Approximately 11 million Uyghurs – a mostly Muslim, Turkic-speaking ethnic group – live in the northwestern region of Xinjiang in China, also named East Turkestan by Uyghurs, a region with a total population of 22 million, with Uyghurs in the majority. Since 2017, the year the mass internment campaign was launched, an estimated one to two million Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples in the region were imprisoned by the Chinese government. Those not detained were subjected to intense surveillance, forced labor, forced sterilizations and religious restrictions, among other persecutions.

The United States governments and several other foreign parliaments such as Lithuania, the United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium, the Czech Republic and France, have
recognized and described the Chinese communist party’s actions in East Turkestan as a genocide. The UN human rights office’s report of august from last year, 2022, considered their violations as “crimes against humanity”. Chinese officials have claimed they have not infringed on Uyghurs’ rights calling the detention camps “vocational education and training centers”.

In this lecture, we welcome a french (non-uyghur) member in charge within the Uyghur European Institute and a research-student in social sciences specialized in Uyghur studies. He will adress the genocidal process in the Uyghur region, more specifically the involvement of concentration camps, forced sterilizations and forced labor in the social and biological death of the Uyghurs and other turkic muslim populations in the region. How do they constitute the underlying elements to the ongoing Uyghur and other turkic muslim populations’ genocide?

After a didactic and socio-historical approach of the colonial and repressive project of the People’s Republic of China in East Turkestan, we will discuss the dislocation of social ties, the forced deportation and the biological destruction of part of the population at the core of the genocide.