What does it feel like to fight for someone else’s land, which has been occupied by their enemy, while your homeland is under occupation? What is the logic and motive behind this decision?
Kavsar Kurash turns 24 this year. He and his mother are US residents. He left the US four years ago to attend college in Sweden. He applied to enlist with the foreigners fighting for Ukraine when the war began.
He said that he might not be able to do too much for them, but he could do great things for himself: He could put his conscience to rest, and sleep peacefully at night.
Kurash was refused because of his lack of military experience. He went anyway, and arrived in the Ukrainian city of Lviv on April 1, with the idea that “if I can carry a wounded man out of a building that explodes or I can carry a bowl of food to a refugee, that is enough.”
Distributing foreign aid was a major daily task for him.
To know the real reason of Kavsar’s journey of Ukraine, I called the boy myself, as a family friend.
“Of course, we do support you to help others, but in international affairs, we Uighurs are not obliged to do so,” I said, trying to remind him of his motherland.
He responded that, since the Uighurs are a people waiting for help from the international community, if Uighurs help people who share the same destiny, help will come from God if it does not come from within or from the international community.
I asked him whether he knew that there are people in the world in an even worse situation than the Ukrainians are in.
“Of course,” he said, “but this is the only available zone I can reach today, so I decided to come to Ukraine, which is in a similar situation to that of East Turkestan.”
When I said that Russia is a neighbor of the Uighurs, and that there were historical and political ties between them, he said: “[Russian President Vladimir] Putin is an ally of [Chinese President] Xi Jinping (習近平), his win is Xi Jinping’s win. It may encourage Xi Jinping to shed more blood in East Turkestan and Taiwan, so I think I’m not on the wrong side.”
Neither I nor his mother could change his mind. He stayed four days longer than his original plan and returned to Sweden safely on April 25.
“I couldn’t do anything to be proud of,” he said on the telephone from Stockholm. “All I could do was let somewhere between 10 and 100 Ukrainians know that they were not alone in this war.”
We asked him whether he had compared the Ukrainians’ situation to that of Uighurs while he was there, to which he replied that the fundamental difference is that they have the chance to die with honor in the war, which is incomparable to the situation of millions of Uighurs disappearing and being held in jails and labor camps.
He said he believed and hoped that if Uighurs in the concentration camps could hear of his presence in Ukraine, they would hopefully believe that, when the time comes, they will have sons and daughters willing to sacrifice their lives for them.
When he made this point, I discovered that he had more reasons for helping Uighurs than Ukrainians to support his presence on the Ukrainian battlefield.
So I congratulated the family for their son’s journey to Ukraine: By heading to a war zone, Kavsar Kurash has already tested his courage to fight for freedom, and demonstrated his devotion to his motherland and humanity.
As I posted this congratulatory message on my Facebook page, I received a number of weighty questions:
What about the Uighur fighters in Syria and Afghanistan? They have said that they were there for military training and to strengthen themselves against China. Do they not deserve praise, as Kavsar did?
They are also people fighting for two countries on one battlefield — those who wanted to achieve the ideals that Kavsar wanted to achieve. They are paying a heavy price for their ideals, looking for ways out of desperation, not going astray when they are alone or marginalized; they are not only a symbol of heroism, they are also example of victims of the international system.
Kok Bayraq is a Uighur American.
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