Paris | The Paris-based Uyghur Institute of Europe called on French President Emmanuel Macron and Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian to “recognize the genocidal nature” of Beijing’s policies targeting this minority in the northwest of France. China.
“The extreme and systematic political violence, organized, planned and perpetrated by the Chinese authorities against the Uyghurs shows an intention to destroy, including biologically, the Uyghurs as a whole group. They constitute genocide according to the criteria put forward in the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948, of which China is a signatory state, ”writes the organization for the defense of Uyghur culture in letters, sent Thursday to AFP, addressed to the President and the Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Believing that no “concrete” action will be possible without this official recognition, the institute (IODE) asks the French authorities to follow in the footsteps of the United States, whose Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has taken up the qualification of ” genocide ”, as well as the Canadian and Dutch Parliaments which adopted non-binding motions assimilating to genocide the repression underway in Xinjiang, a region populated mainly by Uyghurs, a Turkish-speaking ethnic minority and mainly Muslim.
He also urges them to activate “all possible levers”, including that of sanctions, “to put an end to this genocide”, by drawing up a list of “extreme political violence” attributed to China by “numerous academic studies” , “detailed press inquiries” and “increasingly numerous testimonies”.
Among this violence, IODE denounces “massive internments”, massive and forced sterilizations “,” separation of Uyghur children from their families (number estimated between 700,000 and 800,000) “,” totalitarian surveillance “,” policies of eradication of the Uyghur identity ”targeting language, culture, religious sites …
Experts estimate that more than a million Uyghurs are or have been detained in political re-education camps in this vast semi-desert territory.
Beijing rejects the term internment camps and speaks instead of “vocational training centers” intended to help the population find jobs and thus keep them away from extremism.