The East Turkestan Government has issued an immediate and urgent plea to the 78th United Nations General Assembly and its member states for quick and decisive action to halt China’s ongoing genocide against Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic people.
The president of East Turkestan Government-in-Exile (ETGE), Ghulam Yaghma, made the plea in a press statement he issued on Wednesday, noting that decisive action from the UN General Assembly is urgently needed in the light of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recently invigorated commitment to persist with genocidal actions in East Turkestan.
President Yaghma said: “China’s ongoing genocide in East Turkestan is arguably the most pressing humanitarian crisis of our time. 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 noted that: “Since 2014, China’s ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in East Turkestan (Xinjiang province) 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 labour camps. Beyond this, China’s ongoing genocide in East Turkestan encompasses forced labour, sterilisations, cultural erasure, and assimilation, the separation of nearly one million Uyghur children from their families, state-sponsored rape, and the suppression of religious freedom.”
According to him, “The United States and the Parliaments of multiple Western nations-including Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, and France-have officially labelled China’s actions as ‘genocide, adding that ” a 2022 UN report has further corroborated that these crimes may amount to crimes against humanity.
Speaking in a similar vein, ETGE Strategic Advisor, Dr Mamtimin Ala, said: “Democratic nations, spearheaded by the United States, must urgently prioritise the East Turkestan issue at both the UN General Assembly and Security Council.”
He said: ” A failure to act lays bare a catastrophic shortfall in our global human rights architecture and represents a grave moral failure. 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 Turkestan, 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.
“The passive stance of Muslim-majority and Turkic states, like Turkey, is profoundly disconcerting, given their obligations to their fellow co-religionists and ethnic kin. The inconsistent stances of Western nations on crises like Russia’s aggression in Ukraine and China’s ongoing genocide necessitate immediate course correction,” he added.
The ETGE, therefore, called on the UN and its member states to adopt a multi-pronged strategy that unequivocally condemns China’s genocidal campaign in East Turkestan and provides asylum for those fleeing the horrors, adding that: “The strategy should also include supporting East Turkestan’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 Turkestan issue on the UN Security Council’s agenda.”
“Additionally, it should advocate for diplomatic boycotts of China-hosted events, enforce the Genocide Convention, honour the Responsibility to Protect mandate, recognise East Turkestan as an occupied country, and support the decolonisation and empowerment of occupied nations like East Turkestan, Tibet, and Southern Mongolia,” it added.
Established in 2004 and based in Washington, DC, the East Turkestan Government in Exile (ETGE) serves as the official democratic representative body for the East Turkest people in exile.
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