China’s treatment of Muslims, including the Uighurs in Xinjiang, has been part of Ankara’s agenda, Ömer Çelik, spokesman for Turkey’s ruling ÇP, said at a press conference on September 29.
Çelik said Turkey has been closely monitoring human rights and freedom of worship, and that China’s anti-extremism regulations, which were passed in 2017, contain negative and arbitrary practices against the Uighur community. He said, “Our only wish on this issue is for the Uighurs to live in prosperity and peace and to contribute to China’s development, social peace, prosperity and equality among its citizens.” He continued that Ankara, for its part, has repeatedly urged Beijing to respect the rights of minorities such as the Uighurs.
According to Selik, “Turkey supports the one-China policy. We certainly respect China’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. We support China’s right to fight terrorism.” He added, “The practices faced by the Uighur Turks should not be evaluated in this context. A careful distinction must be made between terrorists and innocents.” According to the country’s media, in February, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said after a meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, in Germany that “China should not label all Muslim Uighurs as terrorists.”
In 2019, Ankara also condemned China’s “policy of systematic assimilation of Uighur Turks” and described its treatment of Uighur Muslims as “a great embarrassment to humanity. In response to this statement by the spokesman of Turkey’s Zhengfa Party, the Chinese Embassy in Turkey issued a statement on June 30, saying that “the statement on Xinjiang is totally inconsistent with the reality of China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region,” and expressing strong protest against it. The statement reads, “The Xinjiang issue is not a human rights, ethnic or religious issue, but an anti-terrorism and anti-secession issue.”
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