In an eight-square-metre office a couple of streets away from the Walkie-Talkie tower and Sky Garden in the heart of the City of London, Rahima Mahmut sits at her desk organising her activities for the day. With straight black hair to her shoulders and smartly dressed, she has a firm but warm smile, and could be mistaken for one of City’s finance workers. But her mission is very different: the sole representative of the World Uyghur Congress in London, she is here to fight for the future of Uyghur people.
Mahmut has come a long way. But in her mind, she has never left her hometown, Ghulja, behind. Ghulja, known as Yining in Chinese, sits on the north-west of today’s Xinjiang (also known as East Turkestan), bordering Kazakhstan, with the Himalayas and Pamirs to the south and Altai mountains to the north. It lies on an oasis that caravans used for centuries to transport Chinese silk to Europe.
Today it has regained that role: the most important trade routes in China’s hugely ambitious Belt and Road Initiative pass through Xinjiang. But for the Uyghur people who live there, is has brought nothing but violence and oppression. Uyghur and Kazakh people once declared an East Turkestan Republic, for a short while, in the last years of the second world war, and China’s government will stop at nothing to prevent anything like that happening again.
