The Washington Post: Uyghurs face cultural genocide aims at erasing their language and culture

The Washington Post reported that the Uyghur minority in China is facing cultural genocide that aims to replace the culture and language of the Han nationality with the culture and language of the Uyghurs.

This is being carried ou by uprooting their language, besieging their intellectual and cultural sites, and even imprisoning them.

The report, published by the Washington Post, argues that despite China’s claims to be a “rule-of-law state,” the reality reveals a framework that exploits the law to suppress political opinion.

This is evident in the recent life sentence handed down to Rahel Dawoud (57), an Uyghur researcher specialized in ethnology and one of the most prominent advocates of the Uyghur culture and heritage across the world.

The Washington Post added that the suppression of Uyghur culture and identity began after an attack on a market in southern Xinjiang in May 2014 that killed 31 people. As a result, Uyghurs were accused of “separatism.”

In this context, Chinese leader Xi Jinping pledged to eliminate religious extremism, which included the establishment of re-education camps for Uyghurs and the detention of more than a million people in these camps, in addition to forced labor, and state efforts to suppress the birth rate among Uyghurs.

The US newspaper said that “China initially denied the existence of the camps, and then issued a statement confirming that they were vocational training centers. However, the United Nations revealed last year strong evidence of torture and other human rights abuses, which are likely to constitute “crimes against humanity.”

Despite international condemnation of these actions, China continues to deny any human rights abuses in Xinjiang, according to the Washington Post report. In fact, Xi Jinping visited Xinjiang in August last year and again called on regional officials to achieve “effective control over illegal religious activities.”

The United States, for its part, has responded by passing laws such as the Uyghur Human Rights Act of 2020 and the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act of 2021, aimed at punishing China’s human rights abuses and preventing the import of products that were produced using forced labor in Xinjiang.