UK lawmaker Alicia Kearns has expressed her deep concerns about the ongoing suppression and genocide of the Uyghur Muslim community in Xinjiang, China. Chairing a foreign committee meeting in the UK on Tuesday, Kearns listened to the harrowing experiences of Yalkun Uluyol, an exiled Uyghur rights activist, who detailed the atrocities faced by his relatives in China.
In a post on X, Kearns shared, “@Yalkun Uluyol shared his story and that of his family with the Foreign Affairs Committee. It is a heartbreaking insight into the reality faced by the #Uyghur people, one of loss, forced separation, grief, and the ache of the unknown. Genocide is taking place in #Xinjiang.”
Uluyol, recounting his last visit to China in 2016, highlighted the mass detentions that prevented him from revisiting. He shared the distressing news of his family members’ experiences, revealing, “The first member of my Uyghur family who was taken for re-education was taken in September 2016. Furthermore, my father disappeared in June 2018.”
The activist expressed his struggle to trace his father, discovering in 2020 that he was held in a re-education camp in their hometown and had been labeled untrustworthy for having relatives abroad. Uluyol emphasized the lack of communication with his family back home, taking two years to confirm his father’s location in a detention camp.
Detailing the strict security imposed on the Uyghur community, Uluyol shared a personal incident, stating, “The day I got married, I had shared some photos of myself on a Chinese social media, resulting in the forceful interrogation of all my relatives back home.”
He highlighted the UK government’s acknowledgment of genocide in April 2021 and the foreign affairs committee’s inquiry, noting no positive changes since. Uluyol recounted additional atrocities inflicted by Chinese authorities on his relatives abroad, emphasizing the lack of improvement in human rights violations in Xinjiang.
“This is just my storyline of witnessing the milestones of worsening conditions in the region. From Mass detentions to state-imposed labor transfers, to unjust imprisonments and transgressional repressions added to the inability to communicate back home. I can dive further into mass imprisonment in labor camps. But nothing has improved as of yet, in terms of human rights violations in my hometown”, he said.
(Inputs from ANI)