NEW YORK - Dressed in Hugo Boss suits with a home in the Virginia suburbs and an intimidating international travel schedule, Turkel is in many ways a prototypical man of Washington, writes Foreign Policy.
Turkel came to the United States in 1995 to study first in Idaho before receiving his law degree from American University in Washington D.C. In 2020, he was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people for his efforts to raise the profile of China’s systematic repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities in his native Xinjiang.
That same year, he was appointed by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to serve on the USCIRF, a bipartisan agency that advises on issues pertaining to religious freedom around the world.
All the same, Turkel is plagued with survivor’s guilt. Prison camps have once again appeared in his native Xinjiang in northwestern China—only unlike the Cultural Revolution, which was a nationwide purge, the brutality of the state this time has been trained on Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities.
More than a million people have been detained in the camps for arbitrary reasons, including having a beard, having contacts abroad, or having attended a Western university.
Camp survivors and human rights groups have reported instances of torture, forced abortion and sterilization, rape, and slavery while the United States has deemed China’s campaign against the Uyghurs to be a genocide.
Watching the largest arbitrary interment of a minority group since the Holocaust from afar, Turkel grapples with the question: What do you do when “never again” is happening once more?
