Uighur women are forced to marry Han Chinese and have abortions, and face other atrocities by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as part of its efforts to eradicate Uighurs, Uighur advocate Rushan Abbas told a news conference in Taipei yesterday.
The Campaign for Uyghurs founder and 2022 Nobel Peace Prize nominee urged world governments to condemn China’s “war against human dignity, democracy and freedom,” and act to stop Uighur genocide.
Women and children have been the most direct victims of Beijing’s policies to culturally assimilate Uighurs, including forcing Uighur women to marry Han Chinese men, repressing Uighur culture and religion, and controlling the Uighur population, Abbas said.
Photo: CNA
The CCP has dispatched more than 1.1 million party members to surveil Uighur women in their homes, and some of the women are raped or forced to have abortions, she said.
The party provides Han men in Xinjiang homes with preferential loans, while encouraging them to marry Uighur women, Abbas said.
Many women living in government-run camps are sexually abused by the police, Abbas said.
“The bodies of Uighur women [have] become the battlefield on which Uighur genocide is being carried out,” she added.
Beijing’s “Pomegranate Flower Plan” has displaced millions of Uighur children by placing them with Chinese families, foster homes or boarding schools, denying them Uighur culture, she said.
Washington-based Center for Uyghur Studies director Abdulhakim Idris, speaking remotely at the event, said that the CCP in 1949 promised the East Turkestan government that it would preserve its autonomy.
Idris said he had not been able to contact family in the region for many years, and they are probably being held in government camps.
Taiwan should learn the lessons of Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong, he said.
“This is the price of signing a peace accord with the CCP,” he said.
Taiwan East Turkestan Association president Ho Chao-tung (何朝棟) said that one out of six people in Xinjiang was being held in a government camp, which he described as experiment labs.
If Taiwan should be “incorporated” into the CCP, it could become Xinjiang, he said.
Young Taiwanese need to understand that the nation’s democracy was hard-won and not a gift from heaven, he added.
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