Greetings to all, and my heartfelt appreciation for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation for giving me this opportunity to address today.
As Madam Speaker Pelosi pointed out here, it has been 30 long years since we have witnessed the state of terror when Communist China massacred its own unarmed young students in order to maintain its brutal authority. Yet 30 years after, in China, communist ideals are alive and well. This totalitarian ideology has returned to the world in full force. And it is backed up by China’s enormous economic power.
My people, the Uyghurs are an ethnically and culturally Turkic people, which has been under the control of Communist China since 1949. As a result of our unique ethnic identity, culture, language and religion, we have been persecuted and repressed for decades.
Now, the Communist Chinese government is conducting genocide against the Uyghurs with mass surveillance, modern-day concentration camps, repression and evilness, challenging human dignity and basic survival rights that God gave us with our birth. The Communist regime is getting away with it in front of the entire world. Now, the entire population of East Turkistan, including my sister Dr. Gulshan Abbas has become the victims of Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road initiative, the blueprint for his imperialistic dream for the world domination. Between trade threats, the belt and road initiatives power, debt trap diplomacy, and manipulation of the UN, China has become a power able to strong arm the world.
The individual freedom to choose ‒ to choose what we believe, how we believe, and why we believe ‒ is one of the major achievements of the modern world. It defines our sense of liberty, of the freedom of conscience that we all take for granted. Yet now this foundation of our freedom is coming under attack. This disturbing trend is clearly visible in the persecution of the Uyghurs. This issue, the persecution of the Uyghurs, is only one part of a rising tide of intolerance that is rapidly covering the world. This struggle should be the concern of everyone who values the basic human rights of dignity, respect, and freedom of belief for all people. These rights are a fundamental part of the human legacy, our legacy, that is increasingly under attack from a new totalitarian threat, which is the return of communism through China’s rise to power.
We must hold our leaders accountable and demand that they raise this issue with the Chinese government. We need to let the millions of innocent people who are suffering and arbitrarily detained in East Turkistan know that we have not forgotten them and that we will not rest until they are freed. To make things change with the communist regime, we must all raise our voices.
China is the biggest communist threat in the world today and it dangers the world stability, western values, and democracy for all humans! It is on us, with our actions put an end to this despicable malice practice on our watch. Our silence and inactivity will undermine what we value in this great country!
