CFU PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 4th, 2026
Contact: contact@campaignforuyghurs.org
https://campaignforuyghurs.org/

CFU Honors the Legacy of Those Who Stood Against Tyranny 36 Years on From the Barin Massacre

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Campaign for Uyghurs (CFU) marks the 36th anniversary of the Barin Massacre, commemorating the Uyghur men and women who, on April 5, 1990, stood up against the Chinese Communist Party’s draconian One-Child Policy and its systematic targeting of Uyghur women through forced abortions. The People’s Liberation Army responded with overwhelming military force, massacring protesters in Barin, East Turkistan. Those who survived faced mass detention, torture, and sham trials, punished for the crime of demanding dignity.

Thirty-six years after the Barin Massacre, the world now has irrefutable documentation of what the CCP has always been willing to do to the Uyghur people. A February 2025 report by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide found that all major repressive policies in the Uyghur Region continue or are actively expanding. Government data indicated 3.34 million instances where individuals were coerced into labor in the Uyghur region in 2024. Uyghur population growth has been driven to near zero through coercive birth prevention in some regions, while assimilationist residential schools aimed toward absorbing 100% of the Uyghur middle school population. In January 2026, five UN Special Rapporteurs issued a formal statement of alarm, warning that the CCP’s forced labor transfer system operates through coercion on a massive scale, and that the severity of that coercion in many cases may amount to enslavement and forcible transfer as crimes against humanity. The Barin Massacre was a warning the world did not heed. These findings confirm the cost of that silence.

“The Barin Massacre was a deliberate act of terror by the Chinese regime against Uyghurs who demanded basic human rights,” said Rushan Abbas, Founder and Executive Director of CFU. “Thirty-six years later, we remember the bloodshed in Barin and recognize it as an early warning the world failed to heed. The CCP has carried that same brutality forward into a full-scale genocide, and every government and institution that remains passive bears responsibility for growing Chinese threats today. This is not only an Uyghur struggle; it is a test for the entire international community to protect freedom and democracy.”

CFU calls on governments, international bodies, and civil society to move beyond statements of concern and take concrete action, enforcing import bans on goods produced through Uyghur forced labor, sanctioning CCP officials responsible for genocide, and elevating the voices of Uyghur survivors and advocates. Indifference or inaction only enables the oppressor and the ongoing crimes against humanity.