Day: January 18, 2020

President Donald Trump’s legal team issued a fiery response ahead of opening arguments in his impeachment trial Saturday while House Democrats laid out their case in forceful fashion, saying the president had “abandoned his oath“ and betrayed the public trust. 

The dueling statements previewed arguments both sides intend to make once Trump’s impeachment trial begins in earnest on Tuesday. Both sides are seeking to make their case for a Republican-led Senate and for an American public bracing for a presidential election in 10 months. 

The House’s 111-page brief pulls together the private and public testimony of a dozen witnesses — ambassadors and national security officials at high levels of government — who raised concerns about the president’s actions with Ukraine. Stripped of legalese and structured in plain English, the document underscored the extent to which the impeachment proceedings are a political rather than conventional legal process. The Trump team similarly offered a taste of the rhetoric expected to be deployed by the president’s defenders in the Senate. 

Senate’s responsibility

In their brief, the House managers overseeing the prosecution wrote that it is clear that the “evidence overwhelmingly establishes“ that Trump is guilty of both charges. “The only remaining question is whether the members of the Senate will accept and carry out the responsibility placed on them by the Framers of our Constitution and their constitutional Oaths,“ the brief states. 

The Trump team, meanwhile, called the Senate’s formal summons to two articles of impeachment passed by the House last month “a dangerous attack on the right of the American people to freely choose their president.” 

“This is a brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election and interfere with the 2020 election, now just months away,“ the filing states. 

Trump’s legal team, led by White House counsel Pat Cipollone and Trump personal lawyer Jay Sekulow, is challenging the impeachment on both procedural and constitutional grounds, claiming Trump has been mistreated by House Democrats and that he did nothing wrong. 

Trump’s attorneys argue that the articles of impeachment are unconstitutional in and of themselves and invalid because they don’t allege a crime. Trump was impeached by the House on one count each of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Under the Constitution impeachment is a political, not a criminal process, and the president can be removed from office if found guilty of whatever lawmakers consider “high crimes and misdemeanors.” 

Trump’s answer to the summons was the first salvo in what will be several rounds of arguments before the trial formally begins on Tuesday. Trump will file a more detailed legal brief on Monday, and the House will be able to respond to the Trump filing on Tuesday. 

Two added to defense team

Trump on Friday named Ken Starr, the prosecutor whose investigation two decades ago led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, and former Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz to his defense team. 

The additions bring experience in the politics of impeachment as well as constitutional law to Trump’s legal team. Both Starr and Dershowitz have been fixtures on Fox News Channel, Trump’s preferred television network. 

Dershowitz said he would deliver constitutional arguments defending Trump from allegations that he abused his power. Trump is also accused of obstructing Congress as it sought to investigate pressure he applied on Ukraine’s president to announce an investigation into Trump’s political rivals as the president withheld the security aid and a White House meeting as leverage. 

Trump says he did nothing wrong and argues that Democrats have been out to get him since before he took office. 

A legal brief from the White House laying out the contours of Trump’s defense is due by noon Monday, and White House attorneys and Trump’s outside legal team have been debating just how political the document should be. 

Some in the administration have echoed warnings from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, that the pleadings must be sensitive to the Senate’s more staid traditions and leave some of the sharper rhetoric exhibited during the House proceedings to Twitter and cable news. 

Dershowitz is a constitutional expert whose expansive views of presidential powers echo those of Trump. Starr is a veteran of Washington’s partisan battles after leading the investigation into Clinton’s affair with a White House intern. The House impeached Clinton, who then was acquitted at his Senate trial. Trump is expecting the same outcome from the Republican-led chamber. 

Still, the lead roles for Trump’s defense will be played by Cipollone and Sekulow, who also represented Trump during special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. 

Dershowitz sought to play down his role in the case in the hours after he was named to the team, saying he would be present for just about an hour to make the constitutional arguments. 

“I’m not a full-fledged member of the defense team,“ he told “The Dan Abrams Show“ on SiriusXM. 

Epstein association

White House lawyers succeeded in keeping Trump from adding House Republican lawmakers to the defense team, but they also advised him against tapping Dershowitz, according to two people who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal discussions. They’re concerned about the professor’s association with Jeffrey Epstein, the financier who killed himself in a New York City jail cell last summer while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. 

A Fox News host said on the air that Starr would be parting ways with the network as a result of his role on the legal team. 

Other members of Trump’s legal defense include Pam Bondi, the former Florida attorney general; Jane Raskin, who was part of the president’s legal team during Mueller’s investigation; Robert Ray, who was part of the Whitewater investigation of the Clintons; and Eric D. Herschmann of the Kasowitz Benson Torres legal firm, which has represented Trump in numerous cases over the last 15 years. 

Giuliani, a former New York-based federal prosecutor as well as the city’s former mayor, told The Associated Press the president had assembled a “top-notch” defense team and he was not disappointed at being excluded from it. 

Giuliani, who many in the White House blame for leading Trump down the path to impeachment by fueling Ukraine conspiracies, had previously expressed interest in being on the legal team. But he said Friday that his focus would be on being a potential witness. 

Trump was impeached by the House in December. Senators were sworn in as jurors Thursday by Chief Justice John Roberts, who will preside over the trial. 

Starr, besides his 1990s role as independent counsel, was a U.S. solicitor general and federal circuit court judge. 

Removed at Baylor

More recently, he was removed as president of Baylor University and then resigned as chancellor of the school in the wake of a review critical of the university’s handling of sexual assault allegations against football players. Starr said his resignation was the result of the university’s board of regents seeking to place the school under new leadership following the scandal, not because he was accused of hiding or failing to act on information. 

Dershowitz’s reputation has been damaged in recent years by his association with Epstein. One of Epstein’s alleged victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, has accused Dershowitz of participating in her abuse. Dershowitz has denied it and has been battling in court for years with Giuffre and her lawyers. He recently wrote a book, Guilt by Accusation, rejecting her allegations. 

Giuffre and Dershowitz are also suing each other for defamation. 

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Canada’s federal government will help Newfoundland on the Atlantic coast dig out in the wake of a massive winter blizzard that buried cars and left thousands without power, a Cabinet minister said Saturday.

The storm dumped as much as 76.2 cm (30 inches) of snow on St. John’s, the capital of Newfoundland, and packed wind gusts as high as 130 km per hour (81 mph). The snowfall was an all-time record for the day for St. John’s International Airport.

St. John’s Mayor Danny Breen said earlier that a state of emergency declared Friday remained in effect. Businesses were closed, as was the international airport.

Natural Resources Minister Seamus O’Regan said military reservists might be called in, but details of the assistance had yet to be worked out. The immediate priority will be snow removal and clearing roads to the snowbound hospital, he said.

“We have a real issue right now with access to the hospital,” O’Regan told reporters in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government is meeting for two days in what it has called a retreat.

Commenting on the scale of the blizzard, O’Regan said: “It’s snow and a hurricane, and snow and a hurricane shuts down a city.”

The public safety and defense ministers, who were en route to Winnipeg, would be able to provide more details later, O’Regan said. Earlier, the provincial premier asked the government for support, including “mobilizing the Canadian Armed Forces.”

Thousands remained without power, and social media showed people had begun to literally dig out of their homes after snowdrifts blocked their doorways.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corp (CBC) confirmed a report of an avalanche slamming into a home in St. John’s Battery neighborhood, which sits at the entrance to the city’s harbor on the slopes of a steep hill.

A picture of the home on Twitter showed the living room filled with snow. The CBC also said a 26-year-old man has been reported missing after having set out to walk to a friend’s house on Friday during the blizzard.

“Help is on the way,” Trudeau tweeted.
 

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The U.S. National Archives, home to foundational documents such as the Bill of Rights, apologized Saturday for altering images critical of President Donald Trump at an exhibit on women’s fight for voting rights and said it had removed the display. 

The entrance to the Washington exhibit had featured interlaced photographs of a 1913 women’s suffrage march and the Women’s March that took place on January 21, 2017, each visible from a different angle. In the 2017 photograph, the word “Trump” had been blurred in at least two signs carried by demonstrators, including one that originally read “God Hates Trump.” 

The word “vagina” and other anatomical references were also obscured. 

No repeat pledged

“We apologize, and will immediately start a thorough review of our exhibit policies and procedures so that this does not happen again,” the archives said in statement. 

The photo editing was first reported by The Washington Post on Friday and witnessed by a Reuters reporter on Saturday at the same time as demonstrators attending this year’s Women’s March strolled through downtown Washington in the cold and drizzle. 

The Post reported Friday that the archives had said in a statement last week that as a nonpartisan agency it had altered the image “so as not to engage in current political controversy.” 

Roughly an hour after Reuters witnessed the altered image, however, the archives issued a public apology in which it said it had removed the display and would replace it as soon as possible with one that uses the unaltered image. 

“We made a mistake. As the National Archives of the United States, we are and have always been completely committed to preserving our archival holdings, without alteration,” it said. 

Along with its popular Washington museum, which includes exhibits of founding documents, the agency preserves government records and oversees research centers and presidential libraries in dozens of locations across the United States. 

“Public access to government records strengthens democracy by allowing Americans to claim their rights of citizenship, hold their government accountable and understand their history,” its mission statement reads. 

Not easy to spot

The altered 2017 image was easy to miss, visible only from the side of the display at an angle of around 45 degrees. From the front, only the 1913 suffrage march — part of the movement that led to women winning the vote in 1920 — was visible. 

Trump has been criticized for his behavior toward women, including for taped comments that surfaced in 2016 in which he can be heard bragging about groping and having sex with women. 

At the time, Trump dismissed the tape as locker room banter. 

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Russia is rapidly expanding foreign arms deals worldwide, with Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin confirming to the Russian military’s newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda December 20 that Moscow has signed military cooperation pacts with 39 countries in the last five years, many of them in Southeast Asia, including Laos, which has not been buying Russian weapons on this scale for decades.

The expansion is raising eyebrows and comes as relations between Russia and NATO have broken down.

Analysts said old Cold War alliances with countries such as Laos, Moscow’s appetite for barter deals, and the potential for access to railroads under construction that will provide access to seaports and trade routes along the Vietnamese, Cambodian and Thai coasts, appeal to Moscow, and the arms sales are part of a larger effort by Russia to strengthen its links with these countries.

“Moscow’s motives appear to be a combination of commercial and the perhaps disruptive, in the sense that any erosion of U.S. or European defense interests is a de facto win,” Gavin Greenwood, an analyst with A2 Global Risk, a Hong Kong-based security consultancy, told VOA.

He said Russia had accounted for 25% of major arms sales in Southeast Asia since 2000, and according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Moscow sold $6.6 billion in arms to Southeast Asia between 2010 and 2017, as much as the U.S. and China combined.

The institute also says Russia accounted for 60% of arms sales across Asia and Oceania between 2014 and 2018.

However, Russia also needs to offset falling sales to India, and the MiG-29 and Sukhoi-30 fighters purchased by Malaysia in 1995 are nearing the end of their life. Greenwood said any replacement was unlikely to be procured from Russia, as they are also considering deals with U.S. and European suppliers.

Southeast Asia focus

As a result  of declining arms sales to India, Russia is falling further behind the U.S. in global arms sales, analysts say,  but it has remained the dominant player in Southeast Asia, where analysts said  South China Sea disputes, terrorism   and competition among rival states is increasing demand for high-tech weaponry.

Fomin said progress in developing military cooperation with traditional partners China and India had been made alongside fresh efforts with Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos.

“Their efforts to sell are obviously increasing and there’s a sense from some quarters that this is a strategic effort by Moscow – while others would say probably not, it’s commercial,” Greenwood said.

Russia remains a primary supplier to Vietnam, accounting for 60% of all military sales to that country – including submarines – and is seeking opportunities in the Philippines while stepping up sales to Malaysia, Indonesia and Myanmar.

Meanwhile, strategically important Laos, which forms a buffer between China and Southeast Asia, has increased its spending, acquiring Russian T-72B tanks, BRDM-2M armored vehicles, YAK 130 fighter jets and helicopters.

In addition,  Russia and Laos last month launched the nine-day Laros 2019 exercise, their first joint military exercise, with more than 500 soldiers taking part alongside the recently acquired tanks, which was seen as part of a greater effort to deepen military ties with Southeast Asia.

Analysts said further joint military exercises with Laos are now in the offing together with more arms and training for Laotian officers in Russian military academies.

The timing could be related to Chinese railway construction, “which will connect southern-southwest China to Thailand,” Greenwood said, which would provide further seaport access.

Ukraine sanctions

Increased weapon sales worldwide can be traced to Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine six years ago. Sanctions followed and the ruble collapsed, sparking a three-year financial crisis.
 
Carl Thayer, emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales said military technology is one of Russia’s much-needed strengths.

“Annexation of the Crimea was accompanied by very punishing sanctions by the United States and Russia went through a phase of trying to recover by developing its domestic market.

“That didn’t work, and they had to do overseas exports and the one thing the Russians have is military technology,” Thayer told VOA, echoing Greenwood.

Meanwhile, the issue for most Southeast Asian countries is that access to high-tech weaponry is limited to the U.S., which ties sales to human rights, and Russia, which offers soft loans, state-backed credits, barter deals, spares and servicing with a no such strings attached.  

Don Greenlees, senior adviser at the Asialink think tank at the University of Melbourne, said U.S. costs and conditions, coupled with sanctions, mean easier options are available in Russia.

“If you want really high-level military technology and you’re a Southeast Asian country you’ve either got to go to Moscow or you’ve got to go Washington. And Washington hasn’t made it terribly easy in recent years for a lot of these countries to obtain the best kit,” he told VOA.

“And it’s also more expensive to buy it from Washington,” Greenlees said. “So Russia, for many of these countries, is the arms supplier of choice.”

The big picture

Thayer said Moscow also must act against any isolation spurred by sanctions and establish itself with Vietnam, with which it has always been a strategic partner, as a natural conduit in developing relations in Southeast Asia, but Laos  “is just one small peg in the larger picture.”

Greenlees said Russia’s regional reemergence was still in its early days but from a big-picture geopolitical point of view, it’s the Sino-Russian alignment that concerns everyone.

So far,  China has not complained about Russia’s push into its traditional sphere of influence.  Moreover, it also could benefit from potential sales to countries alienated by the U.S. linkage of sales to issues like human rights, which analysts said could lead to a stronger alliance between Moscow and Beijing in Southeast Asia.    

“If that leads to a hardening of East-West ‘camps,’ that would be a concern to the region. It could force the issue of ‘taking sides and reduce the opportunities for small to medium sized powers to play the great powers off against each other,” Greenlees said.

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It looks like any other cooking class in yuppie Tel Aviv. Sleek kitchen utensils, baskets of fresh vegetables, participants sipping wine and beer. The first hint that this is a little different is the beer Asmara from Eritrea.

Yael Ravid, co-director of Kitchen Talks, explains how her cooking events make a special connection between Israelis and the Africans seeking refuge in their country.

“As we cook together shoulder to shoulder, we literally break bread, not as a metaphor but as a real happening together. I’m hoping they will enjoy the holiday feast we’re preparing for the Eritrean Christmas and they will get a chance to know Asmayit, our Eritrean cook, and to ask her questions about her life, her home kitchen, how she grew up, how she came here,” she says.

Chef Asmayit Merhatsion is a 30-year-old asylum seeker from Eritrea. As she chops and stirs, she tells her story, starting with her imprisonment in Eritrea.

“When I was in college I was arranging for women or girls to pray. They catched [caught] us and asked who organized? I organized. They are thinking our meeting is political but it’s not political, it’s religious. That’s why I was in prison,” she explains.

After two short stints in prison, she escaped to Sudan, then to Libya, hoping to make it to Europe. But after Europe closed its doors, she decided on Israel, paying smugglers to get her across the Sinai desert.

That was almost nine years ago. Today she is married and has a young daughter. She works for the AIDS task force. And she is a chef with Kitchen Talks to share her love for Eritrean food and culture.

“It’s a vegetarian dish, five types of food we do and the traditional bread we have here I make it at home. This one is not bread it’s injera, it’s made of teff flour growing in Eritrea or Ethiopia…it’s non gluten, its healthy, that’s why we are not fat,” she says.

Participants paid about $50 for the collaborative cooking event and were enthusiastic when they tasted the results. Many said it was their first time meeting with an asylum seeker and eating their exotic food.

“You can form an opinion based on things that you don’t know or things that you fear. Then once, like even seeing here people interacting, and then once you know somebody, like get to know them and speak with them, and all of a sudden you’re like, they’re people just like me and deserve rights just like I do’,” says Adi Cydulkin, a cooking class participant.

“They are here, they exist here, we can’t ignore it, we should help especially the young children to become good citizens here in Israel,” says Eli Levy.

Participants agreed that they will take home, not only empathy for African asylum seekers like chef Asmayit, but also some of her tasty recipes they learned tonight.

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Thousands of women are planning to march in cities across the United States Saturday for the fourth annual Women’s March to advocate for a host of issues, including gender equality and women’s human rights.

Rallies are planned in dozens of cities, including Washington, where the first Women’s March in 2017 drew hundreds of thousands of people the day after President Donald Trump was sworn into office.

The march has included a political message since it began three years ago when many protesters wore the knitted pink hats that have become a symbol of women’s anti-Trump sentiments.

Politics continued to be a strong theme at the Women’s March in all subsequent years, including in 2018 when the organizers moved the march to Nevada, a battleground state for the midterm elections that year, as well as in 2019 when the march returned to Washington and heralded the record 102 women who had been recently elected to the House of Representatives.

Several of the Democratic candidates for president in 2020 are planning to attend Women’s March events across the country this year. Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, will attend the Women’s March in Reno, Nevada, while former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick is planning to be at a rally in South Carolina. Senator Michael Bennet and businessman Andrew Yang will attend Women’s March events in New Hampshire and Iowa, respectively.

Since its first march, the Women’s March has faced controversy, including its leaders facing accusations of anti-Semitism. The organizers have repeatedly denied the claims. Three of the four original co-chairs of the organization have left the group, and the organization has appointed a new board that includes three Jewish women.

Current co-president of the Women’s March, Isa Noyola, noted in a statement ahead of this year’s march that it will be the last march before the 2020 election.“

In 2020, we have a chance to finish what we started three years ago and remove Trump from office,” she said.

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Chinese authorities are continuing to detain foreign nationals of Uighur descent, which experts charge is part of an effort by Beijing to prevent any outside access to Xinjiang province.

 VOA interviewed several ethnic Uighurs of different nationalities who said they or their family members faced detention upon arriving in China. The detained foreign citizens were allegedly jailed, put under house arrest or even sent to the so-called reeducation camps, while some others were repatriated to their home countries.

Hankiz Kurban, a Turkish citizen from Istanbul, told VOA that her parents, Yahya Kurban, 54, and Amina Kurban, 51, both Turkish citizens originating from the region of Xingjian, have been detained since Sept.11, 2017, when they were on a trip to operate a clothing business in Urumchi, the capital city of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
  “
I received my mother’s voice message asking me, in a trembling voice, to contact the Turkish embassy in Beijing and do something for them,” Hankiz said, recalling the moment Chinese authorities arrested her. “It was the last day I heard from my parents.”
 
Working on release

Kurban and her siblings have attempted to find their parents to no avail. The Turkish embassy has told them officials there are still working with Chinese officials to secure the parents’ release.
 
Another Turkish citizen of Uighur origin, Muyesser Temel, told VOA that her brother, Mehmet Emin Nasir, 40, was arrested in late 2017 in Kashgar, where he owned a Turkish curtains store.
  “
We kept calling [the] Turkish Embassy in Beijing, Turkish Foreign Ministry in Ankara, and Turkish Presidential Office. Their answer has been, ‘Wait, we are working on this case,’” Temel said.
 
VOA contacted Turkey’s foreign ministry and embassy in Beijing but has not received a comment.
 
Responding to a parliamentary question regarding incarcerated Turkish citizens in China, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu last April said his government was using its diplomatic means “in every level” to bring them home.
  “
The problems faced by our citizens around the world and the complaints received in this context are closely monitored through our foreign representatives. Every diplomatic and legal tool is used in order to solve their problems, and the necessary legal, economic and social support is provided to our citizens,” Cavusoglu said in a written response.  
 
Uighurs are ethnically Turkic and religiously Muslim with a worldwide population estimated to be 12 million.  More than 90% of them are believed to live in their ancestral home of Xinjiang in China’s northwest region. The remaining Uighurs reside in neighboring central Asian states like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan as well as Turkey and Western countries.

Since 2017 China has been accused of detaining almost 1.8 million Uighurs and other minority Muslim groups in mass incarceration camps where they are forced to abandon their religion. Those outside the camps are believed to be under strict government surveillance with no access to the outside world.
 
China first denied the detention facilities existed but later said they were only for “reeducation and vocational training” purposes. Beijing has tied its policies in the region to fighting “the three evils of terrorism, extremism and separatism.” It recently claimed that all “students” from “training centers” had “graduated” without giving any more details.
 
Leaked document
 
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in November released several official Chinese government documents it had obtained, revealing that officials in 2017 directed border officials and police to hand-pick and arrest foreign nationals of Uighur descent.
 
The documents showed that Chinese officials kept track of about 1,535 people from Xinjiang who had citizenship from various foreign nations, with about 75 confirmed to be in China and about 560 whose location was undertermined. Of the 75 “red-flagged” people, 26 were Turkish, 23 Australian, five Canadian, five Swedish, three American, three Uzbek, three Finnish, two British, two New Zealanders, one French, and one Kyrgyz.
  “
Personal identification verification should be inspected one by one, for those who have already canceled their citizenship and for whom suspected terrorism cannot be ruled out, they should be deported. For those who haven’t canceled their citizenship yet and for whom suspected terrorism cannot be ruled out, they should first be placed into concentrated education and training and examined,” the document suggested.
 

Sadam Abdusalam is one of the Australian Uighurs whose family has been stranded in China since early 2017. His wife, Nadila, a Chinese citizen, was applying for her Australian spousal visa in late 2016 when Chinese officials confiscated her passport. Their son, Lutfi, was born a few months later.
  “
My son, even though an Australian citizen, has not been allowed to unite with me in Australia since the day he was born and I haven’t seen my son for his entire life,” he told VOA.

According to Nurgul Sawut, Campaign for Uyghurs’ director of the board for the Oceania region, three Australian Uighur children and one Australian mother are trapped in China so far.
  “
Except for Sadam’s son, two other Australian children were taken to China for family visit by their grandmother. An Australian permanent resident, who was placed in house arrest and her passport was confiscated after arriving in China,” she told VOA.
 
Detained, repatriated

Hayrullah Muhammed, an Australian Uighur detained at Chengdu airport in western China in July 2017, told VOA that he was incarcerated in Xinjiang for almost a month before being repatriated. The release, he said, came after the Australian embassy in Beijing intervened.
  “
I was under arrest by special police from Xinjiang at Chengdu airport and was flown to Urumqi and interrogated for at least seven times in three weeks in a detention center before I was let go,” he said.
 
Omir Bekali, a naturalized Kazakhstan citizen of Uighur heritage, told VOA that he was arrested by five Chinese police while he was visiting his family in Xinjiang in April 2017.
  “
They put shackles on my hands and feet and my head was covered by a black hood when they took me,” Bekali said, adding that he had lost 130 pounds, almost half of his body weight, because of the harsh conditions in captivity.
  “
Thanks to my wife’s efforts to speak up about my disappearance to the media, Kazakh authorities and U.N. office in Kazakhstan, I was released after seven months of going through food and sleep deprivation, beating and interrogation,” he said.
 
Some experts charge that Chinese Communist Party (CCP) considers Uighur ethnics from foreign countries particularly concerning, seeing them as potential agents from adversaries. Such people, they say, could play an effective role in exposing China’s secretive actions in Xinjiang.   

Timothy Grose, an assistant professor of China Studies at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Indiana, told VOA that CCP officials hope that introducing stricter rules would intimidate Uighurs outside China into silence.
  “
Conceivably, CCP officials assume that Uighurs who have changed their citizenship have also fundamentally shifted their loyalties away from the party, China, and the Zhonghua minzu and to other social, religious, and/or national collectivities and are therefore deemed potential political threats,” said Grose.   
 
As the CCP further restricts outside contact with Uighurs inside China, “officials hope to ‘sterilize’ the region from outside influence while they construct, unimpeded, a narrative about combating ‘terrorism,’ ‘extremism,’ and ‘poverty,’ he added.

VOA’s Ezel Sahinkaya contributed to this story from Washington.

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