Lack of attention given to Uyghurs’ situation is disturbing: Reports

Levitt believes that the world’s indifference, inaction and silence towards the persecution of Uyghurs can be deadly for the victims.

As per the leaked top-secret intelligence assessment from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) on Chinese government foreign interference in Canada, CSIS “has taken specific actions to target Canadian MPs,” (notably Conservative MP Michael Chong), linked to the February 2021 parliamentary vote condemning Beijing’s oppression of Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities, reports ANI.

According to ANI reports, during the last Parliament, while serving as an MP and chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the writer, Michael Levitt, raised the issue of the Uyghurs and advocated imposing Magnitsky sanctions to hold gross human rights abusers, like China, to account.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which are already notorious for widespread human rights abuses in Tibet and Hong Kong, are doubtless delighted that the minority it persecutes most — the Uyghurs — receives short shrift from foreign journalists and politicians.

The Uyghurs, a mainly Muslim and Turkic-speaking minority group in China, have long suffered from the CCP’s discriminatory actions. Numbering around 10 million, they live in the country’s northwestern province, known officially as Xinjiang, Levitt wrote in Toronto Star.

The CCP, in recent years, has increased its repression of the Uyghurs, which includes state-imposed restrictions on religious freedom, language rights, cultural expression and freedom of movement. Many experts denounce it as genocidal.

Since 2017, the Chinese government has detained more than a million Uyghurs in what it calls “re-education camps” and subjected those not detained to extensive surveillance, religious restrictions, forced labour and involuntary sterilization, reports ANI.