Photo: RFA US declares China committed genocide against Uyghurs and Vietnam s Communist Party Congress
China’s repression of Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim ethnic minorities in its northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), including its use of internment camps and forced sterilizations, amounts to “genocide” and “crimes against humanity,” the U.S. State Department said Tuesday.
Chinese policies in the XUAR aim for “the forced assimilation and eventual erasure of a vulnerable ethnic and religious minority group,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said, announcing a designation that Uyghur exile groups and human rights experts have advocated since the revelation in 2017 of mass re-education camps that have held as many as 1.8 million Uyghurs.
Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images
A Muslim woman using her mobile phone on July 16, 2009 in Urumqi in Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, during a time of heavy military, paramilitary, and riot police presence following ethnic violence in the city.
Welcome to Uighur Web Now Watch What You Say
April 23, 2014
China’s Internet is vast, with millions of sites and more than 618 million users. But nested within that universe is a tiny virtual community comprising just a few thousand websites where China’s Uighur, the country’s fifth-largest ethnic minority with a population of approximately 11 million, gather online to communicate in their own language and script.