Officials of the East Turkistan Government in Exile (ETGE) and members of the Uyghur community staged protests across the United States and Canada, calling for global accountability and urgent international action over what they described as China’s “ongoing genocide” in East Turkistan, also known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China.

These protests were held on Sunday in Washington and Edmonton, Canada, to mark the 36th anniversary of the 1990 East Turkistan Uprising, also known as the “Baren Uprising”, which the ETGE said was “one of the most significant acts of national resistance” against China’s “colonial occupation” of the region.

According to the ETGE, thousands of East Turkistanis rose up on April 5, 1990, in Baren Township of Xinjiang to protest China’s “genocidal enforcement of coercive population control policies”, under which it alleged that over 250 Uyghur women were subjected to forced abortions.

The exiled authorities claimed that the Chinese authorities responded by deploying over 20,000 troops, helicopter gunships, and heavy artillery, killing more than 3,000 people and arresting over 7,600 more, following the uprising.

Calling the Baren Uprising a legitimate act of “anti-colonial resistance”, the ETGE said, “Mass imprisonment, forced labour, coercive population control, family separation, and the systematic destruction of Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic cultures continue across occupied East Turkistan.”

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