Dozens or hundreds of people took to the streets in Washington and New York Friday afternoon to demand that the U.S. government, the United Nations and countries around the world go beyond condemning violence against the Uighurs and recognize Chinese authorities’ policies in Xinjiang as genocide.
The demonstrations come as Uighurs have been calling attention to China’s intensified crackdown in the region for four years. There are reports that the U.S. government is considering calling Beijing’s actions genocide.
“August 29 marks the fourth anniversary of Chen’s transfer from Tibet to the so-called Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region as the head of the Chinese Communist Party organization there,” Saleh Hudayar, founder of the Washington-based Uighur group East Turkestan Ethnic Awakening movement, told VOA. He presided over the construction of concentration camps and prisons, as well as the forced labor and high-tech surveillance of uighurs that made it a police state as we know it.”
Chen was appointed secretary of the CPC Xinjiang Committee in the second half of 2016. Since then, observers estimate that more than a million Uighurs have been imprisoned in concentration camps, while tens of thousands have been forced to work in factories across China. Human rights monitoring groups, including Human Rights Watch and the Washington-based Uighur Human Rights Project, have also accused Beijing of forcing Uighur women to undergo abortions and sterilizations.
“We call on the U.S. government and the United Nations to recognize the atrocities as genocide and on the international community and governments to break their silence and resist China,” said Hudayar, who organized the protests in front of the State Department in Washington and the United Nations in New York.
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