Sign on to ask your Senator/Representative to co-sponsor the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2019. Enter your name below to sign the letter to Senator Cantwell and Representatives Jayapal, Smith, DelBene and Schrier.
UPDATE: As of 6/20/19 Senator Murray has signed on as a co-sponsor of S 178.

Dear Senator/Representative,

I write to urge your support for the passage of HR 649/S 178 - Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2019.  The Uyghur ethnic minority people of China are currently victims of the world's most massive campaign of cultural genocide (see UN press conference below), according to academics and researchers specializing in China's ethnic policy.

Despite the Chinese government's initial denials, now well documented irrefutable evidence, discovered on China's own government websites, proves the existence, scale, and nature of concentration camps - currently holding  1.5 million Uyghurs, out of a total population of approximately 12 million. Beginning insidiously in the Spring of 2017, the Chinese government covertly launched a systematic campaign against their own citizens using massive surveillance techniques, an unprecedented police presence, and state of the art AI technologies all to target specific populations for indiscriminate internment in detention camps.  

When discovered, the Chinese government claimed they were only removing potentially dangerous people who needed  're-education'.  Increasingly emboldened, the Chinese state has in fact targeted ordinary citizens, including business people. homemakers, musicians, professors, young and old, all without due process.  Observers attest to empty streets and boarded up shops, with now 1 in 6 adults of ethnic background having been interned.  Often taken away in the middle of the night, bewildered and terrified citizens are placed in distant hastily-built well-guarded unmarked facilities.  Similar encampments exist now across the region, where farms and open spaces were only two years prior.

Detainees are crammed into overcrowded facilities where every movement is monitored as they are subjected to relentless brainwashing and torture.  They are forced to memorize and recite political propaganda, venerate Chinese political leaders, denounce their own culture and one another  -- or be punished.  Eye-witness accounts confirm that brain-washing techniques, psychiatric drugs, torture, sexual abuse, malnutrition, and unsanitary conditions are rampant in the camps.  An intensive province-wide religious persecution is also underway, targeting not only the Muslim ethnic minority population but also local Han and minority Christians.  There is growing evidence of medical experimentation in the camps where detainees are forced to drink or swallow unknown substances.

No longer able to deny the existence of the camps, the Chinese government feigns their efforts are to help Uyghurs learn to be good citizens. The current official line is that the facilities are "vocational training institutes." However, minority languages are now banned including the Uyghur language  (though it was the predominant language in the region for decades until two years ago), and minority children are frequently left without guardians as family members are taken away.  The state has provided a solution for thousands of children left behind.  They are now re-naming, retraining, and relocating thousands of Uyghur children into state-run 'orphanages' where a whole generation of children will not know their own names or families, their own culture, their native language, or their history.  They will be citizens of the state without family.  This is the aim of China....and they are well on their way to ethnic cleansing, cultural genocide, and ominously worse, as they attempt to eliminate these ethnic people and their rich and significant history.

This rapidly escalating human rights assault on minorities in NW China reads like a page from World War II history books, which makes it all the more shocking since it is happening today. The unique combination of concentration camps plus high-tech surveillance has created an Orwellian nightmare unprecedented in human history.    This should alarm us on many levels, not the least of which is China's ever-expanding economic role on the world stage.   Their political aims are far broader than their own country, and if the United States is unwilling to speak out now about what is happening to China's own citizens, we can fully expect to see similar scenarios play out in the future, wherever the Chinese government has a foothold.  

By appealing to people of influence we hope to awaken the collective conscience now.   We hope you share the urgent need to alert the world to the unmistakable parallels between the current internment campaign in China's Xinjiang region and the tragic Nazi period.  By taking action now is it possible to envision a climate whereby the camps would no longer be tolerated, and the possibility of actual genocide eliminated? I appeal to you to do everything in your power to not allow another genocide to happen on our watch.  What is unfolding in China is said to be the worst human rights atrocity happening anywhere in the world.  You have authority to help bring pressure on China to demand a cessation of this horrific campaign of ethnic cleansing and to avert a future of even more ominous possibilities.

Please give your support to bring this crisis to an end in whatever constructive way our government may be able to bring change to this tragic situation. Citations: https://jamestown.org/program/evidence-for-chinas-political-re-education-campaign-in-xinjiang/   and https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-xinjiang-rights/15-million-muslims-could-be-detained-in-chinas-xinjiang-academic-idUSKCN1QU2MQ