Rahile Dawut is a famous indigenous anthropologist and folklorist in Xinjiang, China, who has been disappeared into the mass re-education camps (w/o trial or sentence).
Please consider signing this protest letter to China: http://salsa4.salsalabs.com/o/50943/p/dia/action4/common/public/?action_KEY=25616
Her “crime”: she is a prominent Uighur person, an outstanding member of an ethnicity and religion, that is targeted in the ongoing campaign.
A new essay on Rahile Dawut as fondly remembered by students and colleagues, by Darren Byler appeared today in the China Channel, Los Angeles Review of Books, November 2, 2018: “Essay: The Disappearance of Rahile Dawut” https://chinachannel.org/2018/11/02/dawut-dawut/
Also on Rahile Dawut, also see these expressions from academic organisations, and news reports:
https://concernedscientists.org/2018/09/rahile-dawut-prominent-uyghur-scholar-and-anthropologist-missing/
https://www.centraleurasia.org/2018/09/06/statement-dawut/
http://www.americananthro.org/ParticipateAndAdvocate/AdvocacyDetail.aspx?ItemNumber=24182&navItemNumber=659
https://eldiariofeminista.info/2018/08/16/rahile-dawut-la-academica-uigur-desaparecida-en-china/
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2018/08/16/nick-holdstock/where-is-rahile-dawut/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/10/world/asia/china-xinjiang-rahile-dawut.html
https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/professors-09182018151339.html
And, by the way, she is one of at least several hundred prominent indigenous academics, scholars and cultural figures (Uyghur/Uighur, Kazakh, etc.) who have been detained, for no crime, in the vast camp system set up since 2017. It is by now clear that this is a broad assault on these indigenous ethnicities as such.
See this report on 231 (!) such intellectuals identified by the Uighur Human Rights Project, https://uhrp.org/press-release/persecution-intellectuals-uyghur-region-disappeared-forever.html
On the Xinjiang human rights catastrophe now unfolding before us, I think anthropologists and Asia scholars everywhere must inform themselves about it and speak up about it. See also this compilation of the news since 2017 and of select academic books and reports, as well as a list of events recently organized to raise public and political awareness of this crisis:
https://uhrp.org/featured-articles/chinas-re-education-concentration-camps-xinjiang
yours,
Magnus