Witnesses of Continued Uyghur Genocide Tell their Stories

Speakers at The International Religious Freedom (IRF) Summit highlighted the ongoing human rights violations and outright genocide of Uyghur Muslims in China by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The summit took place in Washington D.C. from July 13-15.

“[Chinese President] Xi Jinping’s genocide includes the forced disappearances of millions of Uyghur’s into concentration camps, the forced sterilization of Uyghur women, forced abortion of their precious babies, and state abduction of Uyghur children into orphanages far from home to be reared with non-Uyghur upbringing,” said Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ) at one of the summit’s plenary sessions.

Tursunay Ziyawudun described her first-hand experience of the vile inhumanity that characterizes everyday life for the millions of Uyghurs in Chinese concentration camps. It left “indelible scars on my heart,” said Ziyawudun concerning her internment.

“Sometimes they showed us propaganda films, sometimes they taught us Chinese law, sometimes they taught us Chinese ‘red’ songs, and sometimes they made us swear oaths of loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party,” explained Ziyawudun.

Perhaps the most heartbreaking and angering part of the conference was Ziyawudun’s description of the systematic rape of Uyghur women.

 “Once, they took me out alongside a young woman in her 20’s. Next to the camp officers, there was a man in a suit, wearing a mask over his mouth. … They raped the young woman, three [ethnic majority] Han officers raped me as well. They were always taking girls out of the cells like this. They did whatever they wanted. Sometimes they brought some of the women back near the point of death,” Ziyawudun recounted with tears in her eyes. Ziyawudun’s experience is representative of many other stories unable to be told.

A side event at the conference hosted by the Uyghur Human Rights Project featured the testimony of more first-hand witnesses to the injustice towards Uyghurs. One witness, an Uyghur forced to flee East Turkestan, described the plight of Uyghurs in his homeland. “Tens of thousands of publicly respected clerics have either been tortured to death in prison or have disappeared without a trace in the last five years, and their bodies were not even returned back to their families,” he said.

The Uyghur witness also expressed lament for his teacher, who was “arrested for no reason and tortured to death while he was not charged with any crime.” According to the witness, his teacher was not a rash person looking for trouble but was “the most prudent person [he] knew.” Even still, “the Chinese government wouldn’t tolerate even such a person,” he said X.

Another first-hand witness to the genocide was a Ph.D. student who still has family members in the concentration camps.

 “Uyghurs and Khasakz … in my homeland face perhaps the darkest time in our history,” and “China’s genocide in the region has devastated the people,” she lamented.

“Eventually they detained my sister” and “they gave her a sentence to 17 years just last year,” she said. The justification given for this harsh sentence was that the ”CCP claim [her] sister was praying in 2015 at [their] father’s funeral.”

In reaction to the witness’ advocacy for the Uyghur people, the CCP used and manipulated her sister to coerce her. A few weeks before the summit, she heard her sister’s voice for the first time in four years. It was a recording from the CCP of her sister telling her that “you are [a] Chinese citizen” and that “I hope you will not do anything wrong like me. Otherwise, you will end up like me in this place.”

Although China often puts up a front of altruism, the reality is their government is littered with corrupt practices and beliefs. In 2019, The New York Times revealed leaked internal CCP documents and speeches showing the extent of their human rights violations. Using the guise of combating religious extremism, President Xi instructed government insiders to “show absolutely no mercy” and that “The weapons of the people’s democratic dictatorship must be wielded without any hesitation or wavering.”

Also at the IRF summit Sam Brownback, the former U.S. International Religious Freedom Ambassador at large, condemned the genocide. 

“I think it’s diabolical, I think it’s completely wrong, and I think it has to stop; and if it doesn’t get stopped, it will spread,” Brownback warned. 

“I so admire the Uyghur’s that will stand up and speak because every one of them pays with family members going into concentration camps,” the former U.S. Senator, Kansas Governor and State Department official said, alluding to the Chinese practice of targeting family members of those who speak out against the genocide.

Brownback called China’s actions “the most egregious violation of religious persecution of a group in the world today,” and he encouraged people to “please keep speaking out because it won’t end unless we really put the pressure on China.”

The Uyghur population faces religious persecution unimaginable to many in the West today, and it shows no signs of slowing.