises, he identifies is this policy of tabula rasa or creating a map scraped clean. And this is really what I see happening in Xinjiang. So scraping Xinjiang clean and Uyghur's clean of Uyghur identity and Uyghur culture in order to facilitate dispossession and ethnic cleansing. And this idea of the land being empty or made empty, this dates all the way back to the 2010 Xinjiang work forum after which we began to see these adverts on the Beijing subway. If you were travelling on the Beijing subway, I know David Tobin was at the time. He also saw these, you will have seen these pictures of an empty Xinjiang, an empty Xinjiang where there are almost no people. And these were put up by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps and they were essentially adverts to hand migrants to move to Xinjiang, to go to Xinjiang. It was an incentive for hand migrants to move in, move into the emptied land. So settler colonialism becoming much more explicit from this time onwards. And I think I'm gonna stop there because I think I'm gonna let Penny speak to this. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you very much to the organisers of this conference to invite me. It's a great pleasure to be here. My name is Andrei Klimesh. I work as a researcher in Czech Academy of Sciences. I've been working on Xinjiang since 1999. I did my doctoral research on Uyghur national movement before 1949 and lately I've been working on one project unrelated to Xinjiang and on Xinjiang ideology and propaganda system. I decided to focus just on two specific points about the debate about whether we can call the crisis in Xinjiang genocide or not because we've heard a lot of information in previous presentation. So I decided to emphasise just two points. But firstly, I think there is a debate about whether we should have the debate, whether events in Xinjiang are genocide or not genocide. There is a lot of arguments or a lot of people argue that this crisis should not be called genocide. It's been argued, these are quotations from an article actually, that the concept of genocide has been highly politicised by the West used for a political agenda. I found this quote, critic of China's policies and practices would be best served by focusing on actual problems of people, experienced by people living inside the region, et cetera. I think we as scholars should agree on a terminology which at least to label what's going on. Now I'm not trying to speak about whether it's possible to prosecute in terms of genocide or in terms of crimes against humanity. And I will try to present some factual, some facts which I leave up to discussion by legal experts whether they can be used as evidence or they are insufficient to be used as evidence. Nevertheless, I think we have the responsibility to agree what, how to call the events going on in Xinjiang. Because as was mentioned several times here before, there is an unprecedented form and the extent of the repression which is going on in Xinjiang. But I think at the same time the trends are, they have a lot of similarities and they are continuities of a number of past phenomena either in Xinjiang or in People's Republic of China or in China or in other places of the world. And they are, they have many similar traits with other genocides and crimes against humanity. So I think the responsibility lays with experts to establish whether we can or cannot call it genocide or crimes against humanity, especially now in the situation where there are two completely different world views being presented in the debate when concentration camps on the one hand are called schools on the other hand or potential genocide or crimes against humanity are being called a successful model of anti-extremist policy. So I think we have the responsibility to find terminology for the sake of having a discussion, not meaning discussion with the People's Republic of China because the limits of discussion are, or the possibilities of discussion are quite skeptical, especially in the situation of Xinjiang. I think the experience or the situation shows that campaigning and pressure is probably the best way of interaction or most efficient way which bears actual results instead of attempts at dialogue. It has been also pointed out in the relatively few articles I've read on genocide or works on genocide that there is a conceptual nexus, not only conceptual between genocide and colonialism, I think there is also a strong connection between genocide and totalitarianism or totalitarian rule. And this I think is especially prominent in contemporary People's Republic of China where in many aspects we see sort of a great leap backwards, many totalitarian era policies are being resurrected and perfected, updated for the context of 21st century, such as mass detention, combined with re-education, combined with forced labor, all of it greased by highest, newest, highest technologies. So I think it's important to also pay attention to this nexus or linkages with the evolution of political system. Also I think one level where it's very prominent as was shown just now by Joe's presentation is a political discourse of the People's Republic where we see a clear revival of totalitarian, binary, dichotomic discourse as researched, for example, by Tiefen Yuan who did, who researched language of cultural revolution or by essays, by actually a Czech, dissident, dissident, Czech dissident on Czechoslovakian communist discourse who argues that totalitarian discourse seeks to split the discursive world and therefore also the real world into two halves, one white versus black, correct versus incorrect, healthy versus infected, et cetera. So I think this perspective of totalitarianism or is very valid, very, pardon, very valid, very framework which we can use looking at contemporary Xinjiang. Lemkin perceived genocide as a synchronized attack on different aspects of life, of a particular victim nation. I will focus on cultural genocide. On one aspect, let's say, of cultural genocide, so that's inflicting terror or mental pressure or mental damage, psychological damage or waging psychological war against the particular community. I think destruction or decimation or various similar meaning or words having similar meaning are also apt to use in this context, despite the fact that they are just, they are quite strong because I think a lot of the elements of what is called officially strike hard campaigns or people's war on terrorism, liberation of thought in previous historical periods, so-called de-extremization, modernization, beautification, signification of religion, terms which is also re-engineering of Uyghur and other minorities, social structures, transformation, et cetera. It implies or it shows that it's conditioned by actual destruction and obliteration of the existing situation and replacing it with something new. Hence my choice of wording. So, applying mental pressure, coercion, state terror as illustrated by Joe in her article, creating atmosphere of fear, I think it's very important or one important facet of the synchronized attack on the particular victim group. It's also stipulated in the Convention of Genocide, which can mean also causing serious mental harm to members of the group or to the group as a whole. So I think a lot of data shows that the situation really does exist on ground in Sintiang as mentioned by Aziz. Every Uyghur has a story to tell of loss and disappearance of close family members. It's normal for Uyghurs to be growing up in atmosphere of fear. Everybody has had their family members killed during political campaigns, disappeared, tortured. I think the state terrorism it was shown by Joe's article that's apt to use in this situation. I think it's worth to remember that Uyghurs have not been subjected to these policies of Communist Party of China since 1949 but they have been subjected to sort of proto-communist policies already since at least 1937 during the era of Sheng Shui Cai where Sintiang was viewed or functioned pretty much as a protectorate run by political commissars of the Communist Party of Soviet Union. So it was during this period when the first purges happened and lots of elites, for example, perished in this purge. These mental pressures extend beyond the boundaries of people's republics of China. So for instance, just one example to be quicker or two examples maybe. One informant in Kazakhstan informed me or told me that after people are released from a re-education camp of Kazakh ethnicity and are allowed, in case they are allowed to Kazakhstan, it happens quite frequently that they are practically immediately visited by the staff of Chinese consulate in Almaty and persuaded not to talk. Other Uyghurs in Turkey, for example, frequently tell stories about their relatives being taken in order to pressure them outside the boundaries to cooperate with Secret Service, et cetera. So these terror tactics extend beyond the boundaries. Another important part of cultural genocide, I think, which is ongoing is the decimation of Uyghur intellectual elites. And this is in this case quite clearly is on grounds on their ethnicity because regardless of the degree of their religious profile, regardless of the fact that many of these elites, such as Raheela Davut, as far as I am informed, Abdukadir Jalaladin are communist party members and as such are not allowed to practice religion, regardless of the fact that many so-called patriotic religious figures also have been detained. So this implies that the target is actually the ethnic group in this particular concept. So the decimation of intellectual elites, I think, is one facet which can be established also pretty firmly based on data, which is happening today in Xinjiang. Thank you. Thank you so much. Ken Green from Greenland. Thank you. I think that this is a really important conference and I'm really delighted to have been invited. Unlike most people who've spoken today, I'm not an expert on China or Xinjiang or the Uyghur, but what I hope to do is to give you a sense, perhaps, of the lessons learned from an analysis of what has happened to the Rohingya and was the minority in Myanmar, Burma. And so I want to start by, I like to start talks on the Rohingya with Aung San Suu Kyi and General Min Ong Lai because these are the authors of the genocide and these are the genocide down. We should never forget that genocide takes place because of decisions made by governments of this kind. I want today to ground my thoughts and discussion in the field work that my team from the International State Crime Initiative and I conducted on Myanmar's genocide of the Rohingya. We did this field work inside Myanmar in 2013-14 and later we went to the Bangladesh camps in Cox's Bazaar in November, late October 2017, after, if you like, the sort of the denouement of the genocide. And I think that the framework that I want to give you now, a way of understanding genocide is different from that adopted by many genocide scholars because I don't really want to use a genocide convention. I think that there are very significant problems with the convention, very significant problems with the international mechanisms of justice. And I want to begin by saying that I approach what I'm talking about from a state crime perspective. My colleague Tony Ward and I derived a definition of a state crime in around 2000 and that definition is essentially human rights violations perpetrated by state agents in pursuit of a state organizational goal. I mean, that's important. It's not about individual gratification. These crimes and these deviant acts taking place because they advance a particular state or government goal. So that's the general definition of state crime under which genocide, torture, war crimes, and so on fall. Sorry, I forgot about the slides. I'm drawing, okay, that's my starting point, but I also want to draw on the work of Raphael Lemkin who of course coined the term genocide and was initial, he was central to the framing of the genocide convention, though was deeply disappointed in its final form. And I want to also talk about the work of Claudia Card a little bit later when she talks about the idea of genocide as being the equivalent of social death. And finally, I want to use the work of Daniel Fierstein who is an Argentinian scholar of genocide and he talks about genocide as social practice. And I think the most important point I want to make before I actually go into the detail is that genocide needs to be understood as a process. It's not an event, it's not a simply event of spectacularized violence or an incident of mass killing. Genocide is a process and it takes place very often over decades. And I think that's what I've learned this morning about the Uighur. And it's certainly true of the genocide. That was a genocide which took place over some 35 years. And so we need to go back to Lemkin's original writings. Genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aimed at the destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. And annihilation can take place in ways other than mass killing. Though mass killing is very frequently a result of genocidal practices and policies. And I think one of the things that Lemkin made clear in both the quote that Andre gave and this one is that genocide needs to be planned. It's not something spontaneous. It's not the product of communal violence. It's planned by states. And this is what General Min Ong Lai said. I think it was in around 2015, but I'd have to check that. The Bengali problem, I mean, because it's worth noting and talked about suppression of the Uighur and the Uighur culture. The word Rohingya is not allowed to be used inside Myanmar, Burma. And in fact, Aung San Suu Kyi instructed the American ambassador in 2015 that the word was not to be used. Instead, we were talking about people who believed in Islam who lived in Rakhine State. So he said the Bengali problem, because that's what the Myanmar State calls the Rohingya, the Bengali problem was a long standing one which has become an unfinished job. It's finished now, but this was prior to 2017. It has become an unfinished job despite the efforts of the previous governments to solve it. The government in office is taking great care in solving the problem. Now, in terms of understanding genocide as a process, I'm using first in stages because I think they're really helpful. They go one to six, but they often run concurrently. And I won't say much about some of the early ones because time is very short, but I want to give some sense, in fact, time is very short. And so it starts with stigmatization. It is othering a particular targeted group. We move them to, once you've targeted another group, it becomes easier to assault them. It becomes easier to hurt them because they aren't like us, they're different to us. And that's somehow less human. Sorry, I'll go back to the... And once you've begun the physical violence with respect to the Rohingya in 2012, mass violence against the Rohingya led to them fleeing the capital city of Rakhine State, Sitwe, and ending up in an area which is now a detention camp complex. We think about the camps in Bangladesh, but actually there are horrendous camps inside Myanmar in Rakhine State, where Rohingya have been languishing since 2012. So that once they're isolated in camps, and there's one ghetto in Sitwe, and in what we call prison villages, it's much easier to systematically weaken them through the denial of the right to health care, the denial of right to education, the denial of an opportunity to earn a livelihood. And this has severe mental health implications. Of course, as Andre was talking about earlier, and Joe implied, once you've systematically weakened a group, it becomes much easier to annihilate them. But I think it's important to bring Claudia Cardin here. She's a social theorist who talks about social death, genocide is a form of social death. And she says what distinguishes genocide is not that it has a different kind of victim, namely groups, although it's a convenient shorthand to speak of targeting groups, rather the kind of harm suffered by individual victims in virtue of their group membership is not captured by other crimes. I'm going to move quite quickly to give you a sense of what this looks like, of what social death looks like. This is the first image of the Rohingya, and my time is up. So this is, I'm going to really rush, but this is an image of the Rohingya as they fled Myanmar in 2015. And these are the camps inside Myanmar, just to give you a sense. They are in a much worse situation than the camps in Bangladesh. And I'm not going to talk about it now because my time is up, but I want to leave you with the thought about genocide's final stage. Mass annihilation is not the final stage of genocide. It's rewriting the histories, engaging the denial of the state in which the genocide has taken place. It's about the destruction of the old society. It's about the eradication from history of the targeted group. It's about the creation of a new society, demographic changes and so on. I'll talk about that in the discussion, but I want to show you this final picture of Indian village. Indian's really interesting because this is a very clear example of the way in which the country is being reorganized. This was a mixed Rohingya and Rakhine village, and these are the Rakhine homes. This was where the Rohingya lived. They were all destroyed in 2017. And since 2017, you can see there are all red roofs there, and these are now security establishments. And I think I'm going to leave it here. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Thanks to all of the free speakers for very rich presentations that opened up the concept of genocide, of state crime. And I think I would like to maybe take the privilege of putting one or two very short questions out to you. But I imagine I'm sure that we will have a discussion, a lively discussion later on. So I think that picking up directly, perhaps starting with what we just heard from Penny Greene about the kind of stages of genocide, I think that it does seem to throw up, and this would really be a question to the first two speakers. It does seem to raise the question of where, if we use those stages, and in particular if we engage with this notion of the kind of final enactment of genocide as creating a sort of the destruction of the vestiges of a culture of a nation, of whether that resonates with your understanding of what is happening. For instance, thinking of Joe's description of the destruction of graveyards and religious buildings and so on and so forth. So that would be a question to both of you, to how you would react to this kind of portrayal stages. My question, I suppose, especially to Penny, but in some ways to all of you, because all of you have opted to work with conceptions of genocide that quite explicitly reject the definitions of the genocide convention or indeed of the Rome Statute. Is there not, and just maybe to put that into the room, you, when we look at those international criminal law definitions, then it is true that they essentially provide a number of different types of state acts, mass killings, but not only mass killings, also the inflection of serious bodily or mental harm, as Andre mentioned, and various other kinds of actions, but then they also require the genocide convention defines genocide as a behavior that is done with a very specific intent, the intent to destroy and hollow and part a national ethnic racial or religious group. And I think all of you basically decided not to work, with that narrowing definition. So my question to you would be, is that the case, and then if so, why? Why not use international criminal law definitions and what about the mechanisms that international criminal law might provide? Thank you. I'm just waiting for my laptop to warm up, so I need to slide on there, but I have been looking at the UN Convention on Genocide. That was the first thing I went to, well, no, the first thing I went to was Raphael Lemkin, the same quote that you just put up on your slide there, Penny, and the next thing I did was to look at the UN Genocide Convention. And I think I was trying to plot what's happening in Xinjiang against Article II, the various provisions in Article II of that convention. What you find is that the first point of mass killings is obviously difficult in the Xinjiang case for all sorts of reasons. One is that we can't know how many people are dying, it's extremely difficult to know how many people are dying. I think my tentative conclusion at the moment about mass killings in Xinjiang is that I think there have been moments where we could, where there have been what Bradley Campbell would call a proto-genocide. So this is, he talks about a spectrum of genocide with proto-genocide at the lesser end and hyper-genocide at the greater end. And a hyper-genocide, of course, an example of that would be the Jewish Holocaust, but a proto-genocide would be something like, and I suggest this very tentatively and I open to argument about it, but would be something like the Yekhen massacre, as it's become known from 2014, where we had, we don't know the numbers exactly, but anything between one and 3,000 Uyghurs in Ilishku village or Ilishku township killed by state forces, that would qualify under Bradley Campbell's definition, which is not a legal scholarly definition, it's an academic definition, but that would qualify as a proto-genocide. However, if you look at the other points under Article II of the Convention, the Genocide Convention, then it does fit and Andre did actually speak to that just now, the part about mental harm, physical and mental harm. There are very, very many examples of physical and mental harm now being perpetrated in Xinjiang, and I don't know whether it's possible to prosecute using the Genocide Convention without the mass killing aspect or do you need the mass killing aspect as well? I'm sorry, maybe I didn't make myself clear, but I think that often the argument sort of fails or runs into difficulty is in terms of establishing intent, genocidal intent, so you can show that all these terrible acts are being perpetrated by a state, but can you also actually show that this is done with the intent to destroy in whole or in part a national group, a racial group, or religious group that tends to be where it fails? Yes, so the intent is really difficult to prove, the mass killings are really difficult to evidence if and when they are happening. I think the mental harm is easier to prove at the moment, we have a lot of testimonies from former camp survivors via, for example, the Xinjiang Victims Database, but the main problem that I discovered and the reason why I've kind of moved away a bit from the Convention was that China has lodged a reservation, essentially. It has signed up to the UN Genocide Convention in 1949, I think July, I think it's just before the establishment of the PRC, but they've lodged a reservation and Reservation 2 says we do not recognise Article 9. Article 9 in the Genocide Convention basically means it's a provision to refer a dispute over the interpretation of the Genocide Convention to the International Court of Justice. China doesn't recognise that article, which means if China disputes the interpretation, which of course it will, we can't ask the ICJ to adjudicate, so it's a complete non-starter as far as I can say, but I'm not a lawyer, so I'll let the lawyer's comment on that. Thank you, important question. I think I'm not a lawyer, so just to get back to the Convention, I always thought reading the text means any of the following acts with intent. So the intent is a really important word. I think I'm not a lawyer, I'm not sure what constitutes what from legal point of view, but the way I'm reading or the way I understand the official documents and the policies, I think there is a clear intent of the state to terminate the existence of Uyghur with its identity features, with its culture, language, religious practices as they exist now and replace them with something else. And I think this constitutes an intent to destroy what Uyghurs themselves think they are. I think, in general terms, I think identity of a person is not what the government says. I think Uyghurs who although do have still written in their Shenfengsheng the category wayward zu, et cetera, but in fact cannot practice Islam, cannot choose the name they want, cannot speak Uyghur language at school, cannot listen to Uyghur songs and dances because all the singers are in re-education camps, they cannot go to a cemetery or a shrine, et cetera. I don't think the Uyghurs or human beings would think of themselves as human beings able to call themselves Uyghur under these terms. That's how I understand it. And I think this intent to end what Uyghurs are now and replace it with something else is clearly there, has been there for decades. Thank you so much, Ben. Thank you, yes. I think that the part of the problem with a legal approach to genocide is that there's an attempt to decouple politics from law. And genocides are ultimately political. It's not about the law. I mean, states break laws all the time and genocide is a very clear example of that but all the component parts that Andre has just mentioned are clear examples of that. And so I think that it's not helpful to frame genocide legally because, A, I don't think it helps us understand the processes as I talked about earlier, but it certainly isn't part of the solution. Well, if it's part of the solution, it's a tiny part of the solution. So at the moment, the Gambia has taken the Myanmar state to the International Court of Justice on grounds of genocide. And the result was that the International Court of Justice said that the Myanmar state must put in place provisional measures to prevent acts of genocide taking place against the Rohingya. Now, most of the Rohingya are gone. The genocide has happened. And what the court has said is simply abide by the genocide convention. There's nothing new in the provisions, the measures that the International Court of Justice has demanded that the Myanmar state abide by. And so I think that the commitment to legal solutions is distracting. It's very time-consuming. Genocides, I mean, when we did our work, we published a report in 2015. It was my final slide. I didn't get a chance to show you. But when we published our report, we sent it to Boris Johnson, who was then head of, he was Minister for Foreign Affairs. The reply we got back from his office was, well, it's not a genocide until a court of law determines it's a genocide. And when do we see attempts to take genocide to court? It's always after the event. It's always after the event. And so I think we have to think really carefully about sort of reifying the law and what the law can do. I think it can be a rhetorical tool. And certainly for the Rohingya, the decision of the Gambia to take Myanmar to the International Court of Justice was a great boost. It was a recognition that they existed and a recognition that great harms had been done. So at that level, I think it's very important. But please don't rely on legal solutions because you'll be waiting decades. And they won't be solutions because the damage will have well, a long, long, long been done. Well, thank you very much. That was, I think, very clear answer. And I think that this is of relevance, not least because even though, of course, it's true that the international tribunals are not actually available in the Chinese case anyway, nevertheless, there are discussions so far as I understand about raising the issue of criminal liability, for instance, through mechanisms of universal jurisdiction in a particular country. And so if I take it, if I get it right, Ben, this panel would not particularly advise civil society groups to pursue that route, but rather advise those of us who are interested in thinking about potential responses to what is happening, to use other strategies, expose the political liability that China has, or maybe using other potential legal routes for pursuing legal liability of, be it the Chinese state or potentially complicit, other governments or other entities, if I get the mood of the panel, right, that might be your response. Thank you so much. I would like to open up for questions. Yes, please. They're in green. Thank you. Well, thank you. Oh, is it me? Thank you. Is it me or her? It's me. It's me. Yes, yes, yes. Me. Yes. In green. You're wearing the wrong color clothes there. OK, thank you. I think that this is really, really crucial, the discussion on this panel, and maybe we'll return to thinking about the political implications of an acceptance of the comments of the first two speakers in particular, to find Penny Greene's argument about thinking about genocide as a process. Very, very helpful indeed. I've got a couple of comments and a question. The first comment is that I think that we need to be very cautious in thinking about, in terms of a revival of cultural revolution type totalitarianism. Rahima this morning noted the difference in her view, the difference between what happened in the cultural revolution and now, and I have a lot of sympathy for the view she put forward. Now we're talking about the global circulation of surveillance capitalism and the complicity of global corporations with that in what China is doing. And through an incredibly invasive use of surveillance technology, which in terms of its political economy including its reach is way beyond anything that Mao and the cultural revolution could imagine doing. So I think we need to be very, very cautious in thinking about the cultural revolution in a media environment in which thoughtless journalists too happily and too easily make reference to the suppression of the Mao era, you know, speaking as a historian I just think that we need to be careful about that. However, there is a question that nobody has yet raised. I mean the Chinese state has been undertaking a process of hanification of Xinjiang for decades and I would like the panel's view about whether what is happening now, we can think of it as a qualitatively different stage or is it something that continues from policies in the past. I would also like to make a comment about gender. I wanted to make that this morning. I mean the reference this morning in Rahimah's talk to the use of rape and incarceration of women was horrifying in the extreme and Joe refers to the coercive marriage of Uyghur women to Han men and with that kind of distressing photograph and I just want to say that, you know, violence comes in many, many different forms. State terrorism comes in many, many different forms and its gendered dimension is extremely important and we shouldn't forget that. So thank you. Thank you very much. And I'm so sorry, I didn't realise that above Harriet and Jude actually are wearing green. So Jude, how? Yes, please. Yeah, I'll be quick. I mean my question is for this panel and it relates to what happened before but we're sort of positioning, you know, Han versus Uyghur state, Chinese state versus Uyghur and Xinjiang and I would like to bring in the concept of civil society because I think civil society can be recruited into this state plan or it can be a form of resistance and we've sort of normatively assumed it's going to be a form of resistance but actually none of this would be possible without also some complicity on the part of civil society. We see it on the one hand the destruction when you're talking about genocide of certain institutions in Xinjiang which are part of the identity of culture of Uyghurs. But you know what, there must be civil society organisations, non, I don't want to use Han, which are also being recruited into the idea just as they are with the prevent model or other models. So if you have any thoughts on that I'd be very interested to know because it's not so chalk and cheese as presented. Excellent. Can we perhaps take one more question? Yes please. Oh, sorry, yes, thank you. Thank you very much panelists for enlightening us about genocide. Torture and mass murders. There are three countries in the world who are culprit, China, India and Myanmar or used to be Burma. Now the definition of torture is fully explained in the United Nations Charter. Now you as a scholar and academics define what torture and mass murder is but where is the United Nations not intervening in these instances? There is a genocide process going on in India. In Kashmir there is a lockdown for seven months and the women are being raped and mass murder is taking place. Political leaders are taken into custody. 1000 political leaders in Kashmir are in prison. Narendra Modi's government in India watching when Donald Trump was visiting India a lot of people were killed in front of the police. Little children were snatched from the mother's lap. They were thrown in the fire and the women were murdered in front of police. So you haven't mentioned India's terrorism and I wholeheartedly agree with Pani Green how she described genocide. At least two million Muslims in India at the risk of ethnically clenched and nobody in the West is intervening. When you talk to India their diplomats say it's internal affairs. Genocide is not an internal affair it is an international crime. India is guilty of crime against humanity and academic argument will not solve this problem until America, Britain, EU, other countries in the western countries intervene in China, in Myanmar and in India three culprits country and we are watching as a human being. I cannot sleep at night when I see the video I haven't slept actually since the daily riots you know how people are cut with a sword their father's mother's sword cut their head and they burn, they burn their houses they burn their shops and when they go back there they say why have you come here? If you come here in your own house it will happen again the same thing communal riots are not new in India so nobody actually is talking about it are you afraid of India? Thank you. Thank you very much I would like to give the panelists an opportunity to apply to get back to these points I'm happy to start on civil society because that was the first project I was doing inside Myanmar which in 2012 and that was how we first learnt about what was going on in Rakhine state and I think that the point that you made about civil society and the ambiguity of civil society is really important we tend to think of civil society as being human rights based as an ultimately a force for good but in my research that's not always the case sadly very often civil society can be a force for reaction and in Myanmar that was the case so in Myanmar part of the problem for the Rohingya was that they were completely alone inside the country because civil society if you like had been captured effectively certainly ideologically by the military regime and then by the NLD and Aung San Suu Kyi in terms of the sort of stigmatization perceptions of what the Rohingya were that is that they were potentially terrorist force that they were illegal Bengali immigrants that they were business monopolizers and all of the kind of racial stereotypes that are used against Muslims inside the country so it's very true that civil society is not an unproblematic force however I think it is our best way forward I think if we are thinking about how we might try to intervene and part of the reason for appreciating the stages of genocide is that it gives us moments of intervention so it's one of the reasons why when we see the appalling treatment that our own government is giving to asylum seekers these alarm bells have to ring because these are the points at which when groups are stigmatized we need to intervene and so I think that despite the problematic nature of civil society we only know about what's going on in places like Xinjiang and Rakhine State and Delhi because of the forces of civil society because of international NGOs because of independent journalism and so on so I think it's about how we work with those groups and that can be problematic but I do think that it is by far and away our best way forward and it's about unifying struggles it's about bringing the one of the opportunities I think today would be to bring the Uighur together I don't know that there are any Rohingya in the audience here and so it seems to me that the Uighur and the Rohingya the Kechin these are the groups that should be working together in a unified way to take on these terrible challenges Thank you so much. Any comments from you on these points? I might also allow myself a point I will react to the Cultural Revolution just briefly I think I was referring more to the style of leadership and style of the policy I don't think things are happening in exactly the same way but I think at the same time a lot of approaches are being reintroduced by the Chinese leadership either explicitly or implicitly during the sea era but I think regarding HANIFICATION I don't think HANIFICATION nowadays is a qualitatively new stage I think that was the question right? No it's not a qualitatively new stage it might be new as far as the extent of the implementation is happening now but it's not qualitatively new stage I think the first policy intention of HANIFICATION of Xinjiang are from the 1820s Laura Newby's research The Empire and the Henet I think as far as if I remember correctly she outlines the policy change in the 1820s and that's when the first HANIFICATION idea started at the time so qualitatively no it's not new nowadays also 1950s rising population of HAN HAN people in Xinjiang On the gender question I think the Uyghurs themselves have experienced what's happening to them in gender terms for quite some time so for example I did work with Sampi Xiaodi Uyghur hostess girls who were sitting singing karaoke smoking drinking with HAN businessmen HAN Chinese businessmen in karaoke bars in Urumqi and that whole situation was conceived in ethnopolitical terms within the Uyghur community so the girls were very stigmatised the men would spit at them in the street and if they saw them coming out of a karaoke club would abuse them and hit them sometimes according to my interviews with the girls and it was very much a situation where the Uyghur women were seen as the culture bearers and the Uyghur women had to be protected against HAN male encroachment and it was only by doing that that the Uyghur nation could be rescued or shored up as it were and now at the moment in the internment camps then I think women are being targeted in all sorts of gendered ways you've got testimonies from survivors talking about having been given some white liquid to drink which has caused their menstruation to stop for example we have the grueling stories of rape as Reema mentioned earlier we also have stories from people who got out of the camps of forced sterilisations and forced abortions and I wanted to ask Reema earlier but I didn't want to take up the floor space but if rape is happening on a very regular basis in the internment camps how does that link in with the forced abortions are women falling pregnant from these rapes is that leading to more forced abortions or is it the case that they're being fed things to stop their menstruation so that they can be raped without any kind of effect there are some really troubling questions that emerge from that situation thank you so much if I might just abuse the chair's privilege to get back on the question about civil society with one very brief further comment as a researcher who has spent many years so I did thank you so much I think that none of the panellists particularly wanted to take up this point a very brief could I just say I would not avoid it I mean we talk about what we best know and I agree with you sir I'm sorry allow me to mention that I mean this panel is focusing on the situation in Xinjiang but DBS has a point okay I want to just speak on behalf of the organizers although I don't personally know them I don't think you were here this morning I write about women, Kashmir, India, Delhi Hindutva project and this morning there was a detailed presentation at which I spoke so the first session if you look through the program was actually addressing this question and taking on board exactly everything that you said so we have actually at length spoken about India thank you very much about Kashmir as well and there will be a video available that you can watch later very good point excellent I think that we need to thank you very much but I think that I would very much like to continue on the panel discussion and allow me just to thank you allow me to get back on the point about civil society I think that speaking as someone who's done many years of research working with human rights advocates in China in sort of mainland China I would just like to point out and I think this is important that yes of course society can be highly collusive and supportive of practices that we can call genocidal that are certainly from my perspective crimes against humanity but are awful but I would like to say that China of course is as a whole a highly repressive system Chinese society Chinese human rights advocates included live with huge risks and it is very difficult from within Chinese society to raise persecution and in particular the crimes against humanity that are occurring in Xinjiang and I think that it is important to make this point just to sort of contextualize because if we compare across different systems then the degree to which the state is repressive of course will really affect the ability of any kind of civil society and in China it is quickly vanishing as we speak to actually oppose and challenge severe crimes like this to give one example some two, three weeks ago I did receive a message and I was kind of impressed from a human rights lawyer who shall be nameless directly pointing out to what was described as crimes occurring in Xinjiang that person at the time of writing this was under the heaviest possible surveillance and they are currently recovering from their own experience of forced disappearance and torture and it is difficult for Chinese civil society in particular to raise the issues in Xinjiang severe as they are and much as they of course require to be raised and to be challenged by why we are trying to have this panel looking into possible responses also from outside of China one more point by Andre and then perhaps we can continue I apologise, thank you also on the note of civil society similar experience has spoken to a journalist from one of the more let's say more open non-state owned media in China which are occasionally allowed an investigative report reporting about Xinjiang is entirely off limits even for the slightly more liberal Chinese language eastern or southern China based media thank you so much so I think we had a question here and then behind you, yes please lady in black thank you so much for the panel and this entire day of learning very much so I just wanted to ask a question in regards to the necessity to condemn the cultural genocide the idea of the international solidarity that needs to be fostered obviously there is a difficulty well they do condemn them regardless but there is a difficulty for nations like the US to condemn China because it would be quite hypocritical particularly considering their own Guantanamo Bay and all their human rights violations and I think I'm sort of trying to look at the social media narrative in regards to the Uighurs for my own dissertation and a key argument by the Chinese as seen on social media tends to be that this is the West trying to impose the war on terror narrative onto their own nations to increase further control as we see this turn to a multi-polar world order but also this isn't about relativity and all violations are violations and there's no excuses so I just wanted to ask a more practical question how do we as part of leading institutions and the wider civil society go on about condemnation such that we are able to minimize these loopholes and spaces for Xi Jinping and other authoritarian governments to refute their own crimes against humanity via justification that the global north too is engaging in equally horrendous actions thank you thank you very much so I think I have a question on because I think you kind of touch upon ways of stopping the genocide in Jingyang I know this is probably going to be addressed in later panels but I just want to come back on your kind of understanding of the government kind of the idea that mobilizing international public opinion international civil society was kind of raising awareness might be the best way to stop what's happening in Jingyang I mean just to me it seems debatable that non-cursive measures would be able to stop China especially knowing that it's an authoritarian, highly secretive economically powerful state so I'd like to have a bit more of your insight exactly that those types of mechanisms would help prevent or stop what's happening right now and also my other point would be that isn't like focusing on international society NGOs, academics like yourselves as being kind of people who can act on and stop genocide isn't that kind of taking away the responsibility states do have and especially states that have signed the convention to prevent and punish genocide and that are not doing anything currently so I just want to have a bit of your opinion on that Thank you very much and then we have some input from Sophia Woodman, thank you so much Well not from me, from the there's a very lively chat on the live stream maybe you can read it some of it, but I mean summing up one question is isn't this just about sort of separatism and the fight against separatism and we're kind of masking it with this discussion of all these other things so well I'm not going to try and sum that up but there is a quite specific question from one of our remote audience which is in contrast to the Rohingya the Uyghurs are recognised as an ethnic group in China officially and the Chinese government while they're trying to reshape the identity of the group they're not trying to eliminate the group per se so does that make a difference in terms of thinking of it as genocidal or not Thank you very much now we have a collection of questions who would like to speak to the last questions from the media discussion I would like to make a start Thank you Just a quick word about separatism what's really noticeable in the last few years I've been interviewing Uyghurs about separatism since the mid 90s there was quite a lively debate about Shindyang independence and people were Uyghurs were talking about will the new state be called Uyghuristan or will it be called East Turkistan and it was all very exciting there was lots of young men were having this conversation in Shindyang but at the same time as that going on I would say probably a greater proportion of the population were not talking about independence what's very noticeable about the last two or three years in the context of reeducation and mass internment is that now everyone without exception is saying the only way to solve this current problem is independence I'd also like to remark on separatism because this is something that appears quite often fight against separatism, fight against terrorism and fight against extremism so called three forces I think both the analysis of for example the violent incidents articles by Pavlo in your volume work by Sean Roberts the final chapter or the appendix of Gardner Bovingdon's book Sean Roberts's articles they show that the violent incidents actually overwhelmingly small majority are related to terrorism or acts of terrorism in the sense of an attack on the public on civilians, on unarmed civilians also I think Pavlo also wrote a really interesting article on how the labeling label of the internal political enemy evolves from separatists to terrorists to current day extremists I've read several English language official statements from past months now the term that seems to be also appearing in interrelation with separatism, terrorism, extremism in the official propaganda is violence so this is the fourth concept used very inconsistently in my way in my opinion so I think at least do things refute the argument about separatism and terrorism also a small remark on Guantanamo I'm not sure what specifically you meant by this comparison but would you like to specify or let me put it this way I'm not trying to argue that the United States government is not hypocritical but if we compare Guantanamo and contemporary situation in Xinjiang we do find similarities but we find overwhelmingly differences for example the scale of detention Guantanamo had 800 people at the start which was the largest number of detainees it's an illegal detention facility but on the other hand there are quite a number of people detained there who were detained fighting there are so called high value detainees who were organizers of several very violent terrorist incidents there are people who were detained innocently in both facilities at the same time people in Guantanamo are free to practice Islam they have access to lawyers and they can communicate with their families so I think there are also a lot of differences with Piyarrison thank you so much that was one question on civil society I'll come back to that one two points you also, I'm going to start with a second whereas you said if you're putting the pressure on civil society to take responsibility for dealing with genocide doesn't that remove responsibility or absolve states from the responsibility of dealing with genocide states have demonstrated very clearly that will not take responsibility for dealing with genocide. And one of the reasons is, the very term genocide, you'll see that states will not use the term genocide, not until there is no possibility for them not to. Because once states use the term and accept that a genocide is taking place, they are under an obligation, whether or not you see it as a significant obligation, by the genocide convention, to intervene to prevent and to punish. Now, obviously the second element to punish is much easier, because it's after the event, right? States have shown themselves to have no remote interest at all in intervening to prevent genocide. And I think that's important, and it also speaks to some problematic decisions that some of the major international NGOs have taken. So Amnesty International still call what happened to the Rohingya and describe Myanmar as an apartheid state. Human Rights Watch talk about crimes against humanity, because they themselves are fairly significant, major players and have strong relationships with states and with corporations, which comes back to the point I want to make about what else can civil society do, and I think you follow the money. So one of the most effective ways of trying to tackle the genocide and the consequences of genocide is to place sanctions, boycotts, divestment strategies against those who profit from genocide. And so that will be in relation to corporations and governments. I mean, we only need to look at the effect of the BDS campaign and the violent response that Israel has initiated against BDS activists and the BDS movement to see how effective those campaigns can be. And perhaps precisely on that point, we might also want to think about the broader context discussed earlier today of forced labour and the economic interest that is implicated in that raising the question whether civil society has strategies to expose complicity, for instance, corporate complicity, perhaps also government agency complicity with those kinds of human rights violations as a way for sort of at least raising the issue but perhaps also as an effective way of stopping some of the behavior that supports these ongoing crimes, state crimes, crimes against humanity or in a broader definition, the ongoing genocide in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. I'm afraid that we have gone way over time and so we will have to have a shortened tea break before we continue with a last part of today's conference which will further address more explicitly the sort of practical and advocacy aspects of this topic. I'm sure that you will want to join me in thanking the panelists and also once more thanking the organizers, including in particular Rachel and Sophia but also very much Tim Pringle. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.