The place that I come from; me and my ethnic people call it East Turkestan. This is very strange place to most of the people in the world. Many different ethnic people have been living in this place for thousands of years. The group that I come from, also is the majority people from there called Uyghur.

The Uyghur is a very old word that means united. We had so many great dynasties in our history. However, the World War 2 in 1945 built a new world order that made us become invisible and strange to the other people in the world. At the beginning of WW2, the Soviet Union invaded our country and tried to build a communism power in there. After WW2, the CCP (communism China) became more powerful, so we became a business between Soviet and CCP. The Mongolia would become an independent country, and my country would became a part of CCP, but have a high degree of autonomy. However, China actually didn’t give us the autonomy.

After cold war was over in the early 1990s, the American government soon became a target of terrorism.  After September 11, 2001, the United States declared the war on terror around the globe, and they needed more allies to support it. The support of some big nations like China was a very important step at the United Nation.

Terrorist groups attacked any powerful nation. As a partner in the war on terror China targeted its own terrorist groups.  There was a terrorist group I had never heard about called East Turkestan Islamic movement that became a hat that China can wear on our head whenever its wants. For example, if some people try to protest against some policies of government, the government could just kill them and call them terrorists, and never let any other countries’ reporters get into that area. They will do anything to stop other nations having any true information about us because they want to destroy our culture, language and even people silently.

So they built a nuclear weapons base in my home town, and many people got cancer because of the radiation. However, not every country kept their mouth closed; some countries like the United Stated and Germany and others  started to help us and received us as political refugees. Even we all just became a diplomacy tool that between two counties, but that really help us to let the world hear about our plight. We also have opportunities to go to America Congress and United Nation Meeting to tell what actually happening right now.

This is a short story about my people’s history and how that is connected to the United States in recent years. This is a forgotten spot in the crossroads, and not many people paid attention to this corner in the world.

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