CFU PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

May 15, 7:30 PM ET

Sabrina Sohail: sabrina@campaignforuyghurs.org

(650) 703-4523

www.campaignforuyghurs.org

Campaign for Uyghurs (CFU) commends the State Department for the release of its 2022 International Religious Freedom Report and for exposing the ethnic and religious atrocities faced by Uyghurs under China’s Uyghur genocide and its war on religion.  

The Chinese government has been characterizing Islam as a mental disease that leads to “extremism.” This resulted in the implementation of coercive “re-education” programs that targeted Uyghurs who were practicing their faith peacefully. The report highlighted that Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims are subject to detention in “internment camps or converted detention facilities” in East Turkistan, under the pretext of national counterterrorism and regional counter extremism laws. Individuals received disproportionately severe prison sentences for engaging in personal “personal expressions of religious identity and beliefs, such as praying, owning a Quran, or growing a beard.”

The report highlights the CCP’s utilization of diverse surveillance methods such as home inspection and neighborhood informants to impede Uyghurs from engaging in their daily Islamic practices and the Chinese authorities’ persistent closure and destruction of mosques in East Turkistan. The CCP has forcibly relocated almost a million Uyghur children, some as young as preschoolers, to state-run boarding schools or orphanages. In these institutions, they are subjected to teachings on Han culture, Mandarin language, and CCP ideology, while simultaneously being separated from their Uyghur culture and religious environment.

It is CFU’s opinion that East Turkistan has been the laboratory in which China has been attempting to perfect its now-digitized totalitarian control of the human mind and spirit – to prepare and export it across the world. Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim communities will not be the only ones to endure China’s oppression unless the international community reacts to its threats.

The Secretary of State Antony Blinken mentioned in his remarks on the report that “Governments in many parts of the world continue to target religious minorities using a host of methods, including torture, beatings, unlawful surveillance, and so-called re-education camps,” and continued “Around the world, citizens and civil society organizations stepped up to counter these acts, often at great personal risk. NGOs like Campaign for Uyghurs and Uyghur Human Rights Project are documenting the genocide and crimes against humanity against predominately Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang, China.”

“The State Department’s 2022 International Religious Freedom Report serves as a powerful testament to the pressing need to address the Uyghur genocide. We commend the efforts behind this report and remain hopeful that its findings will lead to international solidarity in addressing the plight of the Uyghur people and other persecuted communities,” says CFU’s Executive Director Rushan Abbas. “We thank Secretary Blinken for acknowledging the hard work we as the Campaign for Uyghurs have been doing to expose China’s war on Islam and genocide against Uyghurs and for his unwavering support in shedding light on the plight of millions of innocent Uyghurs,” Abbas added.  

CFU thanks the State Department for shedding light on China’s assault on religious freedom and the ongoing genocide of the Uyghur people in its recent report. The report serves as a powerful declaration of the United States’ global commitment to advancing religious freedom and protecting the rights of people around the world. CFU calls on the international community, particularly Muslim-majority countries to stand united in solidarity with Uyghurs, defending their rights to religious freedom and human rights that have been unjustly denied to them.