The quoted titles are of reports by Human Rights Pulse on the findings of the Uyghur Tribunal, an unofficial body that conducted three series of hearings in 2021 in the UK on the Chinese state’s crimes against the Uyghurs. The hearings were chaired by Geoffrey Nice, who had worked for the international criminal tribunal that prosecuted former Serbian president Slobodan Milošević.
It is known that Chinese functionaries are murdering Uyghurs. What is not known, according to Samuel Pitchford’s reporting for HRP, is exactly how many are being murdered and how systematically. On day three of the series of hearings held in June 2021, investigators learned:
The guards beat Gulbahar Jelilova so harshly that she had to be taken to the camp hospital. While there, she saw two young women in orange uniforms. A fellow patient told her they were being taken “to sleep”. When Jelilova naively asked why they could not sleep in their rooms, the patient explained they were being put to sleep “forever” by lethal injection. Later, Jelilova witnessed a female inmate being beaten to death. The testimony heard by the Uyghur Tribunal today indicates Uyghurs are being murdered in the camp system, though the scale of the killings is unknown….
Yesterday, Omar Bekali said seven-to-ten men disappeared from his cell of 40 each week (he did not know if they were killed). Today, Mihrigul Tursun testified to seeing nine women die from their injuries out of her cell of 60 over the course of two months. Jelilova, in another camp, noted that after being medically examined, women were put into groups. The younger women usually disappeared shortly afterwards. Jelilova believes they were taken away for their organs to be harvested, a common belief in the camps.
On the fourth day, Ethan Gutmann of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation testified about his interviews with Uyghur and Kazakh refugees. Although they had been held in different camps, all independently reported the same kinds of disappearances described by Jelilova: “Men and women, usually aged 25-31, were taken in the middle of the night, following a medical examination.”
In his testimony, Gutmann estimated that the Chinese state performed some 60,000 to 100,000 transplant surgeries in 2016 and that, annually, 25,000 to 50,000 Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims are murdered for their organs. He said that Chinese policy toward the Uyghurs is summed up by the sentiment that “we will assimilate them if we must, but we will kill them if we can.”
