CFU PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 27, 2023, 1:30 PM ET
Sabrina Sohail: sabrina@campaignforuyghurs.org
(650) 703-4523
January 27th marks International Holocaust Memorial Day, it is the 78th anniversary of liberating the largest Nazi death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau. The purpose of this day is to officially commemorate the victims of the Nazi regime and to promote Holocaust education throughout the world to help prevent future genocides.
Campaign for Uyghurs (CFU) commemorates the six million Jewish people as well as all the hundreds of thousands of Roma and Sinti who were systematically persecuted and murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. We send our deepest sympathies to their families and loved ones and we acknowledge the pain, the sense of loss the Holocaust brings for both the survivors and their families. We also stand with the vow that the world would never again stand by and watch an entire group be targeted for eradication nor allow tyrants and thugs to engage in genocide without consequences.
As stated by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust: “those who are persecuted, oppressed and murdered in genocide aren’t persecuted because of crimes they’ve committed—they are persecuted simply because they are ordinary people who belong to a particular group eg Roma, Jewish community, Tutsi.”
Today, in East Turkistan, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is committing genocide against the Uyghurs and other Turkic people simply because of their culture and faith. The Uyghur genocide has been recognized by 11 parliamentary bodies including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Millions of Uyghurs are arbitrarily persecuted, held in concentration camps, used for forced labor, enforced for abortion and sterilization, and subjected to physical, mental, and sexual abuses. The CCP is destroying the Uyghur identity by prohibiting the use of the Uyghur language, terrorizing the practice of Islam, forcing marriages between Uyghur women and Han men, and taking Uyghur children to state-run orphanages.
Despite the ongoing atrocities in East Turkistan for several years now, the world has paid little attention. As Dr. Elie Weisel said “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” To realize the “Never Again” vow, we must condemn the Chinese regime for its genocide, we must divest investment that fuels the CCP’s violations of human rights, we must reject the products tainted with Uyghur slave labor and we must save the Uyghurs that are crying for help.
Executive Director Rushan Abbas stated that “The genocide committed by the CCP and its war on humanity not only jeopardizes the fate of Uyghurs but everyone’s freedom and liberties. If we don’t stop China immediately, it will be the future of this free democratic world that will be at stake. The time to act is now, otherwise, there will be no later.”
As Dr. Martin Luther King said: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea.”
CFU urges the world to hold the CCP accountable for its human rights atrocities in order to protect the world’s liberty, democracy, and freedom.
