I knew very little about the Uighurs — Turkic-speaking Sunni
Muslims from East Turkistan in China — and their culture when I
founded Witness to Guantánamo in 2008. (I had created Witness to
Guantánamo to document rule of law violations and human rights
abuses at the American military detention center in Guantánamo
Bay, Cuba.) However, I received a crash course on the Uighurs a
year later when Witness to Guantánamo began filming interviews of
former detainees, including the group of Uighurs who had been
released to Albania.
China seized East Turkistan in the middle of the 20th century, in the same time period as when China overran Tibet. When
China gained control of East Turkistan, it sought to destabilize
and destroy the indigenous Uighur culture. East Turkistan was
renamed the Xinjiang Autonomous Region in Central Asia...