23 May 2026
Press Release – For Immediate Release
East Turkistan Government in Exile (ETGE)
East-Turkistan.Net
contact@East-Turkistan.Net
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The East Turkistan Government-in-Exile (ETGE), together with the East Turkistan Parliamen-in-Exile, the East Turkistan National Movement, and the East Turkistan National Fund, today marked the twelfth anniversary of China’s genocide against the Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic peoples of East Turkistan. Twelve years after Beijing launched its so-called “People’s War Against Terrorism” on May 23, 2014, the genocide enters its thirteenth year.
The ETGE stated that what is unfolding in East Turkistan is not an isolated human rights problem but the deliberate destruction of a nation by a colonial power. East Turkistan, which China designates “Xinjiang,” meaning “New Territory,” was an independent state when the People’s Republic of China invaded it on October 12, 1949. In seventy-six years of occupation, colonization has hardened into genocide.
The record, the ETGE emphasized, is established and beyond dispute. Beijing’s own 2020 white paper described how nearly eight million people were driven into concentration camps, which Beijing calls “vocational training camps,” between 2014 and 2019. China’s own five-year plan projected 13.75 million forced labor transfers between 2021 and 2025; in January 2026, UN Special Rapporteurs warned that actual numbers have exceeded even that projection and may amount to enslavement as a crime against humanity. An estimated 25,000 to 50,000 Uyghur and other Turkic youth are killed each year for their organs, with conservative estimates placing the total at 300,000 to 600,000 killed since 2014. Over one million Uyghur children have been separated from their families, and hundreds of thousands of Uyghur women have been forcibly sterilized.
“The world has named this crime, and the world has done nothing meaningful to stop it,” said Salih Hudayar, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Security of the ETGE and President of the East Turkistan National Movement. “The genocide cannot be ended while Chinese colonial occupation that produces it is preserved.”
The ETGE stressed that East Turkistan is not a humanitarian footnote but the cornerstone of China’s economic, military, and geopolitical expansion through the Belt and Road Initiative. The occupied country’s stolen oil, gas, uranium, and rare earth minerals fuel Beijing’s war machine and threaten free nations everywhere. The restoration of East Turkistan’s independence, the ETGE said, is not merely a moral duty but a strategic necessity.
The ETGE called on the international community to recognize East Turkistan as an illegally occupied country, impose binding economic and diplomatic sanctions on China, prohibit the import of all goods produced through forced labor, and support the ETGE’s petition before the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization and its complaint before the International Criminal Court.
“Inaction will not end this evil; it will only embolden China,” said Dr. Mamtimin Ala, President of the East Turkistan Government in Exile. “Any government serious about a rules-based order, and serious ending genocide and colonialism, has every legal, moral, and strategic reason to stand with with the East Turkistani people.”
The ETGE reaffirmed that the restoration of East Turkistan’s independence is the only guarantee of its people’s survival, and that every government that retreats into silence declares itself on the side of colonialism and genocide.