Uygurs around the world rally in protest against Chinese security campaign in Xinjiang
Demonstrators call for protection of culture and a stop to extrajudicial detention in the country’s far western region
Members of the Uygur Muslim ethnic group held demonstrations in cities around the world to protest against a sweeping Chinese surveillance and security campaign that has sent thousands of their people into detention and political indoctrination centres.
Overseas Uygur activists said they planned demonstrations in 14 countries on Thursday in total, including the United States, Australia and Turkey.
More than a hundred Uygur protesters gathered at a plaza near the United Nations in New York to call on the body to protect their culture against Chinese government efforts to assimilate the Turkic-speaking people. Elsewhere, hundreds of Uygur women on Istanbul’s Istiklal Street and in front of Sydney Town Hall chanted and waved blue flags, the separatist symbol for a proposed independent state called East Turkestan.
China has rolled out one of the world’s most aggressive policing programmes in the Uygurs’ homeland of Xinjiang, a vast region in the country’s northwest. Chinese officials say the crackdown is necessary to stamp out a decades-long separatist movement and, more recently, Islamic extremism seeping into the region. Hundreds have died in violent clashes in recent years that the government blames on separatist militants.
