Uyghur News Recap: Aug. 26 – Sept. 2, 2022
A summary of Uyghur-related news around the world
washington — Here's a look at Uyghur-related news from around the world this week: Two Uyghur groups, based in the U.S. and Germany, filed an international criminal complaint with the Federal Criminal Court in Argentina, accusing China of committing genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim ethnic groups. These are accusations China has repeatedly denied. Nury Turkel, chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, said at the 2022 Regional Religious Freedom Forum in Taipei on Tuesday that Taiwan should learn from Beijing’s treatment of the Muslim Uyghur minority community to understand what Beijing could do to Taiwan if the self-ruled island fails to protect itself from China. On the last day of her tenure, U.N. rights chief Michelle Bachelet released her long-anticipated assessment of conditions in Xinjiang, saying China’s treatment of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim groups may constitute crimes against humanity. More than 60 Uyghur organizations around the world urged the international community to take concrete action after a U.N. report found that China may have committed “crimes against humanity” against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim communities in Xinjiang, a region Uyghurs prefer to call East Turkistan. An  found a Uyghur worker gets paid a monthly salary of 1,500 yuan (U.S. $217) while a Chinese worker gets around 5,000 yuan (U.S. $725) for the same work performed at a coal mine in northern Xinjiang. — Gulbahar Haitiwaji, a 55-year-old Uyghur woman and survivor of an internment camp in Xinjiang, wrote a book titled VOA’s Mandarin Service recently sat down with Haitiwaji as she recounted the horrors of being in detention. A Xinjiang native, Haitiwaji moved to France with her family in 2006. In 2016, she said a phone call from a Chinese official asking her to return to China for administrative retirement procedures lured her back to Xinjiang. She then faced arrest. She said the charges against her varied, but the recurring theme was terrorism. For nearly three years, she said, she experienced interrogation, detention and reeducation until her family and the French government helped with her release. China calls its facilities “vocational training and education centers” aimed at combating terrorism. "I couldn't have a bowel movement for 10 days when I was tied to the bed, when I was tied like a dog — and the first time I did it in front of people, I cried." — Gulbahar Haitiwaji, Chinese detention survivor.