TAIPEI (Taiwan News) – The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) launched a five-minute video on its Facebook page Friday (April 5) featuring prominent Uyghur activists and revealing the brutality of Chinese rule in the Xinjiang region.

 

Nury Turkel, chairman and founder of Uyghur Human Rights Project, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization said in the video that China is building more internment camps. He added China may be exporting these camps to other areas and countries.

 

Turkel said the camps currently hold 800,000 to 2 million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities. This was US Department of State official Scott Busby’s estimate in December.

 

In the clip, Rushan Abbas, managing director and founder of Campaign for Uyghurs, said she lost contact with her family members after speaking publicly about Xinjiang’s human rights crisis. “As the retaliation for my activism,” Abbas said, “The Chinese government [tried] to silence me by taking [away] the closest families I have.”

 

Ilham Mahmut, president of the Japan Uyghur Association, recounted his last phone conversation with his mother, in April 2017. “She told me to not make any phone calls.” He also added: “The mother of the World Uyghur Congress’s president Dolkun Isa died in the internment camp last year, and he only learned about her death 40-something days later.”

 

Mahmut said Uyghur families were forced to celebrate Chinese New Year and eat dumplings with fillings that could not be questioned. “If you asked what was in the fillings, it meant you had a questionable ideology, you are uncivilized,” said Mahmut.

 

“Nearly 1.2 million Han Chinese are assigned to Uyghur families to ‘make relatives,’ so they can spy on the Uyghurs and see if we practice our religion, or say something against the country, or the Communist Party, secretly.”

 

President of the UK Uyghur Association Enver Tohti Bughda, a visiting fellow of the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, said the Chinese government uses Xinjiang as an experiment ground for nuclear bombs and other kinds of destructive weapons.

 

Mahmut warned Taiwan to be wary of China’s attempts to take the country. “In Taiwan, the idea of democracy and freedom that’s already within you is not allowed by the Chinese Communist Party.”

 

The DDP Facebook page condemns China’s violation of universal human rights values and calls for more Taiwanese to support Uyghurs’ rights and freedoms.