Thirteen freedom advocates from across Asia convened in Dallas this week for the inaugural Asian Democracy Leaders Roundtable at the George W. Bush Institute, sharing strategies and personal stories to combat the global rise of authoritarianism. The participants, now living in the U.S., represent movements in Myanmar, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, North Korea, Tibet, and Afghanistan.
For Rushan Abbas, founder of the nonprofit Campaign for Uyghurs, the fight is deeply personal. Her older sister, Gulshan, a retired medical doctor she describes as “the kindest and most caring person I have ever known,” disappeared into Chinese custody seven years ago.
Despite her family’s pleas to remain in the U.S. for her safety during a 2016 visit, Gulshan felt a duty to return to her homeland in Xinjiang. She insisted she was not a political target. “I’m just an ordinary person,” Rushan recalled her sister saying. “If something happens to me, it means nobody in China is safe.”
In 2017, after Rushan began speaking out against the Chinese Communist Party’s mass detention of Uyghurs, Gulshan was arrested. The action is widely seen as retaliation for Rushan’s activism. “In the end,” Rushan said, her voice cracking, “I couldn’t protect her.”
The stakes of her activism are stark. Human rights organizations estimate that more than one million Uyghurs have been held in “re-education” camps. Reports detail a campaign of forced sterilizations and abortions, with Abbas stating that “Uyghur women’s bodies are the battleground of this genocide.” In 2020, U.S. Customs intercepted a 13-ton shipment of wigs and other products from the region made with human hair. More ominously, reports have surfaced of the Chinese government building crematoria near internment camps, a direct assault on the Muslim Uyghur tradition of burial.
Metra Mehran, an Afghan gender equity activist, described a different front in the fight for freedom. She highlighted the Taliban’s systematic dismantling of women’s rights since the U.S. withdrawal in 2021. Hundreds of decrees have effectively erased women from public life, barring them from education, work, and even access to healthcare.
“Womanhood in Afghanistan is a crime,” Mehran stated. She detailed how the Taliban employs social engineering, punishing male family members for the actions of women, to enforce its oppressive rules. “The society malfunctions because you are totally erasing half of the population,” she argued, warning that such a society “will be a safe haven for terrorist ideologies.”
Despite the grim reality, Mehran pointed to signs of progress, including International Criminal Court arrest warrants for Taliban leaders and a U.S. campaign to codify gender apartheid as a crime against humanity.
The event’s organizers stressed the need for a united front. Joseph Kim, a North Korean escapee and now a program manager at the Bush Institute, noted that authoritarian regimes in China, Russia, and North Korea collaborate by sharing resources and information. “Freedom fighters need to collaborate because dictators do,” he said.
Kim, who survived starvation and homelessness before escaping to the U.S., offered a message of long-term hope, comparing the struggle for freedom to the multi-generational migration of monarch butterflies. “What kind of courage and humility does it take for the first generation to embark on a journey they know they may not be able to complete?” he asked.
The roundtable took place against a backdrop of global democratic decline. A 2022 Freedom House report marked the 16th consecutive year of democratic backsliding worldwide, with only 20% of the global population living in free countries.
Mehran offered a stark reminder of why these distant struggles matter. “Remember what happened on 9/11,” she said. “The U.S. is very far from Afghanistan, but it was not that far.”
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