Rahima Mahmut is strong. Very strong. But she is also scared, which is why she wants her words to go to higher places and travel faster.
More than anything, she just wants people to know, to understand the horrors she sees behind those five Olympic rings.
They are horrors that make her voice tremble across a harrowing conversation. Horrors that make her eyes moist. Horrors she claims are intensifying in a spiral of atrocities and oppression, but whose alleged perpetrators, the government of China, are being legitimised by sport. Scrubbed clean by curling brooms, you might say if it wasn’t so gravely serious.
‘The Winter Olympics in Beijing should be remembered as the Genocide Games,’ she tells Sportsmail and a few days out from the opening ceremony, those words fill the air for a while.
Protestors have called for a boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympic Games being held in Beijing
It is a popular phrase these days, sports washing. But it is one that can detract from the details of awful testimonies and claims.
They are the testimonies of people like Mahmut, if you believe her. And the claims that up to one million Uyghur Muslims are detained arbitrarily in hundreds of camps in the Xinjiang region, if you believe Human Rights Watch.
They talk about crimes against humanity on a mass scale and of torture, forced labour, sterilisation and rape.
Of children removed from families. Of Chinese authorities systematically persecuting Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims on an escalating scale since 2017. Of ‘cultural and religious erasure’ and ‘Orwellian surveillance’. Of abuses in Tibet and Hong Kong. They are lies, say the Chinese government, and politics, say the International Olympic Committee.
So Mahmut wants to tell a story about her brother. She cannot say for certain if he has been detained, nor if that has been the fate of eight other siblings in Xinjiang, her homeland in the north-west of China which she left in 2000. She cannot even determine if they are alive or…
Source : dailymail
