In the wake of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s renewed commitment to genocidal actions in East Turkestan, the East Turkestan Government in Exile (ETGE) has issued a heartfelt plea to the 78th United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) and its member states. They are urgently calling for immediate measures to stop China’s ongoing genocide against Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic peoples.

Formerly known as the Xinjiang province of China since 2014, East Turkestan has witnessed a rise in China’s ongoing genocide, including the mass internment of over three million Uyghurs and other Turkic people.

The statement stated, “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.”

The parliaments of various Western nations, including the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Lithuania, and France, amongst others, recognize China’s adversaries. However, according to the ETGE, the condemnation has been merely symbolic. “A failure to act lays bare a catastrophic shortfall in our global human rights architecture and represents a grave moral failure,” he added. Bound by the 1948 Genocide Convention, all UN member states have a treaty obligation to prevent and punish genocide.

The ETGE also called out the Muslim-majority countries for neglecting the condition of the East Turkestan population. “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 statement added.

-Anushka Upadhyay