Good morning, Mr. Chair and distinguished members.
It's an honour to be here.
To begin, I will go straight to our topic, which is the worst human rights tragedy in my homeland. We call it, as I know it, East Turkestan, but China calls it Xinjiang.
Uighurs have always faced systemic discrimination and have a long and painful history of human rights violations under China's Communist Party regime.
As an example, 60 years ago the region was chosen as a nuclear test site. It was the only nuclear test site used in China but it was the largest in the world. This nuclear testing had terrible long-term implications for our homeland. For example, our homeland and traditional way of life have disappeared. There is widespread environmental degradation and health-related issues are enormous. For example, the rate of cancer is 30% to 35% higher than the state average and birth defects are commonplace.
Sadly, nuclear testing has happened for 60 years. Sadly the CCP's imperialism and complete disregard for the Uighur peoples does not end with its nuclear testing ambition. Now, it's 2020 and mounting public evidence shows ongoing atrocities on an unprecedented scale in occupied East Turkestan. It's estimated that up to three million Uighurs and other Kazakh minority people are locked up in concentration camps.
The Turkic people have been detained in concentration camps where they are enduring horrific conditions, torture and brainwashing. Children whose parents have been detained in concentration camps are being sent to state-run orphanages. They are forced to assimilate. There are the invasive home stays of Chinese officials, concern around organ harvesting, beauty products made using the hair of detainees, and the list goes on.
Earlier this year, the Australians started a public initiative to uncover a mass scale of Uighurs and the other Turkic people transferred to forced labour camps, and the first manufactured consumer products for export to the west, such as textiles, automotive parts, electronics, and much more.
Very recently we learned that Beijing is conducting widespread forced sterilization and abortion on Uighur women. Dr. Zenz is an expert on this. The world has known since 2016 about the CCP's concentration camps that are part of its official strategy of dehumanization, assimilation and genocide under the pretext of the people's war on terror.
Even before then, Beijing disregarded Uighur human rights. For example, Uighur activist and Canadian citizen Huseyin Celil has been imprisoned in China since 2006.
The CCP has turned East Turkestan into a brutal totalitarian police state. Everything that makes us unique has been targeted: our language, culture, history, religion and identity. Our books and our history have been rewritten. Thousands of our mosques, shrines, graveyards and other sites of cultural and religious significance have been destroyed as the CCP targets us to erase traces of our very existence.
We Uighurs now refer to ourselves as a people destroyed.
As you know, this committee held a hearing on this issue in 2018. I was here, and it doesn't seem to have moved the Canadian government to act. Let's hope today's hearing has a greater impact.
This committee could help by issuing a formal statement demanding that Chairman Xi Jinping immediately abolish the concentration camps and release the detainees. We are calling on the Canadian government to use its Magnitsky legislation to target China's Communist officials for perpetrating gross and systematic human rights violations against Uighurs.
We are calling on the government to grant asylum to Uighurs and Kazakhs from China, with a blanket refusal to deport them back.
The Uighur community is suffering profoundly and we hope that Canada will help us stop this horror.
Thank you.