As a nation struggling to regain our independence, we would like to congratulate the United States of America and its people on the 245th Anniversary of its independence.

Today we commemorate the 12th Anniversary of the 2009 Urumchi Massacre. Twelve years ago, on July 5, 2009, the Chinese government perpetrated a massacre of peaceful protestors and random Uyghur and other Turkic civilians in Urumchi, the capital city of East Turkistan.

The massacre began with peaceful protests by Uyghurs against the repressive policy of China and ended in bloodshed.
China used its military forces to shoot and kill Uyghur protesters and arbitrarily arrested thousands of them. Subsequently, the government used the incident as an excuse to unlawfully abduct Uyghurs for several months after the July 5 massacre. As a result, tens of thousands of Uyghur men disappeared as wide-scale police sweep heightened.

The Financial Times estimated that some 4,000 arrests had already taken place by mid-July 2009, while some accounts say the actual numbers arrested were in the tens of thousands.

Urumchi’s prisons were so full following the Urumchi Massacre that many of the arrested were sent to People’s Liberation Army warehouses.

Internet access, mobile phone service, and outbound international calls were blocked in East Turkistan following the Urumchi Massacre to prevent information flow in and out of the area. East Turkistan was ultimately put under military lockdown. The Chinese government began to implement other repressive policies over the years as the international community failed to act against the atrocities.

Twelve years have passed, and the situation in East Turkistan has gotten worse to where Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Tatars, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, and other ethnic Turkic people are facing nothing less than genocide as yet again the international community fails to act.

In recent years, the Chinese government has been openly and indisputably carrying out genocide against Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic peoples in Occupied East Turkistan. According to China’s white paper, from 2020, some 8 million people have been sent to concentration camps, with millions receiving long prison sentences.

The Chinese government is raping and sterilizing East Turkistani women while separating over 850,000 Uyghur and other Turkic children from their families and sending them to boarding schools and orphanages to be assimilated as “local Chinese citizens.”

Tens of thousands of Uyghur and other Turkic people are being killed for their organs, while hundreds of thousands are being used as slaves in Chinese factories producing exported goods all across the globe.

Since the beginning of 2021, the Government of the United States, the Parliaments of Canada, the Netherlands, the UK, Lithuania, Belgium, and the Czech Republic have formally designated China’s atrocities as genocide.

While we are forever grateful for the symbolic actions taken by the US and other countries in the Free World, they are not enough. Every day that the world fails to take decisive, meaningful actions, more lives in East Turkistan are lost.

We call on the international community to uphold their commitments to Never Again, to maintain their obligations under the UN Genocide Convention and the UN’s Responsibility to Protect Commitment.

We call on the international community to intervene and come to the defense of East Turkistan and its people.

We call on the international community to help us end the genocide and the crimes against humanity being perpetrated by China’s government.

We call on the international community to help East Turkistan and its people obtain justice by supporting our case against the criminal leaders of China at the International Criminal Court and file a similar complaint against the Chinese state at the International Court of Justice.

We call on the international community to address – China’s prolonged occupation and colonization of East Turkistan – the root of the ongoing genocide of Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples by formally recognizing East Turkistan as an Occupied Country and (or) Captive Nation.

We call on the international community to look into their conscience and act in whatever ways possible, be it by boycotting the Beijing 2022 Olympics or granting refugee and asylum to Uyghurs and others fleeing the genocide, engaging in political and economic sanctions, and by intervening to save humanity.

The people of East Turkistan have long been crying for help. We plea to the international community to come to our aid before it is too late. The world failed to act and stop the Urumchi Massacre in 2009, but today it can act and stop the genocide in East Turkistan.