WHC President Dorikun Aisha speaks to Uighurs participating in a rally protesting China’s policies in front of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. (Nov. 6, 2018)
The World Uighur Congress (WUC) sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Blinken urging him to raise the demand for the closure of detention camps in Xinjiang during talks with Chinese officials on Thursday (March 18).
The World Uighur Congress is the world’s largest organization of Uighur exiles. In the letter, the group’s president, Dorikun Aisha, told Blinken, “It is imperative that China immediately and unconditionally stop its genocidal acts and crimes against East Turkestanis.”
Aisha said, “This includes China closing all detention camps and unconditionally releasing all those who have been arbitrarily detained.”
The World Uyghur Congress is based in Munich, Germany. Uighur exiles call Xinjiang “East Turkestan.”
Aisha also said China must also stop using forced labor in Xinjiang and elsewhere, and must allow U.N. monitors to travel to Xinjiang to investigate.
Secretary of State John Blinken and National Security Adviser Sullivan have been in Anchorage, the capital of Alaska, since Thursday for talks with Yang Jiechi, a member of the Communist Party’s Politburo in charge of foreign policy, and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. It was the first meeting between senior U.S. and Chinese officials since Biden became president.
There is much evidence that the Chinese Communist authorities have engaged in massive persecution of the Uighur minority in Xinjiang, placing millions of Uighur Muslims in internment camps, brainwashing them, forcing them to embrace Communist Culture, and engaging in forced labor. A growing number of countries have characterized the persecution of Uyghurs by the Communist authorities as genocide, and the international community has strongly condemned it.
Adrian Zenz, a German anthropologist and the world’s foremost expert on Xinjiang, has studied Chinese government documents detailing the human rights violations that took place inside the internment camps, including the rape of Uighur women and the forced use of birth control measures. Zheng also published on the extensive use of forced labor in cotton production in Xinjiang.
Officials of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have harshly attacked Zheng Guoyen. The CCP Central Propaganda Department has repeatedly condemned Zheng Guoyen and his published articles by name, saying that he is destined to be consigned to the dustbin of history and despised by Xinjiang’s 25 million people of all ethnic groups.
The official Chinese Communist Party response to the international condemnation was at first a complete denial that such a thing existed in Xinjiang. But later, as more evidence surfaced and international inquiries grew stronger, the Chinese acknowledged the existence of those facilities, but argued that they were not detention camps but vocational training centers, designed to educate locals in the ideology of eradicating terrorism and to help them become self-sufficient by teaching them job skills.
Today, Xinjiang and Tibet are prosperous and stable,” Chen Xu, China’s permanent representative to the U.N. Office in Geneva, told the U.N. Human Rights Council on Monday. It is absurd to label China as a genocide.”
The EU countries made a decision on Wednesday to agree in principle to impose sanctions on Chinese officials involved in the persecution of ethnic Uyghurs.
Recent Comments