Over the past several years, the Chinese government has locked up more than a million Uighurs, including model citizens like my 34-year-old brother Ekpar Asat. A philanthropist and founder of a social media platform catering to the Uighur community known as Bagdax, he came to the United States in 2016 to participate in an exchange program sponsored by the State Department, one from which many world leaders and Chinese citizens of the majority Han ethnicity have benefited for decades. Within weeks of returning from the United States to Xinjiang in western China, he disappeared into the shadows of the internment camps.

Beijing has sentenced many other innocent Uighur people, a Turkic ethnic minority, to years and even life in concentration camps and prisons. Uighur women have been subject to forced sterilization and forced marriages to Han Chinese men. Nearly half a million children have been placed in orphanages, despite their families being alive, and then subjected to political and cultural indoctrination. 

After years of this unconscionable treatment, a sign of hope for accountability emerged this month, somewhat ironically in the form of revelations of atrocities committed against another ethnic Muslim minority in Asia, the Rohingya of Myanmar.

Last week two Myanmar soldiers, Pvts. Zaw Naing Tun and Myo Win Tun, were shown on video confessing to carrying out orders to “shoot all that you see and all that you hear” against the Rohingya during a 2017 “clearance operation” — a well-orchestrated, systematic attack that forced hundreds of thousands of Rohingya to flee to neighboring Bangladesh.

The confession represented the first testimony from perpetrators corroborating the accounts that Myanmar soldiers shot children, raped women, destroyed villages and dumped bodies in mass graves, as previously described by Rohingya refugees and a United Nations’ fact-finding mission.

Authoritarian governments often emulate one another; one can find many similar practices between Myanmar and China. Both governments target and persecute ethnic minorities that do not conform to their artificial ideals. Both vehemently deny the allegations while deploying similar strategies and forms of punishment. Both authorities label their genocidal campaigns internal security matters and reject public criticism from democratic countries. Both governments have justified their actions by claiming that the ethnic minorities are extremists, legitimizing ruthless human rights violations under the guise of counterterrorism.