Press Release—for immediate release
17th March 2019
Contact: Nurmuhammad Majid; Ph: 0435 359 449 Adam Turan: Ph: 0411 857 847
Under the joint coordination of East Turkistan Australian Association Inc. and the Islamic Council Victoria and support of other affiliated community groups in Victoria, East Turkistan Community members are planning a mass rally at Victoria State Library on Saturday 6th April 2019 to condemn the 69 years of Chinese Occupation and endless Oppression Policies in East Turkistan against Uyghur Muslims. This major rally is dedicated to raise awareness about the very current situation – the Detention of Millions of Uyghurs in the Concentration Camps in China.
The event starts at 1:00pm Victoria time and will involve peaceful rally, speeches, promotion of information brochures and petition collection which to be sent to Australian Parliament.
There are over 13 million Uyghurs who identify as Muslim Turkic-speaking people living mostly in East Turkistan, according to the Chinese census. However, the actual figure is much higher than the government’s estimate. East Turkistan was annexed by the Communist Chinese government in 1949 and renamed as Xinjiang (East Turkistan) Uyghur Autonomous Region in 1955.
What is happening in East Turkistan is relevant to all Australians as the Chinese Government is condoning Mass Detention if civilian Uyghurs, religious persecution, torture, extrajudicial killings,
forced intermarriages, organ harvesting and racial discrimination policies that specifically targets the Uyghur people. Chinese Oppression policies on Uyghurs by detaining Millions in the concentration camps is no longer an internal matter of China, rather it is a global concern of Human Rights Violence committee by a state and we call to halt such atrocities and brutality of the Chinese Authorities.
The Protest focuses on the alarming situation of Uyghur and other Turkic Muslims of East Turkistan, where there were more than three million of Muslims where arbitrarily detained in the Mass Internment
Camps and prison facilities of Chinese evil State. UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) to say that it suspected that 1 million Uyghurs are currently being held in a
“massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy.” (CERD report). In the camps, officials seek to brainwash prisoners to disavow Islam and pledge loyalty to the Communist Party, and torture those who
refuse, eyewitnesses have said. Arbitrary detentions without charge or trial are the norm for prisoners in these camps, and ethnic Uyghur Muslims have been “disappeared” in large numbers. Common “crimes” are “viewing foreign websites, taking phone calls from relatives abroad, praying regularly or growing a beard.” The widespread use of arbitrary detention is also being used as a tool to force Uyghurs abroad into silence.
The situation in the Uyghur homeland has dramatically deteriorated. The detention camps under the label of “re-education” centers were established in almost all part of the East Turkistan. The detention
centers have multiplied rapidly in the latter half of 2017 and have literally turned the East Turkistan into a dystopian state. By December 2018, 182 camps have been identified through satellite imagery which seems to resemble concentration camps with forced political indoctrination. Scholars are arguing that the situation of Uyghurs is one of the worst human rights crises happening right now. Those Uighurs who are suspected of going against the party’s teachings, being “double faced”, harboring “dangerous ideas”,
“religiously suspicious” or being “politically unreliable” are being interned in these centers.
The lives inside these extremely institutionalized centers are horrific—they are being politically terrorized, psychologically abused and morally degraded. With no legal means to defend themselves against
forcible confinement in these centers, the Uyghurs are left with no other devices than relying on their survival instincts. As such, the entire East Turkistan has been deformed into a surveillance state
monitored by such cutting edge technologies as facial recognition, DNA profiling and omnipresent security cameras. As a result, the Uyghurs are completely stripped of their right to free movement, free assembly and free expression. Instead, they have further been in more tight corners to lose hope for the future.
The mass rally in Melbourne Victoria on 6th April 2019 is a crucial way to shed light on this appalling situation of the Uyghurs in their own ancestral homeland. The message the Uyghurs in Australia would
like to convey to the Australian Government and public through these demonstrations is that the operation of the concentration camps is profoundly inhumane and that the lives of the Uyghurs are getting lost
in every second in the very eyes of the world. The world is deafeningly silent to a point where it would conflate neutrality with lack of courage to ethically confront the perpetrators. This silence only encourages China to bring more suffering to many innocent Uyghur lives now and to many other peoples in other places in the future.
Next time, it will not only be the Uyghurs but others who will fall victim to the autocracies of this unchecked regime anywhere in the world. So the Uyghurs need your care, courage and commitment to stop ethnic cleansing policies of Chinese authorities against Uyghurs.
We also wish to send a message to world that through 69 years of Occupation and Genocide policies, Chinese Evil Regime has carried out countless crimes against humanity in East Turkistan including
religious persecution, cultural destruction, ethnic assimilation, political suppression and social injustices. We call for a “NEVER AGAIN” and stop China’s crime against humanity.
Together we march to end the Oppression and to call for the indefinite closure of detention camps and call for the release of Uyghurs detained and we call the world should care for the freedom of
Uyghur Muslims of East Turkistan. Freedom for East Turkistan, Freedom for the Uyghurs.
This event invites all relevant stakeholders including Government Representatives, Public Figures, Community Organizations, Human Rights Defenders and Media Groups. Your support is crucial to establish the system of justice in East Turkistan.
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