Thank you.
Greetings to the members of the subcommittee. I'm very honoured to be testifying today. I'm sitting before you as an advocate for Uighur human rights, and as a scholar whose research has focused on Uighur cultural expression for more than a decade.
Just this month there's been a significant shift in expert analysis of the Uighur human rights crisis. Authoritative institutions and experts have begun to label what is happening as a campaign of probable crimes against humanity, and likely, genocide. For many years the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, has been systematically destroying the institutions that long served to maintain and pass on Uighur cultural knowledge. Uighur language journals have been shuttered. Poets and musicians have been disappeared by the hundreds. Mosques have been bulldozed, and more than one million living, breathing individuals have been taken away to camps and prisons en masse.
Recent investigations of forced labour and forced sterilization, including the alarming statistic that population growth among Uighurs in two prefectures declined by 84% between 2015 and 2018, have shed light on the government's totalizing campaign of repression.
The CCP claims it must assimilate the Uighur population to quell unrest and stamp out terrorist activity, but these are excuses that mask the horrors happening on our watch. By politically indoctrinating and forcibly assimilating Uighurs, the CCP is attempting to remove their loyalty to any source of authority other than the CCP itself. In conscripting Uighurs into involuntary work schemes and turning the Uighur region into a manufacturing hub for inexpensive labour, the CCP is securing control of Uighur lands for resource extraction and global trade, while ripping apart Uighur families and communities in the process. In other words, the relationship between the CCP and the Uighur region is, at its core, a colonial one, recalling the dark and painful histories and present circumstances of liberal democracies such as the U.S., Australia and Canada, vis-à-vis indigenous peoples.
The CCP is enacting a genocide because it is a colonizer. Land and subjugation of the local people are dual prizes in its end game. The CCP has sought totalizing control of the Uighur region since it came to power in 1949. It established autonomy in the region in 1955. That autonomy was and remains a sham.
Many Uighurs, meanwhile, profess an almost spiritual connection to this land, their homeland, something that outside observers far too often overlook in our analyses. In the 1990s, for example, as the Chinese state incentivized Uighur farmers to sell their lands, the beloved folk musician Küresh Küsen urged his brethren not to do so, singing, “The land is great. The land is mighty. The land is the source of life. Brother farmer, I beg of you, do not sell your land”.
During my own time living in the Uighur region over the past decade-plus, I was struck by how much the concepts of land and homeland still seemed to shape everyday life for Uighurs. In 2015, an acquaintance of mine and her aunt took my mother, who was visiting, and me to visit the tomb of a revered Uighur scholar near Kashgar. This tomb had long been a holy site of pilgrimage, but is now a state-designated tourist spot. At the tomb a sheik described the history to us, and we wandered the grounds where, off in the distance, beyond the tomb and the state-built museum attached to it, there lay a cemetery on a mountain of sand. Deep green poplars, the quintessential marker of the region's oasis towns, stood in stark contrast to the sea of sand that lay even further beyond it.
My acquaintance led us to a stream of clear, pure spring water, and we crouched down together. "Can't you see why people would see this place as holy?” she asked me, as she scooped spring water into a bottle. I could.
For Uighurs, their land has a sacred significance as a source of meaning and life. That land, along with the home that it inspires and the very lives that play out on it, are now under grave threat. The Uighur crisis is one of the most pressing humanitarian concerns in the world today, and it demands a multi-faceted policy response by governments and multilateral actors around the world.
I have several recommendations for Canada, which I will elaborate on in the Q and A if you're interested in taking them up.
First, focus on refugee admissions. Second, punish and deter harassment of Uighur Canadians. Third, block forced labour imports. Fourth, prohibit companies from exporting high-tech tools to China. Fifth, impose coordinated, targeted sanctions on perpetrators. Sixth, make legal determinations as to whether the Uighur crisis constitutes a genocide.
It's time for the Government of Canada to act on the global promise of “never again”.
Thank you.