by Frances Martel, Breitbart:
Members of the Uyghur and other Turkic communities of East Turkistan organized a protest in front of the White House on Wednesday demanding the U.S. government enact stricter sanctions on China and on businesses that help fund the Chinese government in response to the genocide of their peoples under the Communist Party.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
The event marked the 14th anniversary of the Urumqi massacre, the Chinese government mass killing of, some estimates suggest, over 1,000 people after the indigenous people of East Turkistan organized peaceful protests in response to reports of violent beatings of Uyghur slaves in southern Guangdong province. The Chinese government acknowledged 184 deaths and blamed the protesters for the violence.
Speakers at the event on Wednesday, organized by the East Turkistan National Awakening Movement, repeatedly described the 2009 massacre as a precursor to what has become full-scale genocide against Uyghurs, Kyrgyz people, Kazakhs, and other non-Han ethnic communities in East Turkistan. The Chinese Communist Party administers the once-sovereign territory of East Turkistan under the Han name “Xinjiang” and launched a campaign, believed to have begun around 2017, to imprison millions of the region’s indigenous residents in concentration camps. Long before that, however, the Chinese government under current dictator Xi Jinping launched a “people’s war” against terrorism in 2014 nominally meant to eradicate jihadist groups, but in reality meant to erase Muslim-majority communities nationwide. Islam is the dominant religion of East Turkistan.
Imprisonment in concentration camps and killings are a small part of the long list of atrocities that human rights advocates have credibly accused China of committing in the region. As one speaker on Wednesday, Aziz Sulayman, listed, evidence suggests communist China is also engaging in “forced labor, enslavement, mass detentions, forced abortions, forced sterilizations, cultural and physical eradication, summary execution, state-sponsored rape of Uyghur and other Turkic women and heart-wrenching separation of millions of families.” Evidence also exists of China using concentration camps prisoners for live organ harvesting, a grim, lucrative black market industry for Beijing.
Sulayman, a member of the East Turkistan Government-in-Exile’s Parliament, urged the American government to respond to the Uyghur genocide through financial and political sanctions that would realistically affect the Chinese Communist Party’s decision-making.
“We must enact targeted sanctions on those responsible, freezing their assets, imposing travel bans,” Sulayman said. “Governments and corporations must prioritize human life over profits. We cannot allow economic interests to precede over the suffering of an entire population.”
