Prime Minister Salih Hudayar on behalf of the East Turkistan Government in Exile on Monday said the United States needs to know that "what China is doing in Occupied East Turkistan, so-called Xinjiang, is nothing less than genocide and colonisation as a result of occupation".
"What China is doing in Occupied East Turkistan (so-called "Xinjiang") is nothing less than genocide and colonisation as a result of the occupation. The State Dept and White House need to recognise the genocide and take stronger actions to stop China and its CCP's crimes against humty," Hudayar said in a tweet.
This comes in response to a video message released by the US State Department on atrocities committed by China in Xinjiang.
On Sunday (local time), the State Department said in a tweet (that came along with the video), "In Xinjiang, the Chinese Communist Party has committed egregious human rights abuses against Uyghurs and members of other minority groups, including coercive population control, forced labor, and repression of cultural and religious expression."
Xinjiang region is home to around 10 million Uyghurs. The Turkic Muslim group, which makes up around 45 per cent of Xinjiang's population, has long accused China's authorities of cultural, religious and economic discrimination.
About 7 per cent of the Muslim population in Xinjiang, has been incarcerated in an expanding network of "political re-education" camps, according to US officials and UN experts.
Classified documents known as the China Cables, accessed last year by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, threw light on how the Chinese government uses technology to control Uyghur Muslims worldwide.
However, China regularly denies such mistreatment and says the camps provide vocational training. People in the internment camps have described being subjected to forced political indoctrination, torture, beatings, and denial of food and medicine, and say they have been prohibited from practising their religion or speaking their language.
Now, as Beijing denies these accounts, it also refuses to allow independent inspections into the regions, at the same time, which further fuels reports related to China's atrocities on the minority Muslims.
( With inputs from ANI )
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