US House Panel On China Highlights Abuse Of Uyghurs In Second Hearing

Washington
A new U.S. congressional committee on China held its second hearing on Thursday, highlighting what Washington says is an ongoing genocide against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in China’s Xinjiang region.
Rights groups accuse Beijing of abuses, including forced labor, mass surveillance and having placed 1 million or more Uyghurs – a mainly Muslim ethnic group – in a network of internment camps in Xinjiang.
Congressman Mike Gallagher, Republican chairman of the House of Representatives Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, ahead of the hearing that the situation in Xinjiang should serve as a warning for what the world would look like under CCP leadership.
China vigorously denies abuses in Xinjiang and says it established vocational training centers to curb terrorism, separatism and religious radicalism.
The hearing is the latest in a series of events planned for the next two years while Republicans control the House to convince Americans that they should care about competing with China, and to selectively decouple the countries’ economies. The House panel heard from Gulbahar Haitiwaji, a Uyghur woman who, speaking through a translator, recounted her experience in what she said were years spent in camps where she faced abuse and forced patriotic education.
Qelbinur Sidik, an ethnic Uzbek assigned as a teacher in one such camp, also spoke through a translator, describing prison-like conditions in which she said detainees faced torture and interrogation. Both women managed to travel to Europe where they now reside. Testimony was also heard from Nury Turkel, a prominent Uyghur American lawyer, Adrian Zenz, a German researcher who has sought to document the extent of internment camps in Xinjiang, and Naomi Kikoler from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.