Call on UN Secretary General António Guterres to take urgent action against the East Turkistan genocide

ISTANBUL, Sep 13 (SABAH): The International Union of East Turkistan Organizations stated that since the Chinese occupation of East Turkistan in 1949, the systemic assimilation methods towards East Turkistan people have been implemented. In this process, China is destroying the identity of East Turkestan people, changing the demographic structure of East Turkestan by the occupation forces, and destroying historical artifacts, mosques, and civilization symbols unique to East Turkestan, as well as prohibitions such as language, religion, free travel ban, birth ban.

As a result of such policies of China, millions of East Turkistan people have lost their lives for 73 years. Since the day of occupation, the Chinese government has been subjecting the Uyghurs and other Turkic ethnic groups to genocide through direct killing, extrajudicial executions, and life imprisonment. As a result of China’s new genocidal policy that started in 2013, millions of people are subjected to brainwashing, gang rape, sinicization, medical experiments, organ harvesting and various tortures in more than 1200 concentration camps built by China in East Turkistan. In addition, the crimes of genocide is committed by violating all the articles in the international conventionson human rights with brutal murders such as breaking up families, child camps, depriving parents of their right to educate their children and promote their language and culture, and forcibly adopt children whose parents were killed or imprisoned in camps to the Chinese. In the last 9 years, more than 20 thousand mosques have been destroyed, religious scholars and intellectuals have been arrested or tortured to death.

Recently, the Chinese regime has been implementing extremely strict quarantine measures in East Turkistan within the scope of the “Zero Covid” policy. In the footages shared on social media from the region, it is known that people in the city of Ghulja are completely banned from leaving their homes, the basic food needs of the people are not met, production and daily life in the city are completely stopped, the people are left starving, and because of this, dozens of people have died of starvation in their homes. At the same time, as a result of the policies implemented under the name of quarantine, access to the hospital or any treatment method is cut off, and it is reflected in the social media posts that the elderly, the sick, the pregnant and those infected with Covid couldn’t reach proper medical treatments and many have lost their lives.

Finally, we, the International Union of East Turkistan Organizations, call on the UN Secretary General António Guterres and the UN High Commission for Human Rights to take immediate action to stop this genocide that is taking place in East Turkistan, in the new session of the UN General Assembly. We also request UN Secretary General António Guterres to appoint a special representative for East Turkistan. In this respect, we urge Mr. Volker Türk, the new elected UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, to make all necessary efforts to pursue all suggested methods stop all kind of human rights violations in East Turkistan as stated in the report published by the office of former President Michelle Bachelet. We believe that the report published by the UN High Commission for Human Rights is incomplete in characterizing the human rights violations in East Turkistan and we call on the new administrative office to publish a comprehensive report on the East Turkistan genocide.