10 June 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) condemns the Chinese government’s ongoing genocide and colonial occupation of East Turkistan, which Beijing calls “Xinjiang,” meaning “New Territory,” and its coordinated effort to launder these crimes through staged trade forums and complicit international media. Now in its thirteenth year, this genocide is not receding; the Party’s own leadership has just declared its permanence.
This week’s International Conference for Trans-Altai Subregional Cooperation, held in occupied East Turkistan, does not stand alone. Days earlier, Wang Huning, the Chinese Communist Party’s chief ideologue and fourth-ranking official, toured East Turkistan and ordered “regular counterterrorist efforts,” forced assimilation as the “central task,” and intensified industrial exploitation, with particular emphasis on southern East Turkistan. The forum is the marketing arm of the doctrine the CCP set: the same colonial extraction, now sold to foreign delegations as “development.”
That doctrine is not new. In top-secret CCP Central Committee Document No. 7 of 1996, the Politburo Standing Committee designated the Uyghur and other Turkic peoples’ faith and identity as the principal threat to be eliminated. The same document ordered the state to develop southern East Turkistan, expand the paramilitary Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, and push cotton and petroleum production, the very industries on display at this forum. In the Party’s own classified words, development and repression are one and the same.
The ETGE rejects the claim, now circulating in international coverage, that mass detention was a “response to attacks.” Satellite analysis documents that construction of hundreds of detention facilities began as early as 2009, with the majority built between 2010 and early 2014, before China launched its “Strike Hard Against Violent Terrorism” campaign in May 2014. The apparatus of mass detention was built before the events invoked to justify it. The pretext was manufactured to fit a genocidal policy already in motion.
“The plan was set first, and the pretext was manufactured to fit it,” said Salih Hudayar, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Security of the East Turkistan Government in Exile. “Genocide was the intent, and repression was always the policy. Every foreign delegation that lends its presence to these forums lends its name to the crime.”
A recent Financial Times exposé confirms that mass internment, enslavement, and genocide remain ongoing and have entered a new phase, with Beijing expanding internment through prisons and slave labor through labor transfer programs that obscure forced labor-linked supply chains, while children remain separated from families at increasingly young ages and Uyghur culture and identity are erased.
The ETGE further condemns the role of international media in laundering these crimes. The Associated Press describes East Turkistan as “a region once marked by detention centers,” echoing Beijing’s framing that the atrocity is past, even as its own reporting confirms the camps were converted into prisons and that forced labor is widespread. When outlets present an ongoing genocide in the past tense, they whitewash a crime in progress.
“The exploitation of our land, resources, and people, our coal, oil, gas, cotton, and critical minerals, extracted on the backs of an enslaved Uyghur workforce, is not development. It is colonial plunder,” said Dr. Mamtimin Ala, President of the East Turkistan Government in Exile.
The international community must stop addressing the symptoms and address the root: China’s colonial occupation of East Turkistan. The ETGE calls on all governments and organizations committed to human rights to support the decolonization and restored independence of East Turkistan, and to support the ETGE’s complaint before the International Criminal Court and its petition before the UN Committee on Decolonization, to ensure the survival of the Uyghur and other Turkic peoples of East Turkistan.
The coordinates of hundreds of detention facilities — including concentration camps, prisons, and forced labor camps — can be viewed via Google Earth at nationalawakening.org/coordinates, where the historical imagery time slider shows them under rapid construction in the years before May 2014, when China launched its campaign of genocide.
