Uyghur men pens down his community suffering in Chinese detention camps, turns into a most consequential works

New York [US], September 16 (ANI): The situation of Uyghurs in China has been bleak under the Chinese communist party (CCP)'s rule and continues to escalate, however, two Uyghur men, who escaped from indoctrination camps decided to pen down their experiences and published a book to expose the crackdown on Uyghurs living in China, the New York Times reported.
The book titled "The Backstreets" explains the story of two Uyghurs namely Perhat Tursun and Darren Byler were forced into detention camps in 2018 following which they decided to publish the book which highlights the oppression of ethnic minorities in the country and their plight.
"It describes Perhat's inner world," said Tahir Hamut Izgil, a prominent Uyghur poet based in the United States who has known Tursun since their university days in the 1980s, according to New York Times.
Numerous Uyghur intellectuals were detained in China as part of a repression campaign targeting predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities that started in 2016, and has only escalated lately.
Notably, the novel is recently published by the Columbia University Press on Tuesday and narrates a smoggy provincial capital where an unnamed narrator tries to escape rural poverty and finds work as a token minority hire in a bleak government unit dominated by Han Chinese which is the largest ethnic group in China, as per New York times.
In his first meeting with Byler who translated the novel, Tursun said that five of his Uyghur classmates had mental breakdowns while in university, which helped him draw connections between alienation and mental health in his writing.
Moreover, Byler who is a professor at Simon Fraser University, in Canada heard about "The Backstreets" for the first time when he was in Xinjiang doing ethnographic research in 2014.
A recent report by the United States, which revealed China's human rights violation in the Xinjiang region, said that "allegations of patterns of torture, or ill-treatment, including forced medical treatment and adverse conditions of detention, are credible, as are allegations of individual incidents of sexual and gender-based violence."
Former UN High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet released the report which said that Uyghurs in the Chinese province of Xinjiang and other predominantly Muslim groups were routinely placed in reeducation camps where they were subjected to torture, rape, forced labour, and abortion.
The report comes at an inconvenient time for Chairman Xi, as his party CCP is set to convene its 20th Party Congress next month in Beijing.(ANI)