Amsterdam: The representatives of the East Turkistan Government in Exile (ETGE) and Swedish Uyghur Committee (SUC) on Saturday organised protests in Amsterdam, Netherlands and Stockholm, Sweden, highlighting the atrocities of the Chinese authorities upon the Uyghur community of East Turkistan.

The protests by these Uyghur rights organizations were organised on the sidelines of the commemoration of the Urumqi massacre.

During the protest at Dam Square in Amsterdam, the Foreign Affairs Minister of ETGE, Salih Hudayar urged the Dutch government to put pressure on the Chinese government to immediately stop the ongoing genocide upon the Uyghur community.

"We urge the government to act against China's ongoing campaign of colonization, genocide and occupation. We want them to support the people of East Turkistan to get their rights to independence and right to human dignity. The restoration of east Turkistan's independence is the only way to ensure that their human rights, their resistance and their human dignity are guaranteed" Hudayar said.

The minister further noted that China has refused to implement and respect the fundamentals of the East Turkistani people.

"Unfortunately despite a lot of countries criticizing China and even the United Nations itself stating that China has been committing crimes against humanity, China has refused to implement and respect the fundamentals of the East Turkistani people," he said.

The minister added that the only way to ensure our human dignity is by restoring our independence.

"By doing so they have shown once again that they intend to continue pursuing their objective to completely eradicating the people of East Turkistan. Hence the only way to ensure our human dignity is by restoring our independence", he added.

In another protest by the Swedish Uyghur Committee (SUC) outside the Swedish Parliament, a protestor recalling China's genocidal acts during the 2009 Urumqi massacre said, "On that unfateful day hundreds if not thousands of Uyghurs were massacred and tens of thousands were arrested across East Turkistan. Since then the Chinese occupational forces have implemented an even more oppressive surveillance-driven police state, laying a groundwork for the ongoing genocide".

The protestor further referred to the Chinese so-called operation of 'People's War' in East Turkistan initiated in 2014 which has marked an even more systematic pattern of genocide.

The protester lamented that millions of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic people in China have been subjected to mass internment in concentration camps and prisons, where they endure forced mitigation, indoctrination, torture, rape, organ harvesting and executions.

"Many are enslaved in factories and forced labour camps under abhorrent conditions, and the scope of this genocide is staggering. During 2016-17 the Chinese regime forcibly collected DNA, voice prints and retina scans from over 36 million individuals aged between 12 to 65. Millions of poor men have been forcibly sterilized, and over a million Uyghur children have been separated from their families and have been placed in state-run facilities to be raised as loyal Chinese citizens," he said.

The protester continued that over 60,000 mosques and other cultural sites have been destroyed in an attempt to erase our cultural heritage.

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