Uyghurs not seen as 'normal' by Beijing, forced to forego their culture: US-based activist

A US-based Uyghurs activist has termed the persecution of the ethnic minority group in China’s Xinjiang region as “genocide” and said that the Chinese government don’t see the community as “normal”. Nury Turkel, an American attorney and human rights advocate, told The Jerusalem Post in an interview the Chinese government has zero-tolerance for people who appear and behave differently. 

Uyghurs are Turkic-speaking Muslims in the Xinjiang province, also known as East Turkestan, who have been facing persecution in the name of “re-education” camps. Turkel said that the Chinese Communist Party is now using the term “transformation” to make them forego their unique culture and traditions.

Several leaked documents from China have revealed Beijing’s brutal and systematic crackdown on Uyghurs, in which they have called it a “struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism”. After Uyghurs militants stabbed more than 150 people at a train station in 2014, Chinese President Xi Jinping, in a series of speeches delivered to officials, urged the party to follow America’s policy of “war on terror”.

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Forced sterilisation

The Associated Press recently reported that Beijing has been taking draconian measures to curb birth rates among Uyghurs as a part of the crackdown on China’s Muslim population. US State Secretary Mike Pompeo called on China to immediately stop forced sterilisation of Uyghurs Muslims after reports of coercive family planning emerged.

Turkel was born in Xinjiang and moved to the United States in 1995 and was later granted political asylum. He said that purposeful prevention of population growth is one of the legal definitions of genocide, highlighting the drop in their population growth dropped by 24 per cent in the last year, and 84 per cent in the previous three years.

He also expressed disappointment over most of the Muslim countries not speaking against the state brutality and taking up the issue on international platforms. The World Uyghur Congress had earlier blamed Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan for not acknowledging the plight of the minority community of China. 

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(With ANI inputs)