In the East, a native people are feeling the wrath of an aggressively authoritarian State. Their language, culture and religion are at odds with the imposed orthodoxy of the far-away capital. For this reason, they have been branded a “fifth column” by a regime notorious for its intolerance of any expression of diversity from the people it subjugates.

These people are subjected to the whims of a cruelly-efficient police state. Their movements are tracked. Their schools get routinely shut down. Their literature is censored. Their houses of worship crumble under the weight of bulldozers.

Alarmingly, authorities have now begun to kidnap and intern these people in concentration camps—first the intellectuals, then military-aged men, finally, anyone else that the State might consider subversive elements. There, they are conditioned to abandon their traditional identities and molded to embrace the regime. The lifeless bodies of those who refuse are discarded. The regime justifies the elimination of a unique cultural identity with statements like, “We shall load our guns, draw our swords from their sheaths, throw hard punches and relentlessly beat, strike hard without flinching at terrorists.”

Despite bits and pieces of this ongoing State-sponsored tragedy making its way into the international press, the regime passionately denies accusations as “Western Propaganda.” Few governments are willing to risk souring relations with the regime to find out. It’s a pragmatic response.

This Orwellian depiction should sound eerily familiar to most readers. For the children and grandchildren of Armenian Genocide survivors, this should look like a call to action. The chant “Never Again!” heard every April 24th outside Turkish embassies across the globe serves as a warning that genocides gone unpunished can easily be replicated.

In this very real case, the regime is the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), while its victims are…Turks…of sorts. The Uyghurs number around fifteen million in the central-Asian province of Xinjiang, which they call “East-Turkestan.” They are the descendants of those Turks who stayed put while their kin migrated west to ravage Armenia.

Communist China would absorb the region by 1949. Despite Chinese control, the mountains continued to shelter an underground independence movement for decades. Unwilling to tolerate any challenge to the supremacy of the CCP, the Central Government is implementing a strategy which it had perfected in Tibet: to turn the locals into loyal Chinese communists. This goal would be accomplished by eroding any sense of national identity other than loyalty to Beijing. Troops have set up roadblocks and checkpoints throughout major cities. CCTV cameras now operate in mosques, and locals’ movements are tracked with GPS emitters. Using face-recognition technology and big data analytics, they have effectively turned the province into a massive open-air prison. Some of this Chinese surveillance tech might soon find its way to Armenia. Locals have been forced to remove veils and shave Islamic beards. Many have even been force-fed pork products. A government program to dilute the region’s Uyghur character has transplanted so many ethnic Han Chinese into the area that their numbers have ballooned from six percent in 1949 to 40 percent today.

Most of those tactics might look like they were pulled right out of the Young Turks instruction manual and updated for the 21st century. A genocide denied is a genocide repeated.

Over the years, the struggle for Armenian Genocide recognition has morphed from a campaign to avenge a historical injustice into a human rights issue. After all, the Ottomans didn’t simply set out to kill Armenians, but to remove their humanity. As descendants of victims, we share our pain and humiliation with victims of totally unrelated atrocities across the globe. Recognition, they will argue, is the first step toward prevention. The 1.5 million would not have perished in vain if their example served to protect the lives of human beings of all races and religions.

The Armenian Genocide served as a template for the Shoah. “Who remembers the elimination of the Armenians?” as we like to quote from Hitler. The Srebrenica massacre, the Cambodian and Rwandan Genocides can all trace their origins to the world’s failure to act in 1915.

As the victims of the primordial under-acknowledged Genocide, we began to accept the moral responsibility to prevent them in our lifetime. The first step was the most instinctive one: to make common cause with the Pontic Greeks and Assyrians. The Armenian Parliament recently recognized these genocides, while Diaspora groups now lobby for the recognition of all three genocides by foreign governments. Eventually, activists would lend their voices to other causes-célèbres.

At the height of the Darfur Conflict, the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) launched the extraordinarily successful “Urgency of Now” campaign—the poster of which featured a starving Sudanese child cropped with a photograph of an Armenian boy during the Genocide. The message was as clear as it was poignant: those who lost their humanity due to the international community’s unwillingness to act decisively embodied what was at stake. Perhaps not so coincidentally, activists of the “Save Darfur” movement carried signs with a familiar slogan: “Never Again!”

Bandwagoning Armenian Genocide recognition onto sexy causes makes practical sense. Darfur’s archetypal dictator, Al-Bashir could never hope to match the star-power fielded by celebrities like George Clooney and Mia Farrow in the struggle for global sympathy.

But what about unsexy atrocities? The kind that don’t end up on celebrity Instagram accounts and those which are committed in the middle of diplomatic quagmires in distant lands? Do the descendants of Genocide survivors not have a responsibility towards them?

In Yerevan, the Aurora Prize headquarters, which Clooney co-founded, effectively institutionalized Armenia’s role as the global champion of Genocide prevention. Incidentally, the latest recipient of the Prize, Tom Catena, works in Sudan.

So far, the campaign for Armenian Genocide recognition has encountered few if any moral qualms. Armenians are impartial to the Rwandan conflict. The Republic of Armenia would unlikely face real diplomatic fallout for condemning Burma’s persecution of its Rohingya minority. If anything, denouncing the Islamic State’s campaign against the Yazidis may have lent credibility to Armenia’s title of World Genocide Watchdog.

This consequence-free approach to genocide-diplomacy has led the most eager among us to imagine commonalities between the Armenian Genocide and anything from the Black Lives Matter movement to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The window of ambiguity is quickly closing for the self-appointed global leaders of genocide prevention. We will soon have to choose between an unwavering commitment to the upholding of our values and pragmatism, not unlike the choice we resent Israel for making.

In recent years, Armenia has found itself sucked closer into China’s orbit. As is the case in many developing countries, strengthening economic and political ties with Beijing risks the danger of imposing our own “gag rule” (to borrow a term). China has demonstrated a willingness to use any means at its disposal to punish any international criticism.

These have taken the form of bans on Chinese tour groups, the cancellation of economic agreements or restrictions on foreign companies operating within the country. Other diplomatic consequences may also follow.

Armenia’s closer scrutiny of the plight of the Uyghurs might be uncomfortable for another reason: Turkey’s President Erdoğan.

Unlike the majority of world leaders, Erdoğan has been quite vocal about his opposition to the treatment of Turkey’s ethnic cousins in China. He even referred to China’s actions as “a kind of genocide.” This sort of criticism may risk growing economic ties between Ankara and Beijing. Of course, Erdogan’s words are meant for a domestic audience. The president’s posturing as a modern-day Ottoman sultan has been warmly met at home. In recent years, Erdoğan has visibly increased Turkish presence in Bosnia, offered diplomatic and military support to the Syrian Turkmen and supported Azerbaijan.

Erdoğan has also been very liberal with his use of the term “genocide.” He’s applied the G-word to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, the situation in Myanmar and even accused Armenia of committing Genocide against the Turks. For Erdogan, the term applies to just about anything other than his country’s extermination of its Armenian, Greek and Assyrian minorities.

Coincidentally sharing a cause with Erdoğan, in this case, might seem unthinkable, but exciting conclusions could be drawn. Armenia’s courage to take a stand against human rights abuses inflicted on a Turkic group would contrast quite positively with Turkey’s selective approach of condemning only atrocities (both real or imagined) against Turks. Comparisons between China’s treatments of the Uyghurs and Turkey’s similar treatment of its Kurdish minority also come to mind.

Ultimately, such an arrangement could help dislodge the genocide issue from national pride at the heart of Turkish civil discourse. Nationalists in Turkey have long portrayed the genocide as an Armenian conspiracy to weaken Turkey. If Armenians are willing to call a spade a spade regardless of national interests, shouldn’t the Turks?

Our parents and grandparents were stripped of their citizenships, their property, their language, religion, identity and their humanity, much like the Uyghurs today. Armenia’s responsibility toward victims of atrocities should not be limited to convenience.

A real test of our commitment to universal justice would entail speaking out for the cousins of our oppressors when they, in turn, become the victims. With the gradual destruction of the Uyghur people, Armenians will soon face an uncomfortable dilemma: does the global solidarity between victims extend to the ethnic-relatives of an enemy state?