Oslo [Norway] May 5 : On April 29, Sayragul Sauytbay, Vice President of the East Turkistan Government in Exile (ETGE), gave the opening speech at the Ethical Trade Conference 2025, Norway's leading event for ethical and sustainable commerce.
Hosted by Ethical Trade Norway at Dansens Hus in Oslo, under the theme "Make Sustainability Great Again!" The conference commemorated the 25th anniversary of the organisation and convened over 300 attendees from businesses, labour unions, government, and civil society, as stated in the ETGE's announcement.
Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh from East Turkistan and a prominent witness to the Chinese concentration camps, offered a pressing testimony regarding the ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Chinese government against the Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic ethnic groups. Drawing from her experiences as an educator forced into Chinese concentration camps, she detailed instances of mass internment, torture, forced labour, and indoctrination, according to the ETGE announcement.
She pointed out that almost one million children from the Uyghur, Kazakh, and other Turkic communities have been forcefully removed from their families and placed in Chinese state-operated boarding schools and orphanages, where they undergo political indoctrination intended to erase their cultural and religious identities, as cited by the ETGE release.
Sauytbay cautioned that without full transparency and ethical due diligence, continued political and economic engagements with China could render the government of Norway and Norwegian businesses morally and legally complicit in the atrocities committed by the Chinese state, as reported by the ETGE release.
She also underscored that the Chinese abuses occurring in Occupied East Turkistan form a part of a larger imperial agenda. She asserted that the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) serves as a key tool in China's strategy for global domination, enabling the Chinese Communist Party to extend its authoritarian influence under the pretext of development and trade, according to the ETGE release.
While she recognised the initiatives taken by Ethical Trade Norway and several Norwegian firms to enhance corporate accountability under the Transparency Act, she insisted that much more must be accomplished to eradicate complicity in systems founded on genocide and forced labour, as noted by the ETGE release.
The East Turkistan Government in Exile reaffirms its appeal to Norway and the international community to acknowledge and denounce the genocide and mass enslavement of the East Turkistani population carried out by the Chinese state, enforce targeted sanctions against those accountable, and advocate for the fundamental rights of the East Turkistani people, including freedom, dignity, and national self-determination.
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