Washington DC: The East Turkestan Government in Exile has issued 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. This comes in light of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent invigorated commitment to persist with genocidal actions in East Turkestan
“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,” said a press statement issued by Ghulam Yaghma, President of East Turkestan Government-in-Exile (ETGE). 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 labor camps.
“Beyond this, China’s ongoing genocide in East Turkestan 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,” added the statement.
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.’
A 2022 UN report has further corroborated that these crimes may amount to ‘crimes against humanity.’
“Democratic nations, spearheaded by the United States, must urgently prioritize the East Turkestan 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. (IANS)
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