Most Uighurs, though not all, are Muslim, and speak a Turkic language rather than Chinese. In the 1990s, a major separatist insurrection in the province and the recent collapse of the Soviet Union encouraged China to increase its control in the region. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Beijing stopped talking about the Uighurs as separatists and started referring to its opponents in the region as terrorists; this discourse, linked to the Islamic faith of most Uighurs, helped China gain international support for its actions. When violence broke out in Ürümqi shortly after the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the government cracked down harder than ever before. The state now monitors the individual trustworthiness of each person. Points are lost for owning a Koran, so-called extremist behavior such as fasting during Ramadan, simply being Uighur, or having a family member living in a foreign country. Those who lose too many points are sent to a camp, often for an indeterminate length of time.

China is treating Islam like a mental illness

The Uighur diaspora in Europe is relatively small—just a few thousand refugees, in addition to several thousand more in Turkey. Some came on student visas, to France, Hungary, and the Nordic countries, and then stayed. Others, knowing it was a one-way trip, put their safety in the hands of smugglers. Ibrahim and his family paid $40,000 for a journey through Guangzhou, Malaysia, Thailand, and Turkey, before they could start a new life in Belgium. “I arrived with only $100 left in my pocket,” he told me.

At first, many Uighurs in Europe were reluctant to speak out. Although Ibrahim and his friends live in European democracies where freedom of speech is promised, they feared that their advocacy would lead to retribution for their families.

One activist told me that when in the past he risked a snatched conversation on WeChat, the widely used Chinese social-media app, the state was listening. “You can hear that there is someone else there,” he said . “If we greet our families with ‘Salaam Alaikum,’ they flinch and tell us to be quiet.” The Uighurs I met told me that as surveillance and arrests in Xinjiang increased since 2017, the calls from relatives stopped altogether. “I didn’t want to be an activist,” says Halmurat Harri, a Uighur campaigner and Finnish citizen, whose parents were detained in Xinjiang in April 2017. “I’m just a son, who wants to speak to his mother.” As the silence settled in, many in Europe began to feel they had no other choice but to go public.

Halmurat was one of the first to challenge the Chinese demand for silence. In August 2018, he set off on a “Freedom Tour” of Europe to raise awareness of the detention of Uighurs, including his parents.

Halmurat argued extensively and publicly that his parents’ case did not fit with any official Chinese-government excuses for detaining Uighurs. They are retirees, so they don’t need vocational training. They are secular, so can’t be called religious extremists. His father even speaks fluent Chinese. Halmurat used social media effectively—and in December 2018, his parents were removed from the camp and put under house arrest. He thinks it is “highly possible” that his activism pressured the government to let them go—though they were released just weeks before the Finnish president visited China.