The following statement is attributed to the Executive Council of the East Turkistan Government in Exile
WASHINGTON DC
18 September 2004
On Thursday, the Chinese State Council Information Office issued a white paper titled “Employment and Labor Rights in Xinjiang” to whitewash its brutal campaign of colonization, genocide, and occupation in East Turkistan. The white paper was released in response to international criticism of China’s mass interment and forced labor of millions of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Turkic peoples in Occupied East Turkistan.
The white paper which claimed that China was “protecting human rights through development” was described by the East Turkistan National Awakening Movement (ETNAM) as “an effort to whitewash China’s colonization, genocide, and use of slave labor of Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples in Occupied East Turkistan.”
The white paper stated that through “vocational training,” which is a sick euphemism for indoctrination in concentration camps, “every year from 2014 to 2019 Xinjiang provided training sessions to an average 1.29 million urban and rural workers.”
The East Turkistan Government in Exile’s Prime Minister Salih Hudayar stated, “this means that an estimated 8 Million Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples were sent to Concentration Camps from 2014 to 2019. This white paper seems to provide evidence of more than double the number of people were interned in concentration camps than the previously estimated 3 million.”
The Sun tabloid newspaper based in the United Kingdom, reported that some 8 million people have been interned China’s “re-education” concentration camps in the past six years as the internment of Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples in East Turkistan.
The white paper also claims that China is providing “organized employment-oriented training on standard spoke and written Chinese, relevant legal knowledge, general know-how of urban life, and labor skills.” China further claims that its “vocational training” is necessary to move people of out poverty and “backwardness.”
Based on countless testimonies of former victims of China’s concentration camp, credible media reports and investigations, people sent to the concentration camps were forced to undergo political indoctrination, forced starvation, torture, forced medication, rape, organ harvesting, and even execution. There have been countless numbers of deaths in the concentration camps, including the deaths of over 150 Uyghurs over a period of six months in one concentration camp in Kuchar county alone.
The majority of the Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic people who were sent to the concentration camps were either already employed or retired including artists, clergy, doctors, intellectuals, businessmen and businesswomen, former government employees, and students.”
Prime Minister Salih Hudayar stated:
“There is no need for these people to undergo “vocational training,” majority of them were already highly skilled individuals. In fact, the mass interment of what is now believed to be 8 million people in concentration camps has driven our people into poverty as the Chinese government as torn families apart, shutdown businesses, and decimated the lives of all of East Turkistan’s people. Furthermore, our people are not “backwards,” in fact prior to Chinese colonization and occupation of East Turkistan, we were much more developed than China and its people.”
Prime Minister Hudayar further stated, “in Occupied East Turkistan, China and tis CCP’s “counter-terrorism” policies are a pretext for eradicating Uyghur and other Turkic peoples in order to achieve China’s national defense goal of preventing East Turkistan’s independence.”
The East Turkistan Government in Exile (ETGE) again urges the international community to formally recognize China’s crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples as a genocide while also recognizing East Turkistan as an Occupied Country.
We urge the world uphold its commitments to ‘NEVER AGAIN’ to by taking immediate meaningful action, including humanitarian intervention if necessary, to stop this 21st Century Holocaust.
