Keynote Speech by Dr. Rishat Abbas, President of the Uyghur Academy, at the 3rd International Uyghur Forum
Keynote Speech by Dr. Rishat Abbas, President of the Uyghur Academy, at the 3rd International Uyghur Forum
13th June 2026, Berlin / Germany
Roundtable 5: Contemporary Uyghur Identity, Culture and Historical Memory
As-salamu alaykum, Hello Everyone.
It is an honor to join this roundtable with respected scholars, researchers, and advocates. As someone who has spent many years working to protect Uyghur rights, language, culture, and identity, I would like to begin with a simple truth: A people survive not simply by existing. They survive through memory, language, culture, faith, history, and the ability to pass their identity from one generation to the next.
Today, the Uyghur people are facing one of the darkest chapters in our modern history.
Since 2016, decades of repression under CCP rule have escalated into a systematic campaign against the Uyghur people that many governments, parliaments, legal experts, and human rights organizations have recognized as genocide and crimes against humanity. The UN Human Rights Office has concluded that these abuses may constitute crimes against humanity.
This oppression is not merely an assault on individuals. It is an existential attack on the Uyghur people as a whole—targeting our identity, historical memory, and survival as a living civilization.
Uyghur children are being separated from their families. The Uyghur language is being pushed out of schools. Mosques and historical sites have been destroyed. Scholars, writers, and religious leaders have been imprisoned or silenced. This is part of a broader effort to sever the connections between generations and erase memory, culture, and identity.
For centuries, the Uyghur people built a rich civilization in Central Asia. Our language, culture, scholarship, and traditions carried our history from one generation to the next.
Today, that bridge is under attack. Yet there is another side to this story.
History teaches us that culture can survive even the most systematic oppression. Its survival depends on everyday acts of preservation and on a people’s determination not to forget who they are.
We see this resilience throughout the Uyghur diaspora. Around the world, Uyghur communities are rebuilding cultural life far from our homeland, preserving our language, documenting our history, and passing our traditions on to future generations.
A new generation is taking the lead by learning its mother tongue, recording the stories of elders, studying Uyghur history, and reconnecting with traditions that many feared would disappear.
The Uyghur Academy serves as a vital anchor for these efforts. Through education, language programs, research, youth initiatives, and cultural preservation projects, we work to strengthen Uyghur identity and community resilience.
Preserving culture is not simply about remembering the past—it is about protecting the future.
In times like these, the work of scholars and researchers is no longer purely academic. Research becomes a tool of collective survival. Documentation protects memory, and scholarship becomes a form of resistance against erasure.
That is why forum like this is important. We need both scholarship and lived experience. We need research, but we also need human stories.
As we begin today’s discussion, I hope we remember not only the suffering of the Uyghur people, but also their resilience.
Despite genocide, displacement, and cultural destruction, Uyghur identity endures.
Ultimately, preserving Uyghur identity is about ensuring that future generations know their history, speak their language freely, practice their culture openly, and live with dignity and freedom.
Thank you.
