Exile government says decades of a failed human-rights-only framework prove only decolonization can guarantee the East Turkistani people’s survival.
18 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) today welcomed the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s advancement of the Uyghur Policy Act of 2025 (S.1542), urging the full Senate to enact it and pressing Congress and the Trump Administration to go further by appointing a Special Coordinator for East Turkistani Issues at the Department of State and treating East Turkistan on par with Tibet.
Introduced by Senator John Curtis, cosponsored by Senator Jeff Merkley, and originally authored by Secretary of State Marco Rubio during his Senate tenure, the bill directs the Department of State to prioritize support for Uyghurs in diplomacy and foreign aid, train Foreign Service Officers in the Uyghur language, and counter Beijing’s efforts to block consideration of Uyghur issues in international forums. A companion bill, H.R. 2635, introduced by Congresswoman Young Kim passed the House in September 2025.
“We commend Senators Curtis and Merkley and the committee for advancing this bill, and we urge its swift passage,” said Dr. Mamtimin Ala, President of the East Turkistan Government-in-Exile. “Yet five years after the United States formally recognized this genocide in January 2021, no meaningful action has been taken to end it. So long as the world treats it as a human rights problem rather than the product of Chinese colonial occupation, the systematic erasure of our nation will continue unabated.”
The ETGE warned that by branding the East Turkistani people — Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic peoples who form the majority population of East Turkistan — as “minority groups” within the so-called “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region,” the bill adopts the very vocabulary Beijing engineered to bury its crimes as an “internal affair,” deny the East Turkistani people’s inalienable right to self-determination, and colonize and erase an entire nation with impunity.
The international community must recognize these atrocities as instruments of genocide and colonial subjugation rooted in China’s illegal occupation of East Turkistan, not isolated human rights violations to be managed. Beijing has signaled no intention of stopping its campaign of genocide and colonial subjugation. During a tour of East Turkistan earlier this month, Wang Huning, Chairman of the CPPCC National Committee and a member of the CCP Politburo Standing Committee, ordered “regular counterterrorist efforts” and urged enforcement of the Ethnic Unity and Progress Promotion Law, which the ETGE has condemned as codifying genocide.
May 23, 2026 marked twelve years since China launched its so-called “Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism,” the euphemism for an ongoing campaign of genocide and crimes against humanity carried out through mass internment, enslavement through forced labor, forced sterilizations and abortions, industrial-scale organ harvesting, and the systematic destruction of Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic cultures across occupied East Turkistan.
That the genocide continues into its thirteenth year is itself proof that a human rights framework alone cannot end it. Without confronting the colonial occupation that drives these crimes, international condemnation has neither constrained China nor slowed the destruction of the East Turkistani nation. Only the speedy restoration of East Turkistan’s independence can guarantee the fundamental human rights and very survival of its people.
“Tibet has a Special Coordinator at the State Department. East Turkistan deserves no less,” said Salih Hudayar, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Security of the ETGE and President of the East Turkistan National Movement. “The United States and Western democracies must, at a minimum, treat us on par with Tibet by recognizing our right to self-determination, using our country’s actual name instead of a Chinese colonial term, and extending the support long given to the Tibetan cause.”
The ETGE further called on the United States to impose new targeted sanctions on the Chinese officials and entities driving these crimes, and to support East Turkistan’s petition before the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization, to guarantee the fundamental human rights and self-determination of the East Turkistani people.