Every year on February 5 they remind the world that what happened then was the beginning of a genocide that still continues.
by Ruth Ingram
As the world moves on to more headline grabbing pastures, the Uyghur region’s hidden carnage of mass detentions, sterilizations, forced labour and cultural annihilation continues to rage unabated.
Twenty-seven years ago this week, on February 5, 1997, police opened fire on unarmed protesters in Ghulja, a city in China’s northwestern province of Xinjiang, close to the border with Kazakhstan. The incident during which at least 100 mostly young men were mown down by Chinese police, 200 sentenced to death, and 4,000 arrested for their peaceful protest against a creeping cultural destruction of their people by the Chinese state, will forever be remembered as the event that set in motion an intensified and incremental assault on Uyghur people in their homeland, culminating today in what many governments and lawmakers have termed a genocide.
There are no bombs falling, no mounds of rubble or people huddling for safety in the burned out shells of buildings, but the fallout from 1997 of the assault on the Uyghur nation continues unabated with thousands of people sentenced extra-judicially to long jail terms since 2016, many more unaccounted for, half a million children wrenched from their parents and their culture to be educated by the state, often in orphanages, and the CCP bent on assimilating every so-called minority people group into the mainstream Han mould.
Uyghur protesters gathered around the world outside Chinese embassies this year in commemoration of the dead of 1997, and those who remain disappeared or still in custody for daring to speak out against decades of oppression by successive governments.
In an anniversary statement, Dolkun Isa, president of the World Uyghur Congress (WUC) said, “Over the past 27 years, the Chinese government’s assault on Uyghur rights has intensified, turning into a genocide. Under Xi Jinping’s leadership, arbitrary arrests, suppression of cultural heritage, and increased repression of Uyghurs both in East Turkistan (the preferred Uyghur exile term for Xinjiang) and abroad have become widespread.”
The WUC called on the international community to reflect on the lessons of Ghulja and take decisive action. “As we remember the Ghulja Massacre and acknowledge the suffering of millions of Uyghurs, the WUC emphasizes the importance of collective action against the atrocity crimes,” Isa said. “Urgent support for justice and accountability efforts is needed to counter the ongoing atrocities committed by the Chinese government with impunity.”
Addressing a much-diminished crowd of Uyghurs and their supporters outside the Chinese Embassy in London, WUC’s U.K. Director Rahima Mahmut, herself a native of Ghulja, who escaped Xinjiang soon after the massacre, reported that the CCP crackdown on her people has not relented since the mass roundups following Chen Quanguo’s appointment as new governor of Xinjiang in 2016.
Whereas a significant number of U.K. Uyghurs used to regularly turn out to protest the abuses in their homeland, according to Mahmut, the CCP’s hounding of expatriates explains the marked reduction. “Transnational repression of our people has been stepped up and exiled Uyghurs are regularly harassed by Chinese police,” she said. “They are intimidated and threatened, and told that their parents, their brothers and sisters or their children will be taken away if they attend any demonstrations or if they talk about what happened to their family members.” She has herself lost contact with her own family and only through the expat rumor mill has she learned that family members have been detained and one of her sisters has sadly died. After 2016 she was told by a brother not to contact them again. He advised her to leave their fate in “God’s hands” as they would hers.
She reiterated the importance of allies and friends standing in solidarity. “This gives us hope, and the will to continue. It gives us hope that one day we will be free,” she said.
Omer Kanat, Executive Director of the Uyghur Human Rights project described the Ghulja Massacre as a “clear and early indicator of the Chinese government’s dehumanization of the Uyghurs.” This has been “a gradual process that has culminated in a genocide,” he said quoting the findings of the UK Parliament in 2022, and the Independent Uyghur Tribunal in 2021.
He questioned the world’s silence since, and its lack of will and muscle now to address the ongoing human rights abuses in his homeland, despite a UN verdict in August 2022 by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, alleging crimes against humanity in the Uyghur region.
The world has consistently ignored warnings indicators of human rights violations against Uyghurs, he said. “The issue is pertinent to all of us. Our failure has made the world safer for genocidaires. What happened to the Uyghurs should become a lesson learned so that we can forestall genocides before it is too late.”
He called for more sanctions of Chinese officials implicated in the suffering of his people, legislation to focus “policy responses adequately to the enormity of the crimes,” and mandates to address the long arm of repression reaching exiled Uyghurs who are “harassed and coerced into silence about the ongoing atrocities.”
Watertight EU legislation to ban forced labour imports must be rolled out, he urged, saying, “Although it is too late to save the still-unknown number of victims of Chinese government policies, it’s not too late to act for the survivors.”