Uyghur Community Leader: Biden Is ‘Failing to Uphold’ Campaign Promises on China

The prime minister of the East Turkistan Government in Exile, Salih Hudayar, accused President Joe Biden during a protest in front of the White House on Tuesday of “failing” to honor his campaign promises to stand against the Chinese Communist Party’s genocide of Uyghur people.

The East Turkistan Government in Exile, East Turkistan National Awakening Movement, and activists belonging to the persecuted communities of the East Turkistan region organized the march and protest on Tuesday to commemorate the 2009 Urumqi massacre.

That year, the Communist Party violently repressed an uprising in the capital city of East Turkistan that had occurred in response to news from eastern Guangdong province that Han Chinese workers had used sticks to beat an unknown number of slaves from East Turkistan to death in their dormitories. The victims had been bussed to factories in other parts of the country to labor.

China has for decades used the forced transfer of residents of East Turkistan into factories, schools, and farms elsewhere in the country to dilute the identities of ethnic groups native to the region. Uyghurs are the majority population in East Turkistan – an independent republic prior to Mao Zedong’s takeover of the region in 1949. A report published in 2020 by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) revealed the names of 82 multinational companies – including household names such as Nike, Nintendo, BMW, and Apple – that manufactured products in factories outside East Turkistan that had purchased Uyghur slaves as part of government programs.

In addition to observing the anniversary of the Urumqi massacre, the group convened outside the White House to demand Biden take more actions to stop the ongoing genocide of the native peoples of the region – including not just slave labor, but forced sterilizations and abortions as well as the herding of an estimated 3 million people into concentration camps.

“Today, the Urumqi massacre continues on a daily basis with millions of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic people … locked up in concentration camps, prisons, in slave labor,” Hudayar said in his address to the event, “where they are forcibly indoctrinated, tortured, raped, sterilized, and even killed for their organs.”

“It has been eight years since China officially launched its so-called ‘People’s War‘ campaign of genocide against Uyghurs and other Turkic people in May 2014,” Hudayar narrated. “It has been nearly two years since the U.S. government and parliaments across the world have officially recognized the atrocities as genocide and crimes against humanity. Yet not much has been done to stop China’s ongoing genocide.”

Regarding Biden particularly, Hudayar noted that Biden had loudly campaigned in the 2020 election to hold China accountable for the Uyghur genocide.

“During the election campaign, President Biden had promised to act against China’s genocide of Uyghurs in the strongest terms, yet President Biden and his administration are failing to uphold their campaign promises as China continues to kill Uyghurs on a daily basis,” Hudayar noted.

“We are not going to abide by what they’ve done,” Biden said during a Democrat Party primary debate in December 2019, referring to China. “We should be moving 60 percent of our sea power to that area of the world to let, in fact, the Chinese understand that they’re not going to go any further. We are going to be there to protect other folks.”

Biden appeared to change his tune almost immediately after taking office, describing the Uyghur genocide in a CNN town hall in February 2021 as a “cultural” difference between America and China.

“Culturally, there are different norms that each country and they — their leaders — are expected to follow,” Biden said, claiming that dictator Xi Jinping “gets it” that “no American President can be sustained as a President if he doesn’t reflect the values of the United States.”

The comments appeared to indicate that Biden would only pressure Xi on his long list of human rights abuses out of fear that he would lose the support of the American people, not because he intended to act regarding the issues in question.

Hudayar also observed that international institutions like the United Nations had failed to act in the face of the genocide.

“The U.N. and other major international bodies have remained silent and in many ways are complicit through their silence,” Hudayar noted. “Despite repeated calls by numerous organizations, parliaments, and even governments, the U.N. has failed to publish a report on the situation in East Turkistan.”

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet visited East Turkistan in May. Following the visit, she praised the Communist Party for its “tremendous achievements” in human rights and claimed the concentration camps no longer exist, prompting global condemnation and a vow from Bachelet that she would not seek a second term in her post.

The inaction by nearly every major international actor in the face of genocide, Hudayar warned, could result in China succeeding.

“In a decade, there might not be any Uyghurs left to save,” he warned.

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