In that tower built of skulls you will find my skull as well they cut my head off just to test the sharpness of a sword. When before the sword our beloved cause-and-effect relationship is ruined like a wild lover Do you know that I am with you PERHAT TURSUN, “ELEGY” June 1988 was an unforgettable month for the Uyghurs. A group of Uyghur students noticed an insulting slogan, presumably written by a Chinese person, on one of the walls of a public toilet in Xinjiang University: “We will turn your men into slaves and your women into whores!” This incident quickly triggered a mass protest of Uyghur students against the Xinjiang authorities, which just as quickly suppressed it. The protest was described by the Chinese government as an act of secession, a serious crime against the sovereignty of the Chinese state. The Uyghurs considered the inscription a gross insult, foreshadowing many insults and calamities to come. Politically, for the Uyghurs, the incident heralded the end of the quasi-liberal atmosphere under the leadership of Hu Yaobang, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the 1980s, who tried, but ultimately failed, to implement the autonomous laws that were promised by the CCP to the Uyghurs, along with the Mongols, the Hui, the Zhuangzu, and the Tibetans, in the 1950s. With this humiliation and the others that they experienced daily, the Uyghurs were roughly awakened from the illusions of socialism’s promise of autonomy to face a merciless colonial reality that offered them a stark choice — notional autonomy or nothing at all. Since then, the scope of the notional autonomy for the Uyghurs has gradually dwindled, leaving room for more confusion, frustration, and resistance against Chinese rule, and then for much worse. For some Uyghurs, the graffiti incident in June 1988 was experienced as a kind of historical déjà vu, a repetition of the experience of their ancestors who lived in what is now Mongolia, where Bilgë Qaghan, the fourth king of the second Turkic khaganate in the eighth century, issued a serious warning for the Turkic tribes about the Chinese. The warning was inscribed on stone monuments known as the Eternal Stones: “The Chinese made slaves of your noble sons, and slaves of your beautiful daughters.” This warning captured, and anticipated, the essence of the ongoing conflict between the Uyghurs and the Chinese, on and off, over a millennium — to be or not to be the slaves of the Chinese. Almost thirty years after the incident at Xinjiang University, the Uyghurs have been visited by another horrific nightmare, another continuation of the one that they may never awaken from: they have been incarcerated in Chinese concentration camps, where their sons have been tortured and killed, their daughters have been raped and humiliated, and their children have been orphaned and abused. (The poet Perhat Tursun, whose lyrics are cited above, is a prisoner in one of those camps.) By an irony of fate, what Bilgë Qaghan feared most has finally happened to his descendants in its worst form possible. To a Uyghur, history feels as inescapable as those camps. Is this the fate of the Uyghurs? Or is it a cruel mockery of history? How can the current Uyghur crisis best be understood? What is often missing in the discourse about this contemporary genocide is its cultural dimension. Without a proper grasp of culture, it is impossible to understand the origin, or the nature, of this conflict and this crime. After all, we have learned from earlier episodes of genocidal behavior that culture can lead to concentration camps. 
The Uyghurs and the Chinese possess different cultures and mentalities, largely in contradiction with each other but still exhibiting certain commonalities, not because they share the same ancestral origins but because they are driven by the same human desires and life-forces to realize their aspirations and to cope with the pressures of their realities as human beings. Both cultures, first and foremost, owe their origin to the nurturing rivers in their historical terrain — for the Chinese, the Huanghe (Yellow) River and the Changjiang (Yangtze) River are vital for the formation of their culture, sustaining their survival, growth, connectedness, and prosperity, whereas for the Uyghurs, the Tarim River is their mother river and the source of their life. If Chinese culture originated historically between those two famous rivers, so did Uyghur culture originate in the Tarim Basin in East Turkestan, the heart of the Uyghur homeland, called Xinjiang by the Chinese. Historically, the region of East Turkestan makes its first appearances in historical narratives beginning in the second millennium BC. The region was known to the ancient Chinese Kingdoms as Xiyu, or the Western Territories or Regions. At the heart of Xiyu lies the Tarim Basin, which was home to many races, peoples, and tribes — from Indo-European settlers to non-European ones. The extraordinary demographic mixture of the peoples in the area has been confirmed by modern genetic analysis, which has shown that the local inhabitants have a high proportion of DNA of European origin with the mixture of non-European ones. Owing to the geopolitical importance of its location, East Turkestan has caught the attention of many empires that sought control over it, including the Chinese, Turkish, Mongol, and Manchu (Qing) empires. Among them, the political interest of the Chinese dynasties to colonize it was especially strong, and it intensified after the annexation of the region by the Qing dynasty in the eighteenth century. After the ancestors of the Uyghurs living in present-day Mongolia were defeated by Kyrgyz troops in the ninth century, they migrated en masse to the Tarim Basin, where they, along with other Uyghur and Turkic tribes in the area, contributed to the Uyghurization of the local Indo-European peoples, resulting in the creation of a local identity defined by oasis regions, consisting mainly of Islamic and Buddhist areas. The Uyghur tribes, which moved into the Kashgar region, established the Qarakhanid kingdom and embraced Islam in 940
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