A group of representatives of the Turkic communities of East Turkistan, a nation colonized by the Chinese Communist Party, gathered before the White House on Monday to mark five years since Washington recognized the ongoing genocide of Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic peoples in the region.
On January 19, 2021, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo formally declared China’s policy of forcing millions of Uyghurs into concentration camps, widespread implementation of forced sterilization, the abduction of tens of thousands of children to be indoctrinated into communism, and similar atrocities as constituting both genocide and crimes against humanity. His successor, Antony Blinken, similarly ruled the situation a genocide, though former President Joe Biden made dismissive comments about the matter in public.
Current Secretary of State Marco Rubio was among the earliest American political leaders to condemn the genocide for what it is and introduced what eventually became the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), a law that severely restricts imports into the United States of slave-made products from East Turkistan.
Holding signs reading “China Get Out of East Turkistan” and “Stop China’s Ongoing Uyghur Genocide,” the group, representing the East Turkistan National Movement and the East Turkistan Government-in-Exile, recounted in front of the White House the horrors their people have been subjected to for over a decade under dictator Xi Jinping. The East Turkistan Government-in-Exile supports the recognition of East Turkistan as a sovereign nation under Chinese colonial occupation, citing the existence of two East Turkistan Republics independent of China, the latter destroyed and captured by the rise of Mao Zedong and fully occupied by 1945.
“Since 2014, millions of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic people have been imprisoned in concentration camps, prisons, and forced labor facilities,” Salih Hudayar, the foreign and security minister of the East Turkistan Government-in-Exile, detailed to those assembled. “Our women are subjected to forced sterilizations, forced abortions, and forced marriages to Chinese men – acts of state-sponsored sexual violence and rape intended to destroy our nation biologically.”
“At this very moment, over 1 million Uyghur and other Turkic children remain torn apart from their families and placed into state-funded institutions where their language faith and identity are systematically erased,” Hudayar detailed. “Hundreds of thousands of our people – in fact, 578,500 of our people – have been sentenced to long prison terms, [and] millions have been forced into forced labor, producing the very cheap ‘Made in China’ goods for global markets under coercion and threats.”
Hudayar also noted the widespread and ongoing evidence of the Chinese Communist Party killing Turkic people, as well as political prisoners nationwide, to sell their organs.
“Evidence continues to show that Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples are being killed for their organs on an industrial scale, with an estimated 25,000 to 50,000 Turkic people killed every year, while China continues to expand organ harvesting facilities in occupied East Turkistan,” he noted.
That number is the product of extensive research by the world’s leading experts on China’s illicit organ harvesting trade. In 2022, Ethan Gutmann, senior research fellow in China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and one of the most influential journalists in the world on the subject, told Congress that the infrastructure documented in East Turkistan indicates the killing of as many as 50,000 people for their organs a year.
“If we assume that at any given time since 2017, there are approximately a million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and Hui in the camps, my estimate is that 25,000 to 50,000 camp detainees are being harvested every year,” Gutmann explained at a Congressional hearing that year. “Twenty-eight-year-olds from the Xinjiang [East Turkistan] camps can be theoretically harvested for two or three organs, translating into a minimum of 50,000 organs or a maximum of 150,000 organs.”
Evidence that China used Uyghurs for organ harvesting emerged decades before the hearing. Surgeon Enver Tohti, who also testified in 2022, has said repeatedly in public that he was forced, as a young surgeon, to extract the organs from a political prisoner in 1995. By 2019, when the systematic genocide under Xi Jinping was well underway, witnesses who escaped concentration camps began describing being forced to undergo strange medical tests consistent with organ match testing and the existence of “express” lanes at airports to rapidly transfer organs.
While the first reports of a potential genocide and construction of a mass concentration camp complex emerged in 2017, the 2025 State Department report on human rights in China confirmed the genocide was ongoing in 2024, the latest year for which the report is available.
“Genocide and crimes against humanity occurred during the year in China against predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang,” the report detained, listing abuses in China by the state as including:
Arbitrary arrest and detention by the government including, since 2017, of more than one million Uyghurs and members of other predominantly Muslim minority groups in extrajudicial internment camps, prisons, and an additional unknown number subjected to daytime-only “re-education” training; acts of transnational repression against individuals in other countries; serious restrictions on freedom of expression and media freedom, including unjustified arrests and criminal prosecution of journalists, lawyers, writers, bloggers, dissidents, petitioners, and others, and restrictions on internet freedom; restrictions of religious freedom; instances of coerced abortions and forced sterilization; trafficking in persons, including forced labor; prohibiting independent trade unions and systematic restrictions on workers’ freedom of association; and significant presence of some of the worst forms of child labor.
The group assembled outside the White House on Monday urged the Trump administration to impose significant economic sanctions on China in support of the victims of communism and to recognize East Turkistan as a legitimate, occupied state.
“We call upon the United States government and the international community to recognize East Turkistan as an illegally occupied country under international law,” Hudayar, the foreign minister, stated. “Genocide cannot be stopped without addressing its cause: Chinese occupation and colonial domination.”
In a statement, the president of the East Turkistan Government in Exile, Mamtimin Ala, offered a similar message.
“There is no sustainable path to protecting the freedoms, human rights, or survival of our people without decolonization and the restoration of East Turkistan’s independence,” Ala stated. “Any framework that leaves our people under the authority of a colonial power that has demonstrated genocidal intent is not a solution. It is a delay of annihilation.”
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