US relatives of missing Uygurs gather in Washington to call out China on Xinjiang’s disappeared
- ‘If you know someone who is missing, it is time to speak up,’ says event co-organiser
- Campaigners say they plan to present UN with profiles of lost relatives
Nearly two years after the Chinese government began to detain members of Muslim minority groups in western China, a growing number of their relatives abroad have started speaking out.
On Sunday, about three dozen relatives of some of the 1 million Uygurs, Kazakhs and others being held without charge spoke out at an event in Washington, DC, about the mass detentions, hoping to raise awareness of what many of them called a human rights travesty but which Beijing said was needed to counter violent religious extremism.
“If you know someone who is missing, it is time to speak up,” said Ferkat Jawdat, a Virginia-based software engineer. He lost touch with his 52-year-old mother in Xinjiang, home to the predominantly Muslim Uygur and Kazakh ethnic minorities.
Xinjiang has been subject to heavy security measures in recent years and surveillance cameras and police checkpoints have become ubiquitous. Internment camps have expanded rapidly as a primary means of social control.
For members of the Uygur diaspora, losing a family member to the sprawling system has become commonplace.
Jawdat co-organised Sunday’s gathering so that Uygurs in the US could start collecting information on their parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and even children whose whereabouts were unknown. The campaigners planned to present the data to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances and the US State Department.