Uyghurs In East Turkestan Face Forced Starvation

Uyghurs in East Turkestan are facing systematized forced starvation under China’s so called “Zero Covid” lockdown. The situation is extremely urgent. TW: Distressing videos and images.

Genocide Under the Guise of Covid Lockdown

Uyghurs and other Turkic speaking people in Chinese occupied East Turkestan have been starving under China’s systemized, forced starvation scheme since early August 2022. Under the guise of the “Zero Covid Lockdown”, the Chinese government is continuing its genocide on Uyghurs by imprisoning them in so-called “quarantine centers”, confining them in their homes, and allegedly confiscating food directly from their kitchens and refrigerators. Life is not sustainable under such duress, especially for children and the elderly, who are dying daily.

Risking Lives To Release Videos

Videos of this brutality have surfaced on the Chinese social media platform, Douyin, and have emotionally devastated the entire Uyghur diaspora. Members of the Uyghur diaspora believe that Uyghur people in East Turkestan risked their lives to release these videos of a population at the brink of starvation. Many in the diaspora fear that the lives of their family members are in danger due to the extreme lockdown measures in the region. The global Uyghur diaspora is protesting and demanding that the global community pressure China to stop this new form of genocide – forced starvation which is carried out under the guise of keeping the coronavirus infection rates in check.

For the last fifty days, Uyghurs in Ghulja (a city of roughly a half-million mainly Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims) have been releasing videos on Douyin (the Chinese version of Tik-Tok). These videos contain tragic scenes of hungry and sick children; Uyghur residents’ angry confrontations with community cadres as they demand food; street protests against the lockdown and forced starvation; elderly people in critical condition without care; unhygienic quarantine camps; and cases of fatalities caused by the extreme quarantine.

Forbidden From Working

Starting from early August 2022, Uyghur residents in Ghulja, Turpan, Korla, Hotan, Kashgar, and several other cities in East Turkestan have been forced to follow the government mandated stay at home orders. Because they are forbidden from going to work, they are dependent on community cadres to supply them with food and medicine. This enforced lockdown has been imposed despite low Covid infection rates in the area.

Fresh Food Confiscated as “Not Disinfected”

A series of videos from Ghulja features parents stating that children are starving despite repeated pleas to their local Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials.

Some videos show the deaths of children who could not get medical attention due to confinement at home. Others show empty refrigerators and pantries in Uyghur homes after food was forcibly removed, having been declared “not disinfected items”. In some cases, fruits and vegetables from the local orchards and farms were destroyed as “not disinfected items.” There are also videos which highlight that livestock has been killed, also labeled “not disinfected.”

Videos of Suffering

A large percentage of Uyghur residents are being forced to live in extremely unhygienic and crowded quarantine centers where they are at increased risk of Covid infection. Family members have been separated against their will.

In Douyin videos, we have seen children who were left alone after their parents were detained. Some of these children risked their lives climbing the outside walls of their apartment buildings to reach neighbors’ apartments and seek help.

Three children starved for three days without food. According to their father, they have not been eating anything. Extracted from DouYIn by Zumrat Dawut.

One video features a 16-year-old girl experiencing a medical emergency and hysterically crying for her mother, who is gone, as she was taken to a Quarantine center.

Many videos feature crops and fruits that were ruined because Uyghur people could not harvest them in a timely manner. These farmers and villagers will consequently face severe financial difficulties and food shortage in the near future.

Several of these videos feature the protest scene of Uyghurs in the Qara Dong neighborhood of the city of Ghulja. Ghulja has been suffering under an extreme lockdown that was implemented earlier than other cities, and has gone on for longer. According to Radio Free Asia, 617 people who broke the lockdown to peacefully protest against the forced starvation, were arrested. Even the foods donated from Turpan and Hotan to Ghulja failed to reach Uyghur homes due to the restrictions of the government.

In Korla, CCP community officials are welding doors of Uyghur houses

Inadequate Reaction From Global Media

So far, the forced manmade starvation happening to Uyghurs and other Turkic speaking peoples in East Turkestan has attracted some attention from global media such as the New York Times, The Telegraph, ABC News, and several other media channels. However, in light of the severity of this forced starvation on the Uyghur population, the reaction from the global community has been altogether inadequate.

Call For an Open Source Intelligence Team

Adrian Zenz is known for revealing the Xinjiang Police Files – a group of documents hacked from Chinese law enforcement, which contain the faces of thousands of Uyghur detainees in China’s prison camps. Regarding the forced starvation of the Uyghurs, Zenz recently stated, “Uyghurs are in the face of what appear to be the depiction of utter desperation and even death amid a ruthless Covid lockdown. Years of oppression left Uyghurs in the region utterly helpless.” 

Adrian Zenz has called on the Uyghur diaspora to create an OSINT (Open Source Intelligence Team) in order to  geolocate, transcribe, triangulate, and verify these Douyin videos released from East Turkestan.

He stated, “This atrocity will have no end, and such work (the creation of an OSINT team by the Uyghur diaspora) should be planned as a longhaul strategy.”

Editor’s note: We ask anyone with these skills to get in touch with serwi@justiceforall.org

A little girl from Ghulja crying due to food shortage (extracted from DouYin by Zumrat Dawut)

“Food Doesn’t Go Down Our Throats”

Justice For All / Save Uyghur team lead, Serwi Huseyin stated, “The entire Uyghur diaspora is shaken by this new iteration of genocide; systemized forced manmade starvation in Ghulja and other cities in East Turkestan. Earlier we were worried about the wellbeing of our arbitrarily detained family members in China’s prison camps. Now we are worrying about the wellbeing of our family members who are lucky enough to be at their homes. Food doesn’t easily go down our throats nowadays because our loved ones may be starving at this moment.”

Since 2014, China has been committing genocide in East Turkestan, killing millions of Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples by locking them up in concentration prison camps, conducting medical experiments, harvesting organs, forced abortion of babies, sterilization of women, and even separating children from their parents and locking them up in state-run orphanages.

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Stand Against Forced Uighur Starvation

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Interview with Camp Survivor Zumrat Dawut

Zumrat Dawut, a former concentration camp detainee, has been saving Douyin videos posted by Uyghurs in East Turkestan before they are deleted by government censorship, and bringing them to the attention of the global community. Justice For All interviewed her to collaborate with Telegram to highlight CCP forced starvation on Sep, 12th, 2022. The following is a transcript of the entire interview.  We hope it will help supporters of the Uyghur cause obtain a better idea about China’s hidden agenda of using the so-called “Covid lockdown” to eliminate the Uyghur population.

*[The following interview has been slightly edited solely for the purpose of providing clarity in language]

Interview Begins:

1. What do you know about the situation of people being locked down currently in Ghulja and in the rest of East Turkestan? When did you first notice these videos on Douyin?

In East Turkestan, the CCP has locked down many cities under the “Zero Covid” policy. Ghulja City suffered the most with quarantine restrictions. Because Ghulja is a tourist attraction, CCP locked down the city with the excuse that tourists brought COVID into the city. It’s the first city that went under lockdown.

According to Chinese media, with 20 suspected Covid patients without symptoms, and two confirmed infection cases — such a small ratio — they locked down the entire region. With this lockdown, they confined the entire population in their homes, no matter if their homes were apartments  or single family houses. They even welded their doors.

There are no emergency solutions or preparedness, even if there are fires or an earthquake, or floods (recently Kashgar City has experienced floods similar to Pakistan), there won’t be any help for the locked up residents. This situation has continued for more than 50 days now.

Trash was left in the neighborhoods and was not taken care of  properly.

In the beginning officials offered residents foods with extremely high prices. In some cases, even if residents are willing to pay for groceries with such an extremely high price, they have to tell the community cadres 10 days prior.

At first, they delivered the food to their doors, but later on, they did not deliver these foods and groceries directly through doors. Instead they made people prepare their own ropes, and forced people to pull up their foods. People made ropes by tearing their bedsheets, and such scenes were shared on Douyin. People complied with this policy, but  food was not delivered to them in a timely manner, and they always delayed it.

The people who have chronic ailments, such as people who have to go to hospital for blood dialysis, vulnerable populations, elderly people, and infants and children, suffer the most.

All businesses are closed, people are not allowed to go out, and as a result, mothers could not buy infant formulas, and community officials failed to bring medicine for the elderly people. Somehow adults can endure starvation by eating only bread, but children, infants, the elderly, and chronic disease patients fell sick during this forced starvation. People have hung themselves due to starvation, because they are fed up with both starvation and humiliation.

The CCP government did not consider the possible emergency situations at all, and confined the residents in their homes. Uyghur people released videos on Douyin, and I extracted them as soon as they were released. Now the government has banned such videos strictly, and issued a warning on the news channels that releasing videos about lockdown will be viewed as threatening national security and that they will be strictly punished. There are cases where they have arrested some people who release such videos.

I noticed that the lockdown started in the beginning of August and it has been ongoing for two months. Ghulja was the first one. Now the cities suffering most are Hotan, Korla, and Turpan. People from Turpan rely on their grape business to make a living , but with the lockdown they failed to transfer their grapes to the drying stations. Note that during the Wuhan lockdown, they forced Uyghurs to donate money and go to Wuhan to help. But during the lockdown in East Turkestan, Han citizens failed to give any help.

2. Why do people not have enough food to survive?

 Chinese authorities abruptly initiated the lockdown without any prior notice, and residents failed to prepare for the lockdown. They did not allow farmers in the villages to harvest their fruits and crops. Uyghurs suffered from starvation during the lockdown and they will also suffer economically in the upcoming days. Businesses and farming were all stopped, Uyghurs lost their profit. The CCP removed foods from residents’ fridges saying that “your food has Covid virus and has not gone through the disinfection process.” The officials killed livestock, as if livestock carry the virus. They delivered rotten vegetables at a very high price. And they gave vegetables and fruits to livestock, claiming that they did not go through the disinfection process. They also sold the donated food to people of Ghulja at a high price.

3. To what extent are people able to communicate with the world outside other than through these videos? Do you know anyone directly who is in this situation in Ghulja?

The videos released on Douyin only represent the tip of the iceberg. After the release of these videos, it only takes 15 minutes for the CCP government to filter and inspect. Many of such videos were deleted. When I go back to a specific Douyin account to examine the demographic information, I always find that the video has already been deleted. We lost a lot of quarantine scenes because they were removed by the state very fast. They program the app with sensitive words and phrases which lead to deletion, and as a result we missed a lot of people’s stories. We only got the videos from the ones who were fed up with their lives and prepared for everything with bravery.

Many people silently swallow their anger and misery in fear of the CCP. But still the videos that we took from Douyin and showed the world are enough to expose the forced starvation in the region to the world.

Videos Extracted From Douyin Bt Zumrat Dawut