Hello, and happy Friday! This is just a quick correspondence to share my final two stories for The Atlantic, which were published earlier this week.
The acclaimed poet Gulnisa Imin was among roughly 1 million Uyghurs sent to China’s sprawling network of so-called reeducation camps in 2018. A year later, she was sentenced to more than 17 years in prison, reportedly on the grounds that her poetry promoted “separatism.” But it appears that, even deprived of her liberty, Imin did not stop composing poems.
Imin’s work is not overtly political, in fact, but her poems bear their own kind of witness to the Uyghur experience since China’s mass-internment program began. Two of Imin’s poems, which were provided to The Atlantic by the Uyghur linguist Abduweli Ayup and translated by the historian Joshua L. Freeman, have been published in full here.
Some things in life remain beyond our reach Hold no anger in your heart on my account Ask no news of me from people that you meet Your thoughts of me must not weigh on your soul Just think of me as someone on a journey If I’m alive, one day I shall return I won’t give up on happiness so easily There is much more that I still ask of life
Read more of Imin’s poetry here
As the war in Ukraine approaches the six-month mark, I spoke with Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former prime minister of Denmark who was secretary-general of NATO from 2009 to 2014, about the consequences of the war, what more can be done, and how all of this ends. Read our full conversation here
The reality is that if Putin succeeds in Ukraine, he won’t stop in Ukraine. The next goal would be Moldova, then Georgia, and finally the Baltic states. But that project has now been made much more complicated for him because, after the accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO, the Baltic Sea will now be a NATO sea. So the defense of the three Baltic states will be much easier and much more efficient now, and if we wish, we can block all entry and exit to Russia through St. Petersburg. So, for Russia, it’s a strategic defeat that Putin has provoked Finland and Sweden into joining NATO.
And that’s a wrap!
Until August,
Yasmeen