The international public cannot take a firm stance against the extermination attempts and genocide of the people of East Turkistan, through its ongoing trade and economic deals with China. The silence of the Muslim majority countries and its transformation into a satellite of the Beijing regime is truly shameful. CCP has corrupt elites, influential people, and bribed rulers. They are controlling the media in Islamic countries.
Campaign for Uyghurs, and The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) hosted an online event spotlighting the release of a new book, “Menace: China’s Colonization of the Islamic World and Uyghur Genocide,” by Mr. Abdulhakim Idris, Inspector General of the World Uyghur Congress and Executive Director of Uyghur Study.
The speech of Mr. Abdulhakim Idris in the program is given below.
“I want to thank Victims of Communism and Campaign For Uyghurs for organizing this event. As the distinguished guest before me stated, a genocide is taking place in East Turkistan, and the whole world is watching. Writing my book, my goal was to deliver a sober warning. Not only are millions of my people facing a grave threat to their very existence but also the future of the free world is at stake. The free world will see the danger posed by the CCP better only when the factories are closed and their people are unemployed, when the number of people expelled from their media for writing an article opposed to China increases, when the freedom of speech of people begins to disappear.
The CCP has used propaganda and diplomacy to hide the Uyghur Genocide, with denialists claiming that what is happening in East Turkistan does not meet the standards for genocide. According to the UN Convention on the Prevention of Genocide, just one of the five conditions must be met in order for it to qualify as genocide. The situation of the Uyghurs meets all five. Today, Uyghurs are sent to concentration camps by the millions. Uyghur family and life order are deliberately disrupted and replaced by Han Chinese culture. Uyghur men and women are forced into slave labor. 900 thousand Uyghur children are abducted, and Uyghur women are being forced sterilization and forced abortions.
How we got to this moment, and what we must do to escape it, is the subject of my book. I tried to gather hundreds of years of history into just a few hundred pages. My hope for this book is that each person who reads it finds within its pages a glimpse into the world from Uyghurs, expose the Chinese regime’s control on those Islamic countries and shed light on the details of the Islamic world’s silence about the Uyghur Genocide and its transformation into China’s colony.
With our unique Uyghur perspective gained from living through Chinese colonization and experiencing their brutality, we can accurately warn against the dangers of the CCP. Beijing uses its despotic power to determine what is wrong and right. They control our past, our present and future. They try to choose how long we live and when we die. If the world wants to know what the world looks like under Chinese domination, they can find it right now in East Turkistan.
Immediately following the 1949 invasion, Beijing began a policy of assimilation that aimed to dilute the population of the Uyghurs by moving Han Chinese into the region. The CCP understands that the presence of a unified cultural ethnic group presents a significant threat to their expansion of power, and as such it must be destroyed.
While facing demographic threats, Uyghurs have also faced near persistent threats to their civil liberties. During the “Flower Campaign” of 1956 for example, criticism of political parties was first encouraged, and then criminalized. Students, Teachers, and intellectuals were all targeted as enemies of the state and thousands were sent to labor camps, planting the seeds for the coming genocide.
This pattern continued through the “great leap forward” and the “Cultural Revolution”, which created an environment of persecution that killed millions and destroyed entire villages. Islam as a faith was targeted. Places of worship were destroyed. The extent of this destruction was extraordinary and over 90% of mosques were demolished. The city of Kashgar, which had once been home to 107 mosques, was left with just two.
There was a period during the 1980s when the CCP regime seemingly tolerated the Uyghur people. This period began in 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded East Turkistan’s neighbor, Afghanistan, while the USSR was backing Vietnam in a war against China. China, stuck between two fronts, had to temporarily tolerate the Uyghurs to study in their own language and publish Uyghur books, build mosques and take part in cultural studies, even allowed Uyghur student movements in the mid-80s, to keep them happy and avoid influence of the USSR on the Uyghurs. However, this so-called golden period gradually disappeared with the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan in 1989. The Tiananmen Square massacre that took place that same year showed that the Chinese Communist Party was never in favor of human rights and democracy.
Currently, as we can see that the international public cannot take a firm stance against the extermination attempts and genocide of the people of East Turkistan, through its ongoing trade and economic deals with China. The silence of the Muslim majority countries and its transformation into a satellite of the Beijing regime is truly shameful.
The Chinese Communist Party wants to bring the world under its despotic regime. For this purpose, it has been developing systematic and sophisticated projects. Every year, thousands of Chinese have been educated abroad, especially in technology and industry. Likewise, before the CCP took power, many intellectuals, businessmen, scientists and the capital fled to the surrounding countries before the establishment of the PRC in October 1949. However, after the 1980s they returned to China with promises of immunity.
After China’s admission to the World Trade Organization in 2000, it started to apply the free-market economy system more effectively, and in a short time it became the factory of the world with cheap labor. As a result of these important steps, the giant factory that produced counterfeit goods for a period turned into a country that produced its own aircrafts, missiles, internet and electric cars.
While this new order has been built, the universal values of the free world, such as respect for human rights and the development of new nations have been ignored. This regime is a Menace that will surround the world, starting with Central Asian countries and Muslim states.
Today Chinese regime has corrupt elites, influential people, and bribed rulers. They are controlling the media in Islamic countries. These countries are forced to hide their investment deals with China from their own populations. The Chinese regime is talking about not interfering with internal matters in those countries, but in reality, they are giving the orders. For example, those Islamic countries historically had strong bonds with the Uyghur Muslims but are following Chinese orders to stand by their side on the UN human right council. Beijing is using its economic leverage to create diplomatic advantage, using political power for security and military purposes. The CCP has taken over most Islamic countries.
Like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, while claiming to help the world, China hides its crimes with propaganda. The most visible and striking of their deception is the Belt and Road Initiative. The BRI, announced by Xi Jinping in 2013, is marketed to the world with the promise to ‘bring equal development’. But the developments that have emerged so far show that is untrue. There is only one winner in this economic welfare program: the Chinese Communist regime.
Mahatir Muhammed, the former prime minister of Malaysia, has summed these concepts up very well in a PBS Frontline Documentary. To put it briefly, in an infrastructure project within the scope of BRI, the company that won the tender came from China, the company that will build the construction is from China, the materials to be used in the construction are from China, and even the people who will work on the project, come from China. Malaysian citizens lost the opportunity to earn money and support their families. For this reason, Mahatir conveyed that he did not want his country to be exploited again.
You can look to Pakistan to understand what happened to those who accepted this colonial order. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan has admitted that the future of his country’s economy now depends on China. The Chinese have the right to speak in the giant private economic zone established in Suez, which is the most important trade crossing point in the world. Although these economic regions are only investments on the surface, they have actually turned into bases for the Chinese communist regime to control the world economically.
Be it under the name of BRI or through other investments, the Beijing government also exports its own repressive regime. The first target of this regime export is the Central Asian- and Islamic countries, where a significant part of their governments are authoritarian. The Chinese Communist regime turns the rulers of authoritarian regimes into satellite rulers for Beijing. These rulers are making billions at the cost of their own Muslim people.
While Chinese communist regime waging an open war against the religion of Islam, calling “religion is the opium” and “mental disease”, banning the daily prayers of Muslims, banning traditional Muslim names, and attempting to rewrite the Holy Quran. In the war of extinction initiated by a communist regime against believers, Muslim leaders choose to forget their faith and side with Xi Jinping. Those who do not believe in the lies of the CCP are targeted through Beijing and its extensions. The academics and scholars are immediately dismissed from the universities and forbidden from teaching at another university. If they are a company manager, other companies that they trade with directly or indirectly apply an embargo. If they are a journalist, the newspaper they work for terminates them for fear of decreasing advertising revenues. A person working in the state can be dismissed immediately.
The reason why the neo-colonial policies of the Chinese communist regime are being effective in the Islamic world is also due to the chaotic order that Muslim countries have passed through for decades. Due to the wars and tensions in the Middle East and Afghanistan for years, the breakdown of relations between the people and the rulers in the events that started with the Arab Spring, and the Chinese regime’s relentless efforts on spreading disinformation, Muslim majority countries have been exploited easily and authoritarian leaders have been drawn into China’s orbit.
The plight of religious leaders and scholars Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iran are deplorable. They cannot see that what is happening in East Turkestan today will emerge in Pakistan and in every other Muslim majority country. The people in the Muslim world must woke to this reality that now, a threat will from the East.
The crisis at hand is deeply personal to me. Four years ago, almost exactly, I had what may be my last conversation with my mother. My brother has been sentenced to over twenty years in one of the camps. My sisters have vanished as well. The door to my family’s home has been sealed shut I am told. This causes me a pain that strikes me deep in my soul, and knows no end.
I know that I shall embrace my mother, and my family, once more. Whether that be in the next life, or in this one, is not up to me. It is up to us, it is up to humanity, to the world. We must ask ourselves what we will do on behalf of those who have been made incapable of acting. What will we say on behalf of those who cannot speak?
This book is fundamentally a call to action, and a plea for help. It is written on behalf of so many of my people who cannot share their stories at this moment. My hope is that within its pages I capture even a fraction of their lives. Their stories are worth telling, and they deserve to be heard. I am eternally grateful for the opportunity to tell them.
The first condition of standing against the danger posed by this cruel and authoritarian order is to protect East Turkistan. The Muslim world and western countries must stand by the Uyghur people, who have resisted the tyrannical regime with their history, culture, religious beliefs for over 70 years. Think tanks, academics, institutes, and human rights organizations must research and learn about the Uyghurs and this genocide. East Turkistan has long been the gateway to the west for China, and with its resources and location. If this gate is destroyed, then China will know it can do whatever it desires, and it will be too late for the rest of the world.
Thank you for your time, and your support. Together, I believe that we will see this stopped, and justice brought to those responsible.”
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