The Uyghur Tribunal

"My father has been pressured to the point of breaking."

"Two sentences into our phone calls he now starts telling me: 'You have to go to the Chinese consulate, you have to submit an apology letter, you have to love China'. It's come to the point where talking has just become traumatic for both of us."

"And we know on the other side of the phone, there is someone listening."

"The Uyghur family [piano-lesson clients] were telling me how they escaped torture in China -- and how they were forced to eat pork [which is forbidden in Islam]."

"It was really another world, I could not believe it. When the patriotic brainwash I'd received in China was taken away, there was room for truth to come in."

"Chinese leaders do it [accuse those critical of the Chinese Communist Party's leadership of China of being 'racist'], to try to shield themselves from being scrutinized for their brutal human-rights abuses in China."

"They claim they're Chinese people's protector. But it's the biggest hypocrisy."

Anastasia Lin, Chinese-Canadian actor, activist, ambassador on Canada-China relations, Macdonald-Laurier Institute think-tank

 

"They forced me to accept three crimes: Instigating terrorism, organizing terror activities, and covering up for terrorists."

"I denied everything. Experiencing horror non-stop makes you wonder whether these people are human."

Omir Bekali, witness testimony

Members of the Uyghur community staged a demonstration outside Parliament in London in April   Getty Images

The government of China speaks of its mass internment of Muslims in Xinjiang, mostly populated by Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim minority groups, as a charitable effort on the part of the government to find employment for people through retraining, preparing them to take up jobs tailor-made for their new professional status, thanks to re-education. The reality is many of these people forced to submit to China-centric, CCP views and values and loyalties become field or factory workers, in a kind of updated slave-labour market.

 

The Chinese government dismisses as lies all allegations of abuse against Muslims in China, including evidence that claims over 5,500 people from the minority Uyghur group have been 'disappeared'. Now, a London-based  independent tribunal is underway, its purpose to assess claims of genocide made against Beijing in the Xinjiang region. The intention of the tribunal is to hear and record testimony over a four-day period planned to represent a comprehensive public investigation into allegations of abuses against Chinese Muslims.

 

This photo taken on June 4, 2019 shows a facility believed to be a re-education camp where mostly Muslim ethnic minorities are detained, north of Akto in China's northwestern Xinjiang region

In return, Beijing has launched an aggressive public relations campaign of its own, geared to counter any such witness accounts in its determination to undermine the Uyghur Tribunal.  This is where the explanation on the part of the Chinese government that the mass internment of Muslims is sadly misunderstood. Its purpose is to bring destitute people the benefits of living in a "modern, civilized" world, through exposure to lessons teaching that religious devotion spurs ignorance and poverty.

A wide range of first-person accounts on the part of victims of forced sterilization and rape,torture, arbitrary detention and arrest, mass surveillance and intimidation, and forced separation of children from parents is set to begin before the Tribunal. The tribunal heard on Friday that there are 232 concentration camps, 257 prisons, and 5,567 missing people in Xinjiang, according to the Uyghur Transitional Justice Database.

 

Vehicles stand in a parking lot as a large screen shows an image of Chinese President Xi Jinping in Kashgar, Xinjiang autonomous region, China, on Thursday, November 8, 2018.

 

Omir Bekali spoke of his experience in a re-education camp, as one of the first people to give their testimony. He informed the tribunal how he was tortured and tied up with chains. Written evidence he presented descrjbed how a hood was placed over his head, he was brought to "a place like a hospital" where a full body examination took place while the hood remained in place. In days to follow he was taken to a police station basement where he was tortured.

"They hung me from the ceiling. They chained me to the wall and beat me with plastic, wooden, electric batons and metal wire whips". When he was finished presenting his experiences, another person stepped forward, Patigul Talip who described how she and her husband fled China after he had been jailed and beaten for teaching the Arabic alphabet and the Koran. Their two children were scooped off the plane just as it was about to take off. 

The Tribunal envisions that the end result of its information- and data-gathering may form the basis to aid governments around the world to re-evaluate their relations with China.

 

In June, London will host an independent people’s tribunal to investigate the alleged genocide against the Uyghur, Kazakh and other Turkic Muslim populations in north-western China. The Tribunal was established in September 2020 by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC at the request of Dulkun Isa, President of the World Uyghur Congress. First reports of the unprecedented crackdown on these groups initially came to light in 2017.