Ben Mauk

In​ August 2018 I was in Zharkent, a market town in Kazakhstan near the Chinese border, reporting on the extradition trial of an asylum seeker named Sayragul Sauytbay. She claimed she had been forced to teach Mandarin in a political re-education camp near her home town in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China’s largest and most ethnically diverse administrative territory. It was...

Aldekerk​ is a village near Germany’s post-industrial Ruhr Valley, but it’s all immaculate half-timbered houses and shivering lace curtains. I went there last May and when I arrived – it was a Saturday morning – there seemed not to be anyone outside. Somewhere the mayor’s son was getting married, and I’d been warned that no one would be available to talk...