February 6 2020 – Washington, DC

The following joint statment is attributable to the East Turkistan Government-in-Exile’s Foreign Ministry, Office of Prime Minister, Office of the President, and the Parliament-in-Exile.

Yesterday, at an event on China’s Systematic Persecution of Uyghurs, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum declared China’s atrocities in East Turkistan as a “Crime Against Humanity.” We are welcome this designation and are truly grateful to the great people at the Holocaust Museum.

For over 70 years since its occupation of East Turkistan in December 1949, the China has been waging a systematic level of persecution and colonization in East Turkistan which is increasingly becoming synonymous to the brutal genocide of over six million Jews and millions of others by the Nazi regime during World War II.

In 1948, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 260 A (III) and declared the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. In Article two of the Genocide Convention, genocide was defined as the following:

In the present Convention, genocide means nay of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(f) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

All of these acts defined under the UN Genocide Convention are being committed by China against Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic peoples of East Turkistan. Over 3 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic peoples are locking up in concentration camps, prisons, and labor camps where they are subject to torture, political indoctrination, forced labor, organ harvesting, forced sterilization and even a brutal death, all which contribute to the physical destruction of our people. Furthermore, forced population control policies, forced abortions, and forced sterilization has led to a decrease in the natural growth rate of East Turkistan’s Turkic population. In addition, China has forced tens of thousands of Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz and other Turkic women to marry Han Chinese men in a bid to prevent the existence of our future generations. Furthermore, some 500,000 Uyghur, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz children have been forcibly separated from their families and sent to state run orphanages, boarding schools, and even given to Chinese families to become assimilated as loyal Chinese people.

All of the acts committed by China against Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Turkic peoples are nothing less than genocide. Thus, as representatives of East Turkistan and its people, we again call on the United Nations and governments, organizations, and scholars around the world to formally recognize China’s atrocities in East Turkistan as a genocide.