March12,2020
By East Turkistan National Awakening Movement
If you look in the Xinjiang Region, which is East Turkistan. East Turkistan is an area in that Asian area of China for over 100 years. When the Communist Party came in, they took it over, recently they renamed it to a name that means “New Territory.” I bring that up because its home to a Muslim population. The Uighurs, the Kirkistans [Kyrgyz], the Kirks [Kyrgyz], that are being suppressed by China. I think we’ve all heard of the concentration camps that are going up all over China. We’ve done hearings. I sit on the Foreign Affairs Committee, Chair of the Asia Pacific Subcommittee, Ranking Member this year. We had hearing after hearing on the human rights suppression, just the terrible things they’re doing over there. When we looked into it, we have enough reports to feel this is true. That what they’re doing is China has interned over a million Uighurs. Other ethnic groups the Kirks [Kyrgyz], the Turkistanis. Put them into these so-called Re-education Camp, they are not re-education camps, they are concentration camps. They have armed crematoriums around the country near the camps. And my question was when we were in the Foreign Affairs Committee doing his hearing, why do you need an armed crematorium? The people that are supposed to be there are supposed to have passed away. But we recently met with some people that I found it very interesting, the people we met with were from East Turkistan, they had a Kazakh person with them who had just won an award from Mike Pompeo and First Lady Melania Trump for her courage, Women of Courage Award.
What we found listening to the story, this family, an educated family, the husband was a former schoolteacher, the wife was a medical doctor, practicing. I mean they were model citizens. The husband saw what was happening in this new territory, so he got passports, took himself and his kids out. The wife, the doctor, applied for a passport, China would not allow her to go. And so they felt she needed to go to the reeducation camp. This is a lady that’s a doctor that was practicing. China puts them in there saying it was a threat to our country. She was a terrorist. They need to be reeducated. What China is trying to do is erase other cultures. We’ve just seen this over and over again. So when we spoke to these people that were in our office this week, I asked them, do you have reports of the abuses? And they went on and on about the abuses. How they strap people in chairs, they are electrocuting them. Torturing them. Pulling out their fingernails. The women are being raped. People were being, I couldn’t say murdered because they said they would disappear and never be seen again. These things, you know, its not just hearsay. We’ve got reports from all kinds of magazines, all kinds of researchers. Here is one from Radio Free Asia. China secretly transferring Uighur detainees from Xinjiang to Shanxi province prisons. They’re held in the re-education camps, I’ll put quotes around that, they’re not reeducation camps, they’re concentration camps because the Chinese Communist Party is the highest of the hierarchy, nothing can be higher. If you have a religion and have a deity above that, that puts the Communist Party in fear because they don’t know how to control free thought. These people are being sent to prisons in those provinces in China to address an overflow in the overcrowded camps where up to 1.1. million Uighurs and other ethnic minorities accused of harboring strong religious views and politically incorrect ideas have been held since April 2017.
This is something that’s been going on for not just three years but longer than that. But it’s come to light. We’ve asked their ambassadors, have they had the western press in there? Free and open presses? And they said: “Oh, No, there’s no need. These aren’t going on.” But we know they’re going on. This is just one report. I have another one here, Madame Speaker, information concerning China killing prisoners to harvest their organs. This something we’ve heard over and over again. We’ve had hearings on this. This a multibillion-dollar industry in China. It happens to anybody that doesn’t agree with the Communist Party. They get picked up. They get imprisoned. Health Checks are done. In fact, this person that was in our office is a medical doctor. She would do the health checks on these young Muslim men and they would get a red check if they were healthy and in the darkness of the night they would disappear, never to be seen again. The China Tribunal, which was a tribunal put together to look into this, has published its final judgement. The Tribunal concluded that forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale and they had no evidence that the significant infrastructures associated with China’s transplantation industry has been dismantled and absent are a satisfactory explanation as to the source of the readily available organs concludes that the forced organ harvesting continues still today. I don’t know how a civilized world can tolerate such atrocities. When I see [reports] of the armed crematoriums or the Uighurs being taken from their homes, forced into a concentration camp, and then being rented out or sold as cattle, to manufactures and this well documented, I don’t know how we can tolerate that or how we can look at our trade policies to do those kinds of deals with a country that works like that. If they treat their own people that way, how do we expect they’re going to treat any of us?
We’ve talked about Tibet, we’ve talked about East Turkistan, the purging of individuals, the social credit scores, coercion, intimidations, I haven’t touched on the theft of intellectual property. There’s over $600 billions of intellectual property theft that goes and erodes economies all over the world. I want to read an article here just briefly. China compels Uighurs to work in shoe factory that supplies Nike. It says the workers in standard issue blue jackers glue and press about eight million pairs of Nike sneakers each year at the Qingdon Shoe Company, a Nike supplier for 30 years and one of the American brand’s largest factories. They turn out pair after pair of shoes, the shock, with their signature shock absorbing. But hundreds of these workers don’t chose to be there, they are Uighurs from East Turkistan, China’s New Territory region, sent here by local authorities in groups of 500 to toil far from home. After intense international criticism on the Communist Party’s campaign to forcibly assimilate the mostly Muslim Uighur minority by detaining more than a million people in reeducation camps, party officials said last year that most have graduated, graduated from a work camp. And again, if you talk to these people, I’ve talked to pharmacists, I’ve talked to lawyers, I’ve talked to engineers, I’ve talked to doctors. They don’t need to be reeducated. What China wants to.do was intimidate them and basically brainwash them from their habits of a religion, of practicing the religion, and become good model Chinese citizens that bow down to the Communist Party.
But there’s new evidence to show that the Chinese authorities are moving Uighurs into government directed labor around the country as part of the Central government’s initiative for the party. This would help meet its poverty alleviation goals. This is a doctor; they’re saying we need to alleviate their poverty. But also, it is to further control the Uighur population and break Uighur workers. The Uighur workers at these facilities are afraid of or unable to interact in this town they went to, beyond the most superficial of transactions at the stalls or in the local stores where they go. They won’t talk to anybody. The people at these town says everyone knows the Uighurs did not come here on their own free will, they were brought here, said one of the fruit sellers at her stall. The Uighurs had to come because they didn’t have an option. The government send them here, another vendor told the reports that they were sent her forcibly. The report we read did not ask their names out of concern for their safety so they could not discuss the issues. Like I said, we met with an ethnic Kazakh from East Turkistan, now called Xinjiang. She is a true freedom fighter.