The below article was published by ANI/Daily Asian Age, photo credit: AP

The East Turkistan Government in Exile has issued an immediate and urgent plea to the 78th UN General Assembly and its member states for immediate and decisive action to halt China’s ongoing genocide against Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic peoples.

This comes in light of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent invigorated commitment to persist with genocidal actions in East Turkestan Also Read – Political upheaval worsened female illiteracy in Afghanistan, say activists “China’s ongoing genocide in East Turkestan is arguably the most pressing humanitarian crisis of our time.

The deafening silence and paralyzing inaction of the international community are not just a betrayal of the Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples but a disturbing collapse of our shared human conscience,” said a press statement issued by Ghulam Yaghma, President of East Turkestan Government-in-Exile (ETGE). Since 2014, China’s ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in East Turkestan (Xinjiang province) have escalated to include the mass internment of over three million Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples in an archipelago of concentration camps, prisons, and slave labor camps. “Beyond this, China’s ongoing genocide in East Turkestan encompasses forced labor, sterilizations, cultural erasure and assimilation, the separation of nearly one million Uyghur children from their families, state-sponsored rape, and the suppression of religious freedom,” added the statement.

The US and the Parliaments of multiple Western nations, including Canada, the Netherlands, the UK, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, and France, have officially labeled China’s actions as ‘genocide.’

A 2022 UN report has further corroborated that these crimes may amount to ‘crimes against humanity.’ “Democratic nations, spearheaded by the US, must urgently prioritize the East Turkestan issue at both the UN General Assembly and Security Council,” stated ETGE Strategic Advisor Dr. Mamtimin Ala. “A failure to act lays bare a catastrophic shortfall in our global human rights architecture and represents a grave moral failure,” he added.

When people in the Muslim East and democratic West thought of China, they tended to think of it as a unified, strong, homogeneous and peaceful nation of Chinese people with a long, shared history happily living and advancing under Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) glorious rule.

In the relaxed post-Cold War political atmosphere, and especially after the West had engaged China, they tended to think of China as if it were a democracy, completely ignoring or subconsciously forgetting that China was still being ruled by one of the most brutal dictatorships in the world. Impressed by the breathtaking state-led development in China over the past 30 years and wanting strongly to enter the huge Chinese market to make millions, many nations and big corporations simply turned a blind eye to China’s policies of heavy-handed repression of the Turkic and Muslim Uighur people of East Turkestan, which China renamed “Xinjiang”.

However, the myth of a unified, strong, homogeneous and peaceful China has been increasingly challenged and shattered by the recent series of tragic events in East Turkestan and inner China, shocking both the Chinese people and the international community who were used to believing Beijing’s interpretation of the political history of annexed territories and its so-called preferential treatment of the minorities.

The name “Xinjiang” is a direct insult heaped upon the indigenous Uighur people who have lived there for thousands of years while the use of “East Turkestan” by Uighurs is criminalized. The Uighur people, like the Tibetans and Mongols, have never enjoyed autonomy in their so-called Autonomous Region because all the political, military, police and economic decision-making powers are in the hands of Chinese officials. Uighurs at all government levels serve as figureheads, including the regional chairman.