PRESS RELEASE – For Immediate Release
14 September 2023
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East Turkistan Government in Exile calls on 78th United Nations General Assembly for immediate action to end China’s ongoing Uyghur Genocide.
NEW YORK — In light of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent invigorated commitment to persist with genocidal actions in East Turkistan, the East Turkistan Government in Exile (ETGE) issues an immediate and urgent plea to the 78th United Nations General Assembly and its member states for immediate and decisive action to halt China’s ongoing genocide against Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and other Turkic peoples.
The ETGE calls on the UN and its member states to adopt a multi-pronged strategy that unequivocally condemns China’s genocidal campaign in East Turkistan and provides asylum for those fleeing the horrors. The strategy should also include supporting East Turkistan’s pursuit of justice through the International Criminal Court and other international bodies, thwarting Chinese intelligence activities against the Uyghur diaspora, and elevating the East Turkistan issue on the UN Security Council’s agenda.
Additionally, it should advocate for diplomatic boycotts of China-hosted events, enforce the Genocide Convention, honor the Responsibility to Protect mandate, recognize East Turkistan as an occupied country, and support the decolonization and empowerment of occupied nations like East Turkistan, Tibet, and Southern Mongolia.
“China’s ongoing genocide in East Turkistan is arguably the most pressing humanitarian crisis of our time, stated ETGE President Ghulam Yaghma. “The deafening silence and paralyzing inaction of the international community are not just a betrayal of the Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples but a disturbing collapse of our shared human conscience,” he added.
The United States government and parliaments of multiple Western nations—including Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, and France—have officially labeled China’s actions as ‘genocide.’ A 2022 UN report has further corroborated that these crimes may amount to ‘crimes against humanity.’
Bound by the 1948 Genocide Convention, all UN member states have a treaty obligation to prevent and punish genocide. Yet, most Western nations have merely issued symbolic condemnations of China’s genocidal actions in East Turkistan, failing egregiously to enact meaningful preventative measures. Their glaring double standards become all the more apparent when juxtaposed with their reactions to Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine. Furthermore, The passives stance of Muslim-majority and Turkic states, like Turkiye, is profoundly disconcerting, given their obligations to their fellow co-religionists and ethnic kin.
“Democratic nations, spearheaded by the United States, must urgently prioritize the East Turkistan issue at both the UN General Assembly and Security Council,” stated ETGE Strategic Advisor Dr. Mamtimin Ala. “A failure to act lays bare a catastrophic shortfall in our global human rights architecture and represents a grave moral failure,” he added.
Since 2014, China’s ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in East Turkistan have escalated to include the mass internment of over three million Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples in an archipelago of concentration camps, prisons, and slave labor camps. Beyond this, China’s ongoing genocide in East Turkistan encompasses forced labor, sterilizations, cultural erasure and assimilation, the separation of nearly one million Uyghur children from their families, state-sponsored rape, and the suppression of religious freedom.
“Every moment of failure to act enables China’s genocidal machinery to extinguish more innocent lives in East Turkistan,” warned ETGE Prime Minister Salih Hudayar. “The hour for action is already overdue; the world, especially the people of East Turkistan, can afford no further delay.”
