South Asia and Beyond

Disastrous Mistake Not To Stay In India, Delhi Opened Doors To Uyghurs Fleeing China: ‘East Turkistan PM In Exile’

NEW DELHI: ‘If we don’t get any help, the Chinese government will wipe us out,” says Salih Hudayar, the ‘democratically elected’ Prime Minister of East Turkistan (Xinjiang). The Chinese Communist party(CCP) has “eliminated over 130,000 enemies, prevented the births of 3.7 million babies by forced abortion and sterilisation, killed between 190,000 and 750,000 people with the aftereffects of nuclear tests, brutally crushed peaceful demonstrations and carried out ethnic cleansing campaigns” of Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz and other Turkic people, he alleges.”India was the first country to open its doors and its arms to us when we were fleeing Chinese occupation from 1949, Hudayar told StratNews Global Associate Editor Amitabh P. Revi, adding, “unfortunately, many of our people then moved to Turkey, which we now recognise as a disastrous mistake. We should have stayed put in India, given that it was our neighbour, like the Tibetan government in exile.”

In contrast, Pakistan, Turkey, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and other Muslim majority countries have “completely buried their heads in the sand and turned a blind eye” because for them “Chinese money is much more important,” Hudayar admitted. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has not kept the promise of giving citizenship and is holding people in detention camps as a “trump card” to negotiate with Beijing, which is demanding their extradition, the founder of the East Turkistan National Awakening Movement said.

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His “democratically elected” but “unrecognised by any country” government in exile, Salih Hudayar said, has filed a case of genocide and crimes against humanity against Xi Jinping and top officials at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague. The legal case, he said, has precedence in the Rohingya issue, as even if China is not party to the Rome statute, Cambodia and Tajikistan are, and are complicit in the deportation of Uyghurs and other Turkic people.

The youth are fed up with internal and external silence, Hudayar warned, adding that violence without external support will just justify the CCP’s campaign to what it says is fighting terrorism. Beijing, he pointed out, has confused the world with the (UN blacklisted terrorist group) ETIM (East Turkistan Islamic Movement) which has the same acronym as the East Turkistan Independence Movement.

Amitabh P. Revi

Russian language speaker and conflict journalist. Amitabh Revi has been there, done that—from the battlefields of Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan to sublime Russia, Australia and the United States. Along the way he's picked up the Dag Hammarskjöld Distinguished Journalist Fellowship, the Ramnath Goenka award for coverage of the Iraq War and RT's Khaled Alkhateb Award for his reporting from Palmyra, Syria.

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