Who are the Uyghurs?
The Uyghurs are a Muslim, Turkic ethnic group, native to the East Turkistan, where approximately 12 million of them currently live.
The region has long been the subject of territorial disputes. Uprisings in 1933 and 1944 established an independent East Turkistan Republic, intending to separate the people of this region as not Chinese, but instead, Uyghur. In 1955, it was renamed by China “Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region," which was not well-received by the Uyghur community, who found the name “Xinjiang” colonialist in nature, since it meant “new territory."
Uyghur people refer to this region as East Turkistan. Since 1949, the region has been occupied by China, and Uyghurs have long been persecuted for being “separatists”. This persecution and anti-Muslim sentiment increased after 9/11.
Tensions increased, and in 2009, following an incident in a factory in which a Chinese woman falsely accused a Uyghur man of sexual assault, what became known as the Ürümqi riots broke out. A series of attacks by extremist Uyghurs, involving bombs and knives, followed in 2011-2014. This caused China to announce the “people’s war on terror,” and the establishment of “re-education camps” for Uyghurs. In a 2019 investigation, Reuters estimated that up to 1.5 million Uyghurs had been forcibly detained in what could only be described as “internment camps.” In 2020, The Times of India estimated that 16,000 mosques in the area had been damaged or demolished since 2017. The Uyghur “re-education camps” are the largest detention of a minority since WWII.
“All who believe in the principle of “never again” after the horror of the Nazi extermination camps and Stalin’s gulag must speak up against China’s grotesque use of brainwashing, prisons and torture.”
- Washington Post
In 2022, a UN report deemed China’s actions “crimes against humanity.”
The Uyghurs are known for their dances, vibrant music, and Uyghur language. Unfortunately, the internment camps, where Uyghurs are forced to learn Mandarin, is rendering the culture endangered. In these camps, Uygurs are also forced to work–usually in factories. These factories produce everything from steel to cotton, and supply some of the world’s largest companies, many of whom trade in North America. On December 23, 2021, President Biden signed into law the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, a bipartisan bill to ensure that goods made with forced labor in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China do not enter the United States market.