Day: February 11, 2024

“Home” means different things to young Uyghurs – some of whom may have not even visited their ancestral homeland in China’s far western Xinjiang region.

That was the theme of the latest annual art competition for Uyghur artists and others held by the Uyghur Collective, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based youth group that has organized the annual event since 2019.

Uyghur artist Gülnaz Tursun from Kazakhstan expressed admiration for the young artists’ sense of pride in being Uyghur, evident in their creations. 

“This art contest has a great theme, with each painting expressing sentiments of homeland, home and family,” she said. 

“It warms my heart to see that even while living abroad, our youth still harbor a deep longing for their homeland, evident in their works that reflect a profound love for their roots – a sentiment that truly touched me,” Tursun said.

Munawwar Abdulla, the Uyghur Collective’s founder who also works as a researcher at Harvard University, said she and others came up with the competition five years ago because there were not enough platforms for Uyghurs abroad, especially those in the fine arts, to display works that “embody Uyghurism.”

The competition is a way for Uyghurs living in the diaspora to preserve their culture, language and religion amid measures by the Chinese government to wipe them out in Xinjiang – which the mostly Muslim Uyghurs prefer to call East Turkistan – and replace them with China’s dominant Han culture.

It is also a way for young Uyghurs who were born abroad to stay connected to their homeland, where the Chinese government has repressed Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities, and committed severe human rights violations that have amounted to genocide and crimes against humanity, according to the United Nations, the United States and other Western countries.

‘I felt compelled’

Thirty pieces by Uyghur artists around the world were submitted during the latest contest, with submissions due by Dec. 25, 2023. 

The entries were showcased on the Uyghur Collective’s social media accounts, and viewers voted online between Jan. 13-15. The Uyghur Collective announced three winners on Jan. 17.

First place went to Kübra Sevinç, 17, from Turkey for her entry titled “Bir Tuwgan,” or “Relative,” depicting a Uyghur mother wearing traditional ikat robe while holding her child against a backdrop of mountains and two yurts on grassland. She won US$300.

Competition judge Malik Orda Turdush said the watercolor painting was “elegantly drawn, skillfully portraying flowers, clothing and the bond between mother and child.”

Sevinç, who incorporated symbols from the Turkish world in the picture, said she became familiar with Uyghur people and Xinjiang after her father attended a protest in 2019 and brought home the blue flag of East Turkistan, which has been hanging in their house ever since. 

“Upon seeing that blue flag, I felt compelled to do something for our brothers and sisters in those distant places,” Sevinç said. “I was following Instagram pages about the Turkish world, and a drawing contest on this page caught my attention. Given its connection to Uyghurs and East Turkistan, it felt profoundly meaningful to me.” 

Yearning for the homeland

Uyghur artist Merwayit Hapiz from Germany said Uyghur parents in the diaspora play a crucial role in nurturing children to develop with a deep love for their motherland. 

“In those paintings, you can discern their profound respect for Uyghur ethnicity, Uyghur life and culture,” she said. “Their yearning for the homeland is palpable. The artworks mirror the Uyghur education and pride instilled by parents in the diaspora. A nation’s existence is revealed through its art and culture.”  

In recent years, authorities in Xinjiang have detained an estimated 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in “re-education” camps, destroyed thousands of mosques and banned the Uyghur language in schools and government offices. China has said the camps have been closed and has denied any policies to erase Uyghur culture.

“The oppression faced by the Uyghurs felt as if it was targeted to me as well,” said Sevinç. “As a Turk, the ancestors of the Uyghurs were also my ancestors. All my paintings have significance, and I was delighted to create art on a subject that means a lot to me, focusing on the Uyghurs.”

“Freedom and Liberty” by Adina Sabir, a 16-year-old living in the United States, claimed second place and a $200 prize. The work shows a teapot, teacups and a wheel of Uyghur flatbread on a table. A doppa skullcap hangs on a nearby wall alongside an open window through which the Statue of Liberty and Manhattan skyscrapers can be seen.

“‘In ‘Freedom and Liberty,’ the juxtaposition of two locations, notably the Statue of Liberty outside the window and the robust Uyghur atmosphere indoors, makes us think,” Turdush said. 

Sabir said she wanted to express her love for her country, the United States, and for her Uyghur homeland in her painting.

“In this painting, the country outside the window and the culture within the house both are a home to us,” she said. “In this free country, we are able to live with our traditions. The Statue of Liberty is a symbol of freedom.”  

Kashgar spring

Joy Bostwick, an artist originally from Flagstaff, Arizona, won third place for her watercolor painting “Spring in Kashgar,” a depiction of a lane in the city, a stop along the Silk Road in southern Xinjiang, whose Old City was torn down by Chinese authorities. 

In the watercolor, a Uyghur woman sells flatbread on a table shaded by a red umbrella at the base of a tradition building with a carved wooden balcony that is typical of architecture in southern Xinjiang, while another person holding the hand of a toddler walks along the lane in the distance. 

“The warm hues in ‘Spring in Kashgar’ create a nostalgic journey, evoking feelings of home, country and the place of our upbringing, aligning perfectly with the theme of the competition,” Turdush said.

Bostwick, who has lived in Xinjiang and various parts of Asia, says on her website that she is “passionate about documenting and helping to preserve the traditional cultures of the world through my paintings, especially those that are in peril of disappearing because of outside pressures or governmental policies.”  

“I want to showcase the dignity and beauty of people and places that might otherwise be overlooked.”

In addition to the winning entries, four paintings by Medine Chira, 22, from Canada, featuring Uyghur girls and boys were popular with viewers during the competition, portraying the rich and vibrant culture of the Uyghurs. 

One painting captures a young man playing the dutar, a two-stringed lute with a long neck and pear-shaped body, while a young woman rests her head on his shoulder. Another one shows the same young man, now wearing a white shirt with an embroidered collar placing a doppa on the woman’s head.

Chira’s third painting shows a girl wearing a doppa and silk ikat dress placing sangza, deep-fried noodles in a twisted pyramid shape, on a table, while her final work is of a Uyghur girl seated at a table, relishing fruit. 

“While these paintings share similarities, they encapsulate the essence of home for me,” Chira said. “These scenes are a common occurrence in Uyghur households, especially during [the holidays] Nowruz or Eid, where we proudly wear our traditional attire and set up beautiful table spreads. Sharing fruit and sangza with our families is a cherished Uyghur tradition.”

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

Around 1.7 million Indonesians living overseas are registered to vote in this month’s presidential and legislative elections, a mammoth task for the General Elections Commission, which has had to prepare 828 voting booths at Indonesian representative offices worldwide, as well as 1,579 mobile voting boxes and 652 drop boxes for absentee voting. 

How many overseas Indonesians will actually turn out to vote is another matter, and will there be any further controversy after reports that ballots were given to overseas nationals too early? According to a review by the Philippines’ Commission on Elections published this month, of the estimated 10 million overseas Filipinos, only 1.6 million are registered to vote and only 600,000 (around 40 per cent) did so at the 2022 elections. 

Most Southeast Asian governments, at least the more democratic ones, are looking at ways of reforming how overseas nationals vote. The Philippines’ electoral commission says it intends to have an online voting system in place by 2025 for overseas nationals, although there is still talk that this might be cost-prohibitive and could require digital voting to be rolled out at home too, which is simply too difficult for the election commissions of most Southeast Asian countries for now. 

In Malaysia, where overseas balloting has been in something of a mess for the past decade, parliamentarians last month hit on fixed-term parliaments as one way to fix the problem. 

However, it might be worth pondering why overseas voters are still asked to vote for representatives in parliament who live hundreds of miles away from them, whose priority is to represent constituents back at home, and who may know nothing about the concerns of overseas nationals. 

Constituencies mismatched

In Indonesia, for instance, votes from overseas Indonesians go to deciding the seven seats in the House of Representatives sent by Jakarta II district. (Jakarta II, which is Central and South Jakarta, was chosen because that’s where the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is located.) 

This may actually be superior to how other Southeast Asian states count overseas ballots – indeed, at least the seven congresspeople from Jakarta II district know they’re supposed to represent overseas constituents. Compare that to Thailand, where overseas voters select the candidates in the constituency where they are from or were registered, so a Thai living in London but who hails from, say, Chiang Mai province votes for the MPs from Chiang Mai province. But how can the MP from Chiang Mai province be expected to adequately represent overseas electors when perhaps only 0.1% of the ballots cast for them came from overseas?

Why not, instead, make overseas voters a separate district and allocate six or seven seats solely for them? They could have one seat for an MP representing Indonesians in North America, another for Indonesians in Europe, another for those in Northeast Asia, another for Southeast Asia, and so forth. 

And these seats would be occupied by candidates who live overseas. Imagine the Indonesian congressperson who resides in Berlin, New York, Seoul, or Melbourne. They obviously would be able to understand better the concerns and problems facing other Indonesians living abroad. 

Aloof from local politics

There’s a democratic element to this, too. An overseas MP wouldn’t have to mix daily with their peers in Manila, Kuala Lumpur or Jakarta. They would, on the one hand, remain aloof from the politicking and palm-greasing back home and, on the other hand, be able to bring new ideas learned from abroad back to their capitals. 

They could attend parliamentary sessions every month or two, funded by the state, and spend most of their time abroad, where they could also work more closely with their country’s embassies in the regions they represent. 

Currently, almost 10 million overseas Filipinos are represented by several government bodies, such as the Commission on Filipinos Overseas, an agency under the Office of the President. However, having overseas MPs in parliament would provide another layer of representation for nationals living abroad, allowing their voices to be heard by the government bodies and by overseas-based elected representatives. 

Indeed, protecting the large population of overseas Filipinos is one of the three pillars of Manila’s foreign policy initially laid out in the 1990s, yet those emigrants have little legislative representation. 

It isn’t a revolutionary idea to have overseas-based MPs represent overseas voters. France’s National Assembly has eleven lawmakers representing overseas constituencies. Italy’s parliament has had eight. 

Global examples

Nor is it specifically a European idea. The Algerian parliament has eight MPs who represent overseas nationals. Angola, Cape Verde, Mozambique, Peru and Tunisia, to name but a few, also have some parliamentary seats set aside for overseas constituencies. 

To quickly rebut one argument against it, it would not require a massive change to the composition of parliaments, nor would it require too many administrative changes. At the most, we’re talking about less than ten seats, so a fraction of parliament in a country like Thailand, whose National Assembly has 500 seats!

But if electoral commissions are now pondering ideas to better include their overseas nationals in the democratic process, it might be worth considering the more affordable and, perhaps, more democratic option of giving a handful of seats in parliament to overseas representatives. 

Nor, indeed, would it be a terrible idea if campaigners in Southeast Asia’s autocracies suggested this as a rational way of protecting their overseas compatriots – all the while knowing that they’re smuggling something democratic into the conversation, however implicitly. 

After all, even one-party states claim to listen to their parliaments and to protect their emigrants. Some 1 million Cambodians live abroad, most in Thailand but also Northeast Asia, Europe, Australia and North America.  

Why not add a 26th consistency during the next general election and allow overseas Cambodians to elect six seats in the National Assembly directly, the same number of seats sent to parliament by the inhabitants of Siem Reap province, home to around 1 million people, too? 

If the Communist Party of Vietnamese can stretch its tentacles abroad, why not allow a handful of delegates in the National Assembly to represent the 5 million Vietnamese living abroad? 

David Hutt is a research fellow at the Central European Institute of Asian Studies (CEIAS) and the Southeast Asia Columnist at the Diplomat. As a journalist, he has covered Southeast Asian politics since 2014. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the position of RFA.