Today, April 5, 2026, marks thirty-six years since the East Turkistani people rose up in Baren Township, Akto County, against the Chinese colonial occupation regime. For seventy-six years, since the day China invaded our homeland, our people have never accepted occupation. Never submitted. Never surrendered. Baren was not the beginning of that resistance. It was one of its highest expressions. This day does not belong to history alone. It belongs to the living struggle of a nation that has refused, for seventy-six years, to accept erasure.
On April 5, 1990, our people rose in defense of our children, our women, our existence, and our homeland. The uprising was ignited by the Chinese occupation regime’s genocidal enforcement of so-called “family planning” policies, under which over 250 Uyghur women in Baren were forcibly subjected to abortions. Our unborn children were taken from us. This was not policy error. This was colonial extermination.
Led by Zeydin Yusup, hundreds of East Turkistanis marched on the local Chinese colonial office to demand an end to these atrocities and to Chinese occupation itself. The Chinese occupation regime responded with over 20,000 troops, helicopter gunships, aircraft, and heavy weapons. Over twelve days, more than 3,000 of our people were massacred. More than 7,600 were arrested, tortured, imprisoned, or executed. No independent investigation has ever been permitted. That impunity was a signal. China read it, and accelerated.
The Baren Uprising was not an isolated incident. It was a legitimate act of national anti-colonial resistance, consistent with the inherent right of all peoples to resist foreign domination as recognized under international law. The martyrs of Baren were not criminals. They were national heroes defending their nation against an occupying power that had no legal, historical, or moral claim to our land.
Since 1990, China’s war against East Turkistan has only intensified. In 2014, the Chinese occupation regime launched a full-scale genocide against the Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Turkic peoples of East Turkistan, a genocide that now enters its twelfth year. Millions of our people remain imprisoned in concentration camps and prisons. More than one million children have been forcibly torn from their families and placed in colonial state institutions designed to annihilate their language, their faith, and their identity. Hundreds of thousands of women have been forcibly sterilized. Millions of unborn children have been aborted by force. Over 16,000 mosques, cemeteries, and cultural sites have been demolished. Millions are enslaved in forced labor. Tens of thousands of our people are killed each year for their organs, harvested and sold through a state-run industrial system of mass murder.
This is not history. This is now. This is the policy of the People’s Republic of China, ongoing, systematic, and deliberate.
To every government that has watched, deliberated, and done nothing: your inaction is not neutrality. It is complicity. The Genocide Convention does not permit observation. It mandates action. That obligation has gone unmet for too long, and the cost has been measured in the lives of our people.
The East Turkistan Government in Exile calls on all states to formally recognize East Turkistan as an occupied country under international law. We demand full international support for the East Turkistani people’s inalienable right to self-determination and the complete restoration of our national independence and sovereignty. We call on all states to hold the People’s Republic of China accountable before international legal bodies for its ongoing genocide. We call on all states to end every political and economic arrangement that sustains and legitimizes China’s colonial occupation of our homeland.
East Turkistan is not part of China. It has never been part of China. It is our nation, occupied by force, and we will have it back.
The martyrs of Baren gave their lives not for recognition, not for resolutions, not for statements of concern. They gave their lives for independence. For the restoration of our sovereignty. For the right of our people to live free in their own land, according to their faith, their language, and their identity. We do not honor them with words alone. We honor them by continuing this national liberation struggle with everything we have, for as long as it takes, until the occupation ends and East Turkistan is restored to its people.
Our people have resisted since the day China invaded our homeland seventy-six years ago. Baren was the last known major uprising of our people against the occupation, and it was met with massacre. What followed was not silence. It was the continuation of a resistance that has never ceased. We have not broken in seventy-six years of occupation, genocide, and colonial domination. We will not break now.
East Turkistan was a sovereign and independent nation before China’s armies crossed our borders. It is an occupied nation today. The full restoration of our national independence and sovereignty is not a demand we make with hope. It is a demand we make with certainty. On that, we do not negotiate. On that, we do not waver. On that, we are absolute.
Dr. Mamtimin Ala
President, East Turkistan Government in Exile
April 5, 2026