Another tragic disaster occurred in Xinjiang as dozens, maybe hundreds, of Uighurs died in a fire on Friday.
The Chinese authorities showed no mercy. No officer broke into the building or broke the locks for hours after the fire started roaring out of control. The official reason was that the road leading to the building was narrow and parked vehicles blocked the way. It took three hours until firefighters started to extinguish the fire, despite having arrived at the scene within five minutes.
Where were the skills and courage of Chinese police who had previously stormed into buildings and dragged suspects from their beds into the street during the July 5, 2009, Urumqi Incident? The Chinese People’s Liberation Army Special Operations Forces can clear an area within five minutes, but they need three hours to extinguish a fire?
Presumably, they did not want to save the residents because they were Uighurs. Those who were crying and begging did not speak Chinese. Perhaps the residents were even afraid of being rescued, knowing that the firefighters were waiting for orders from higher authorities in Beijing to take action amid China’s lockdown policy. Women and children in the building wept until the order to break the locks came.
This is not the saddest tragedy that Uighurs are facing, although it is the most obvious one, and China is unable to hide it. We have heard of even more tragic scenes in prisons, camps and starving communities over the past three months in areas that are locked down.
However, China is ignoring the facts and hiding them by restricting news coverage.
The Chinese government in a news release put forth numerous lies, including statements from residents of the burning building who never left their homes.
In the statement, circulated on the Internet, Chinese officials said: “This was a light COVID-19 area, and the residents were able to leave the building.”
This lie is a clear indication of the falsehood of the information that only 10 people died and only nine were injured.
According to the information we received, at least 40 people died and more than 60 people were injured. Three floors of the building burned out, and the other four floors were filled with smoke. The fire lasted hours. It is clear that not just the 19 people mentioned in the official account were affected.
While one of the victims, a woman named Qembernisa, burned to death with her three children, her husband and eldest son, sentenced to jail terms of 10 and 12 years respectively, were not with them. Her five-year-old daughter was born while her father was in prison. She had been counting the months and years until she would be able to see her father and older brother.
The Chinese government should immediately disclose the list of victims and provide an accurate account on the number of dead and injured, take responsibility for the disaster, and publicly apologize to the victims’ families. We know that the Chinese authorities, which are committing genocide in our homeland, will not take responsibility for this on their own, so we call on the international community to demand an independent investigation to determine the facts and to appropriately punish China.
We would like to express our gratitude to the Turkish government for calling on China to report the details of the incident and requesting that other countries, such as the US, the UK, France, Germany, Japan and India not turn a blind eye to this tragedy, which was caused by China’s “zero COVID-19” policy.
Rebiya Kadeer is a former president of the World Uyghur Congress. Kok Bayraq is a Uighur-American observer.
In a meeting with Haitian Minister of Foreign Affairs Jean-Victor Harvel Jean-Baptiste on Tuesday, President William Lai (賴清德) vowed to continue providing aid to Haiti. Taiwan supports Haiti with development in areas such as agriculture, healthcare and education through initiatives run by the Taiwan International Cooperation and Development Fund (ICDF). The nation it has established itself as a responsible, peaceful and innovative actor committed to global cooperation, Jean-Baptiste said. Testimonies such as this give Taiwan a voice in the global community, where it often goes unheard. Taiwan’s reception in Haiti also contrasts with how China has been perceived in countries in the region
On Monday, Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) delivered a welcome speech at the ILA-ASIL Asia-Pacific Research Forum, addressing more than 50 international law experts from more than 20 countries. With an aim to refute the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) claim to be the successor to the 1945 Chinese government and its assertion that China acquired sovereignty over Taiwan, Lin articulated three key legal positions in his speech: First, the Cairo Declaration and Potsdam Declaration were not legally binding instruments and thus had no legal effect for territorial disposition. All determinations must be based on the San Francisco Peace
On April 13, I stood in Nanan (南安), a Bunun village in southern Hualien County’s Jhuosi Township (卓溪), absorbing lessons from elders who spoke of the forest not as backdrop, but as living presence — relational, sacred and full of spirit. I was there with fellow international students from National Dong Hwa University (NDHU) participating in a field trip that would become one of the most powerful educational experiences of my life. Ten days later, a news report in the Taipei Times shattered the spell: “Formosan black bear shot and euthanized in Hualien” (April 23, page 2). A tagged bear, previously released
The world has become less predictable, less rules-based, and more shaped by the impulses of strongmen and short-term dealmaking. Nowhere is this more consequential than in East Asia, where the fate of democratic Taiwan hinges on how global powers manage — or mismanage — tensions with an increasingly assertive China. The return of Donald Trump to the White House has deepened the global uncertainty, with his erratic, highly personalized foreign-policy approach unsettling allies and adversaries alike. Trump appears to treat foreign policy like a reality show. Yet, paradoxically, the global unpredictability may offer Taiwan unexpected deterrence. For China, the risk of provoking the
RSS