"My friends were arrested, or simply disappeared"

Lives Less Ordinary

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.6 • 814 Ratings

🗓️ 8 October 2023

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Tahir Izgil is one of the most highly respected living Uyghur poets. Tahir was born near Kashgar, in Xinjiang province, and from an early age he was immersed in the poetry of his culture. When the Chinese state clamped down on the Uyghur community, he lived under constant threat of arrest, and says he couldn’t even perform his poems. So he decided to try and escape his homeland.

Tahir has a memoir out about his experiences called Waiting to Be Arrested at Night, translated by Joshua Freeman.

Presenter: Mobeen Azhar Producer: Harry Graham Editor: Andrea Kennedy

Transcript

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0:00.0	On a winter's night in 1974, a crime took place that would obsess the nation.
0:06.9	It was an extraordinary news story.
0:09.1	The story of an aristocrat, Lord Lucan, who's said to have killed the family Nanny,
0:13.7	mistaking her for his wife, then somehow just disappeared.
0:18.0	One of the great mysteries in English criminal history.
0:20.7	We're still looking for Lucan.
0:22.1	It's honestly one of the most powerful stories of my lifetime.
0:25.9	I'm Alex von Tundselman.
0:27.3	This is The Lucan Obsession.
0:29.2	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:31.7	The explanation is the podcast from the BBC World Service
0:35.9	that goes beyond the spin,
0:38.5	exploring the important questions about long-running stories
0:42.4	and the latest global news,
0:45.1	an honest explanation of the events shaping our lives.
0:49.6	Search for the explanation,
0:51.9	wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
0:58.6	The government's pressure on people to inform on each other, to make up crimes that each other have committed.
1:08.8	We've heard of this developing in all different kinds of ways,
1:12.3	of fathers reporting on their own children,
1:15.0	of children reporting on their own mothers,
1:17.0	relatives reporting on each other,
	...

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