The leader of a group seeking Uyghur independence from China has asked the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant for Xi Jinping.
Salih Hudayar, the prime minister of East Turkestan’s Uyghur exile government, made the request in a tweet.
His remarks came a day after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Children’s Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova for illegally transferring children from Ukraine to Russia.
The exile government of East Turkestan, which was established in 2004 and is based in Washington, D.C., is not recognized by the United States or other governments around the world.
Exile governments are political groups that claim legitimate sovereignty over a country but are unable to exercise that sovereignty. East Turkestan claims to be the legitimate government of the People’s Republic of China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
Arrest warrant for Xi Jinping
The Uyghur people are a Chinese ethnic minority composed primarily of local Muslims who speak a language similar to Turkish. China has long been accused of genocide against the Uyghur people, with the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights concluding in August that allegations of torture, arbitrary detention, and other human rights violations are “credible.”
“This has included far-reaching, arbitrary and discriminatory restrictions on human rights and fundamental freedoms, in violation of international laws and standard,” the United Nations said at the time while calling on the Chinese government to release Uyghur people “arbitrarily imprisoned.”
‘Absolutely no mercy’
In 2019, The New York Times reported that Xi gave secret directives instructing the Chinese Communist Party to show “absolutely no mercy” to the Uyghur people and other Turkic peoples, which resulted in mass internment, forced labor, and forced sterilization of such groups in China.
China has long tried to assert that Uyghur groups seeking independence are terrorist organizations, decrying a 2021 decision from former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to delist the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement as a terrorist organization.
The East Turkestan claim for independence has roots in two previous iterations of a breakaway Islamic republic that existed in the 1930s and 1940s.
The Turkic Islamic Republic of East Turkestan, based in what is now the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, existed from 1933 to 1934 before being defeated by Chinese warlord Sheng Shicai, who ruled the region for the next decade with Soviet assistance.
During WWII, Sheng Shicai switched allegiances from the Soviet Union to the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party that once operated on the Chinese mainland and is still a major political party in Taiwan, China’s self-governing republic.
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Eventually, the Uyghur people rose up against the forces of the Republic of China, and Sheng Shicai was demoted to become China’s Minister of Agriculture and Forestry before fleeing to Taiwan during the Chinese civil war.
The Second East Turkestan Republic, which lasted from 1944 to 1949, was essentially a puppet state for the USSR, which ended its support for East Turkestan following a treaty signed by China with the Soviet Union in 1945.
“We call on the International Criminal Court to act and hold Chinese leader Xi Jinping accountable for the ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples,” Hudayar said in his statement Saturday.
“The International Criminal Court must uphold justice and fulfill its commitment to ‘Never Again’ by investigating the ongoing genocide and arresting Xi Jinping for his direct role in this Holocaust-like genocide in the 21st century.”
