Please note this is a hybrid event - you have the option to attend in person or virtually. Registrations are required for all attendees. For in-person attendees, the event will run from 12 - 2 pm and will include lunch. The live stream will begin shortly after 1 pm (virtual attendees will be sent a link for the event via email).
Join us for a conversation on the Xianjiang region, examining how and why the situation in the region has developed and is perpetuated; sharing personal experience of how the Uyghur community is affected and what activists are doing; and discussing work done to expose companies' supply chain links to forced labors in the region and methods of surveillance and suppression. Sheridan Prasso, Bloomberg News, will moderate the conversation between Rushan Abbas, Campaign for Uyghurs, and James Millward, Georgetown University.
Rushan Abbas started her activism work while she was a student, organizing and leading in the pro-democracy demonstrations at Xinjiang University in 1985 and 1988. Since her arrival in the United States in 1989, Ms. Abbas has been an ardent campaigner for the human rights of the Uyghur people.
She has worked closely with members of Congress since the 1990s. Ms. Abbas was a co-founder of the California-based Uyghur Overseas Student and Scholars Association in 1993, the first such Uyghur association in the United States, and served as that organization’s first Vice-President. The charter co-drafted by Ms. Abbas later served as the blueprint and played an important role in the establishment of the Uyghur American Association (UAA) in 1998. Ms. Abbas was subsequently elected Vice President of UAA for two terms. When Radio Free Asia launched its Uyghur service in 1998, Ms. Abbas was the first Uyghur reporter broadcasting daily to the Uyghur region
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From 2002 till 2013, Ms. Abbas translated for the 22 Uyghurs who were being held in Guantanamo and worked closely with the US Department of Defense, Department of Justice, State Department, and US administration with their efforts on resettlement of 22 Uyghurs from Guantanamo Bay to Albania, Sweden, Bermuda, Palau, Switzerland, El-Salvador, and Slovenia.
After working for more than 20 years in global business development, international relations, and government affairs throughout the Middle East, Africa, CIS regions, Europe, Asia, Australia, North America, and Latin America, now Rushan Abbas is a full-time activist working to advocate for Uyghur people while they are facing genocide by the Chinese regime.
In 2017, Rushan Abbas founded the Campaign for Uyghurs to advocate and promote human rights and democratic freedoms for Uyghurs, and mobilize the international community to act to stop the human rights atrocity in East Turkistan. Under her organization, Ms. Abbas introduced and led the “One Voice One Step” movement and successfully organized a demonstration on March 15th, 2018, in 14 countries and 18 cities on the same day to protest China’s detention of millions of Uyghurs in concentration camps.
Ms. Abbas works with groups in the United States, Canada, The UK, and other parts of Europe, Australia, Japan, and Turkey to highlight the Uyghur cause and in support of empowering Uyghur women and youth for activism.
In July 2020, Ms. Abbas’ organization published the report “Genocide in East Turkistan” which laid out the ways that the actions of the Chinese regime met every condition of genocide laid out in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Ms. Abbas first raised the case of Uyghurs as undergoing active genocide in May of 2019 while delivering speeches at the events hosted by the U.S. Embassies in Prague and Vienna and remained a vocal advocate for declaring the CCP’s crimes as such since then.
In February 2022, Campaign For Uyghurs was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for activism and advocacy done to promote the Uyghur cause for freedom. Campaign For Uyghurs was nominated by US House of Representatives members Tom Suozzi and Chris Smith, who co-chair the Uyghur Caucus.
Ms. Abbas frequently briefs US lawmakers and officials on the human rights situation in East Turkistan and testifies at the United States senate and congress on the Chinese regime’s crimes against humanity. She regularly appears on media outlets to advocate for the Uyghur cause and gives public speeches, having spoken for audiences at Holocaust museums, universities, U.S. embassies, grassroots groups, and more.
Ms. Abbas has three children and currently resides in Herndon, Virginia with her husband, one of the founders, and the current Inspector General of the World Uyghur Congress, Abdulhakim Idris.
James A. Millward 米華健 is Professor of Inter-societal History at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, where he teaches Qing, Chinese, Central Asian and world history. Millward is the academic editor for the "Silk Roads" book series published by Chicago University Press, and former president of the Central Eurasian Studies Society. In Spring of 2025 he will be a fellow at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study.
Sheridan Prasso is an award-winning writer, editor, and Asia specialist. She writes about global issues from cultural and business perspectives. Her assignments have taken her across Asia and around the world, and her articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Times, Travel + Leisure, and The World Policy Journal, among other publications. Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post has called her “the new face of the old Asia hand.”
Sheridan is currently a senior investigative writer for Bloomberg News, based in Washington, D.C., after spending 10 years as a senior writer in Hong Kong. Previously, she spent seven years as a writer and editor for FORTUNE in New York, and eight years with BusinessWeek as its New York-based Asia Editor and Senior News Editor. She served as Cambodia Bureau Chief for Agence France-Presse in the early 1990s, setting up the first permanent Western news bureau to reopen in Phnom Penh since 1975, and worked for AFP in Hong Kong, Paris, and the United Nations as an editor and correspondent. She started her career with The Associated Press, in Washington, D.C., Chicago, and New York.
She has lived in China as a Knight International Press Fellow, and in Japan as a U.S.-Japan Foundation Media Fellow. She is fluent in French, speaks conversational Mandarin, Spanish and Italian, some Japanese and survival Khmer.
Sheridan holds an M.Phil. in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University, and a B.A. in International Affairs from George Washington University. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. She is the recipient of a Front Page Award for the best magazine feature writing of 2007 for an article on factory workers in Vietnam. She also received the Human Rights Press Award for coverage of Cambodian land mine victims, and shared in six awards, including from the Overseas Press Club, for team coverage of the Asian financial crisis and its aftermath.
Location
Setting: Hybrid DACOR Bacon House OR Online 1801 F Street, NW Washington, DC 20006 UNITED STATES
Rushan Abbas Founder, Campaign for Uyghurs James A. Millward Professor, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service Sheridan Prasso Senior Investigative Writer, Bloomberg News
