The below article was written by the ETGE’s Prime Minister Salih Hudayar, Photo credit: ETGE
Australia is a strong and ardent defender of human rights, so China is doing everything it can to attack Australia with propaganda and tariffs.
China’s impulsive tariffs on Australian wine last week has been followed up with a tweet by the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s Spokesperson showing a gruesome doctored propaganda image of an Australian soldier on Monday, further deteriorating the already strained relations between Australia and China. So far, Beijing refused to apologize for the propaganda tweet described as a “repugnant tweet” by Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
Beijing’s attacks on Australia aim to deflect attention away from the brutal genocide and other crimes against humanity that it has been committing in Occupied East Turkistan, officially referred to as the “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region” by China. In recent years, over 3 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic peoples have been locked up in concentration camps, many of which were uncovered by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). The ASPI also revealed China’s destruction of the Uyghurs’ cemeteries, mosques, and historical and cultural sites. Earlier this year, the ASPI published a detailed report titled ‘Uyghurs for Sale’, highlighting China’s modern-day slavery of Uyghurs through forced and slave labor. The ASPI’s crucial data shed light on China’s atrocities and has served as evidence in the East Turkistan Government in Exile and the East Turkistan National Awakening’s formal complaint against China’s officials for genocide to the International Criminal Court.
Hundreds of thousands of Uyghur and other Turkic women have been forcibly sterilized, with countless numbers raped by Chinese military and security forces. China forcibly aborted some 3.7 million babies in East Turkistan along from 1979-2009. Numerous massacres of Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples have taken place over the past 71 years of Chinese occupation of East Turkistan. More recent evidence of these massacres includes the Yarkent Massacre of 2014, where Chinese security forces killed thousands of Uyghurs. Several untold massacres were revealed by PLA veterans who shared their horrific memories of “serving China” and how they partook in the killings of unarmed Uyghur villagers, including children, in an interview with Bitter Winter earlier this year. In addition to all of this, China built crematoriums near the concentration camps as the number of Uyghurs and others dying in concentration camps increase, bringing back dark memories of the Nazi’s death camps during the Holocaust.
Australia is a strong and ardent defender of human rights. It has played a crucial role, primarily through its NGOs and media, in unveiling China’s genocide of Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples in East Turkistan, and that is why Uyghurs view Australia as the “Moral Conscience of the Quad.”That is why China is doing everything it can to attack Australia through propaganda and tariffs. China’s aggressive behavior towards Australia lies in its attempts to deflect attention away from its genocide in East Turkistan and its ever-increasing desire to expand its dominance and influence to all parts of the world, including Australia.
Australia should counter China’s aggression and atrocities by boycotting the Beijing 2022 Olympics, not for political reasons but in protesting China’s Nazi-like crimes against humanity while urging other countries to do the same.The world shouldn’t repeat the same mistake it made in 1936 by attending the Olympics in a country where a 21st century Holocaust-like genocide is taking place.
The ASPI has already confirmed China is using Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples as slave/ forced labor. Like the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, Australia should pass a bill with a “rebuttable presumption” that all goods made with cotton or cashmere from China are made with forced/slave labor. Approximately 84% of China’s cotton production and over one-third of China’s cashmere production comes from Occupied East Turkistan.
As a signatory state of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Australia should support East Turkistan’s complaint to the International Criminal Court and urge other member states to do the same.Also,Australia should pass a Lui Xiaobo Human Rights Accountability Act to sanction Chinese officials responsible for the human rights violations and atrocities against Uyghurs, Tibetans, Hong Kongers, Mongols, Falun Gong practitioners, and countless dissidents and human rights activists like Mr.Lui Xiabo.
Lastly, Australia should formally recognize China’s atrocities against Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples in East Turkistan as genocide and provide asylum to those fleeing persecution.
Australia must stand firm in the face of Chinese threats and continue to be the quad’s moral conscience.
Mr. Salih Hudayar is the Founder of the East Turkistan National Awakening Movement (ETNAM) and Prime Minister of the East Turkistan Government in Exile (ETGE). You can follow him on Twitter @SalihHudayar.