Previously unpublished confidential documents link the system of detention and forced labor of the Uyghur population to statements made by top level government officials, including President Xi Jinping.
The documents, which were leaked by an anonymous source, were shared in September 2021 with the independently organized people’s tribunal called the Uyghur Tribunal. Some documents are marked top secret and include several previously leaked to the New York Times in 2019. They cover statements made between 2014 and 2018 and have been found by independent analysts to be authentic.
The BBC reports,
The documents, branded the ‘Xinjiang Papers’, after the region which is home to most of China’s Uyghurs, reveal how Chinese Communist party (CCP) leaders including Mr Xi and Premier Li Keqiang made statements which directly led to policies affecting the Uyghurs and other Muslims.
These include forced internments, mass sterilisations, forced assimilation, “re-education”, and coercion of detained Uyghurs to work in factories.
The New York Times had reported on an identical set of documents that were leaked to them in 2019, but not all were made available to the public.
In a report on the documents, Dr Zenz said his analysis showed that the links between statements made by top government figures and subsequent policies that were implemented against the Uyghurs were “far more extensive, detailed and significant than previously understood”.
According to Dr. Zenz, in one top secret speech, President Xi stated that China’s Belt and Road Initiative was in “jeopardy” if “the situation in southern Xinjiang cannot be brought under control.”
Freedom United and our Coalition of over 300 organizations, including 70 Uyghur groups, have been urgently calling on companies to leave the Uyghur region.
Further, our community has been pushing back against the mistreatment of the Uyghur people, urging the Chinese government to end the detention and forced labor of the Uyghur people, contacting fashion brands that are potentially implicated in Uyghur forced labor, writing to Apple CEO, Tim Cook, to demand that they cut ties with suppliers that use Uyghur forced labor and, most recently, calling on world leaders to ensure that clean energy be free of Ugyhur forced labor.
More than 80,000 supporters have joined us in calling on the Chinese government to put an end to the detention and forced labor camps.
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