Washington, D.C. — The East Turkistan Government in Exile (ETGE) urgently calls on the international community to take decisive and immediate action against the Chinese government’s ongoing campaign of genocide, crimes against humanity, and racial and religious discrimination in Occupied East Turkistan. This comes as the world marks the second anniversary of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) report, which exposed China’s systematic violations against Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other predominantly Muslim Turkic peoples.
Two years since the report’s release, China continues its brutal campaign unabated, employing forced labor, mass internment, forced sterilizations, forced family separations, forced marriages, systematic rape and sexual abuses, organ harvesting, cultural destruction, and religious persecution. These heinous acts, rooted in China’s illegal occupation and deep-seated racial and religious discrimination, aim to erase the identity, faith, and existence of the Turkic peoples.
The ETGE condemns the ongoing inaction of the international community, particularly the United Nations and its member states, whose failure to act represents a grave betrayal of the core values of humanity and international law. The continued failure to uphold the Genocide Convention and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine constitutes a breach of international law and a moral failure on the part of the global community.
The ETGE demands that UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk take immediate and uncompromising action to address this escalating humanitarian crisis. The international community must elevate the Uyghur Genocide to the top of the UN Security Council and General Assembly agendas. Furthermore, the ETGE urges the global community to support East Turkistan’s legal efforts to obtain justice and accountability by demanding that the International Criminal Court (ICC) initiate investigations and prosecutions against Chinese officials responsible for these heinous crimes.
“The restoration of East Turkistan’s independence is not just a regional issue; it is a global imperative,” stated Salih Hudayar, the Minister for Foreign Affairs of the ETGE. “If the right to an independent state is recognized for Palestinians, then the people of East Turkistan—who have a long history of statehood and re-declared their independence twice in the 20th century—must also have their right to an independent state recognized and supported.”
The ETGE emphasizes that the East Turkistan Republic, an independent state, was forcibly overthrown by the People’s Republic of China on December 22, 1949, and East Turkistan has been under illegal occupation ever since. The world must no longer stand by in silence. The time for decisive and collective action is now.
The ETGE calls on every government, organization, and individual to join the struggle for justice, freedom, and the preservation of the Turkic peoples in East Turkistan.
