Uyghurs demand 78th UN General Assembly to confront China's ongoing genocide in East Turkistan

"China's ongoing genocide in East Turkistan is arguably the most pressing humanitarian crisis of our time, stated ETGE President Ghulam Yaghma.

"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,” he added.

Since 2014, China's ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in East Turkistan 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 labour camps.

Beyond this, China's ongoing genocide in East Turkistan encompasses forced labour, 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 United States government and 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 Turkistan 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.

Bound by the 1948 Genocide Convention, all UN member states have a treaty obligation to prevent and punish genocide.

Yet, most Western nations have merely issued symbolic condemnations of China's genocidal actions in East Turkistan, failing egregiously to enact meaningful preventative measures.

Their glaring double standards become all the more apparent when juxtaposed with their reactions to Russia's atrocities in Ukraine.

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 inconsistent stances of Western nations on crises like Russia’s aggression in Ukraine and China's ongoing genocide necessitate immediate course correction.

The ETGE calls on the UN and its member states to adopt a multi-pronged strategy that unequivocally condemns China's genocidal campaign in East Turkistan and provides asylum for those fleeing the horrors.

The strategy should also include supporting East Turkistan's pursuit of justice through the International Criminal Court and other international bodies, thwarting Chinese intelligence activities against the Uyghur diaspora, and elevating the East Turkistan issue on the UN Security Council's agenda.

Additionally, it should advocate for diplomatic boycotts of China-hosted events, enforce the Genocide Convention, honour the Responsibility to Protect mandate, recognize East Turkistan as an occupied country, and support the decolonization and empowerment of occupied nations like East Turkistan, Tibet, and Southern Mongolia.

"Every moment of failure to act enables China's genocidal machinery to extinguish more innocent lives in East Turkistan," warned ETGE Prime Minister Salih Hudayar. "The hour for action is already overdue; the world, especially the people of East Turkistan, can afford no further delay."