Diana Schemo

Suleiman Ahmed. (Photo by Courtney, Cushing Kiernat) Candice Suleiman Ahmed has worked as a certified medical translator in Minneapolis and St. Paul since 2018, two years after he arrived in Minnesota as a refugee. Born in Somalia, Ahmed was separated from his parents in 1991, when he was seven years old, during a bullet-ridden raid in that country’s civil war. He fled into the bush with other people escaping the violence, eventually making his way to a refugee camp in Kenya.

In Iran, newspapers are now banned, as are public protests. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has seized unilateral control of the government, with only himself to determine when it’s safe for democracy to return. China moved quickly and ruthlessly to control information, seizing Li Wenliang, the martyred doctor who first warned of the approaching pandemic, and silencing journalists whose reporting contradicted the official narrative of a crisis averted through authoritarian rule.

In recent years, journalists have bravely reported on the mistreatment of Muslim ethnic Uyghurs in the northwest Chinese region of Xinjiang: on detention camps, forced labor, the systematic sterilization of women, intrusive digital surveillance, and other government-orchestrated atrocities. As the international community builds more courage to speak out and sanction Chinese officials and companies, only a few nations, including the United States, have officially declared Xinjiang a genocide.