Image: Screen capture from China’s Hell Camps
By Anne Kader / Reha Tarık KAHYA
Reha Tarık KAHYA from Marmaris, Turkiye, hosts a Youtube channel called “The Forgotten” that he considers a social responsibility project. He is trying to deal with the forgotten topics in the world. He recently prepared two videos titled China’s Hell Camps and The world turns its back to Uyghurs to highlight the Uyghurs’ plight. Both videos have English subtitles.
“Do you know the Uyghurs?”, Kahya asks in the video’s introduction. “They are a Turkic people living in the ‘Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China, which we call East Turkistan. The video aims to explain the persecution of our Uyghur brothers and sisters: The genocide carried out by China, how the Uyghurs’ homeland has become an open-air prison, and the concentration camps where the Chinese regime has imprisoned and tortured millions of Uyghurs and members of other ethnic groups”, Kahya writes. “We also touch on issues ranging from prohibitions that Uyghurs are experiencing, forced labor, assimilation policies, children taken from their families, forced marriages, forced abortions, and birth control.”
In the second video, we explain why the world has not managed to stop the Uyghur genocide and crimes against humanity committed by China in East Turkistan. The world has become polarized over this issue and China, with countries and international organizations loyal to it, blocked the UN’s genocide report from being discussed.
The video explains how Muslim countries have taken sides with whom in the power struggle at the UN since 2019 between China and western states over the Uyghurs. It shows details of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights report dated 1 September 2022 on human rights violations in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region; and Michelle BACHELET, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who produced this report. Neither has China left the Uyghurs in exile alone, but it has used its extradition agreements, INTERPOL, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to entrap them.
The least we can do for the oppressed, we all are obliged to do our best to make the persecution they are subjected to known to as many people as we can. Therefore, please spread information on the Uyghur genocide through all possible channels. Let’s not be indifferent.
