In front of the Chinese Consulate in Istanbul, a little girl about ten years old cries out in tears: “Don’t you have children? I haven’t seen my father and brothers and sisters for 4 years!” None of us can describe the trauma experienced by a play age child. As a matter of fact, East Turkestan has been going through a state of insanity for the last nine years.
Apart from the growing pressure on East Turkestan under the pretext of fighting for terrorism after September 11, the process that started with Xi Jinping at the end of 2012 has a completely painful story. East Turkestan, where life on Earth is the most difficult, is on the way to becoming one of the nationalities destroyed! Millions of people have been committed to prison for “being Uyghurs, Kazakh, Kyrgyz.”
We do not know if there is any other period in world history that a nation was taken into total custody, they were jailed or sent to children’s camp, others were left at the mercy of Chinese guards in houses under the project of “being a family”. But what we know is that the largest mass subjection operation since the Second World War is being carried out in East Turkestan! Even on the streets people are monitored step by step with facial recognition systems.
The aggravated assaults, that were initiated with the Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism since 2014 and the declared “75 Signs of Religious Extremism”, moved to a completely different point. Dated from April 2017, the internment camps began to be established intensively throughout East Turkestan, and their number is stated to exceed 1,200. 3-8 million people of East Turkestan, who were removed from their homes, their children and wives, parents, relatives and friends, jobs and schools, loved ones, suffer the most severe torture and deprivation in the world and they are subjected to genocide in China’s “Vocational Training Centers”!
Even having a tent or a compass, having more than one knife in the kitchen, having a passport, wearing a headscarf, going to the mosque, fasting, using the mother tongue at school and in public offices are seen as sufficient reasons for a person to be taken to internment camps.
Within the context of China’s general maxim of law, millions of people who were not guilty of any crime and were not convicted were put in internment camps on charges of “discrimination, extremism and terror“. This law consists of the “principle of preventing the crime in advance”, which disregards the presumption of innocence. In crowded cells of these camps, people who cannot find a place to lie on their backs are subjected to intense brainwashing and torture.
The crimes of arbitrary use of force, systematic abolition of freedom, destruction of culture and beliefs, ideological repression, dehumanization, harassment, rape, physical and psychological torture, murder and genocide are committed in the camps. In short, these camps are places where all human rights are violated.
China entrenches upon all the rights declared in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, infringes all five articles in the UN Genocide Convention and even the “The Crime of Genocide” and “Crimes Against Humanity” regulated in the Rome Statute.
Sharing the same sky with these people and, even from a distance, witnessing their pain and suffering, their harrowing stories , heartbreaks embarrasses us from our humanity in the unjust order of this age. The world must have a word to say for East Turkestan on behalf of humanity!
- The internment camps in East Turkestan should be closed unconditionally as soon as possible, and all violations of rights in the region should be stopped right away.
- The UN must take real steps to immediately stop the atrocities of China’s internment camps that have trampled on human rights.
- The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation should either mobilize Islamic countries against this persecution or abolish itself. Because the current attitude of the OIC encourages China even more.
- Turkey must be a pioneer to end this persecution.
- Until China ends this persecution, all the peoples of the world should boycott Chinese goods.