‘Flagrant Betrayal’: Organization of Islamic Cooperation Whitewashes China’s Muslim Genocide

The head of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a global coalition of Muslim governments, met with Chinese Communist Party leaders Wednesday to discuss “strengthening” ties to Beijing despite its ongoing genocide of predominantly Turkic Muslims in occupied East Turkistan.

The East Turkistan Government in Exile (ETGE), which represents the local communities oppressed by the Chinese regime, condemned the OIC on Thursday for what it described as a “flagrant betrayal” of the global Islamic community and operating as an “enabler” of the oppression of Muslims.

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Extensive evidence documented by human rights researchers, journalists, and advocates of affected communities has revealed a top-down plan by the Communist Party to eliminate the indigenous communities of East Turkistan under dictator Xi Jinping since at least 2017. Leaked government documents show that Xi ordered his Party in 2018 to “break the lineages, break the roots, break the connections, break the origins” of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other majority-Muslims communities in East Turkistan, which China refers to by the Mandarin-language colonial name “Xinjiang.”

That “breaking” has occurred through the forced sterilization of hundreds of thousands of women; the destruction of cemeteries, mosques, and other culturally significant sites; widespread infanticide and forced abortions; stealing children away from their families to communist “boarding schools;” and the imprisonment of up to 3 million people in concentration camps, where they face communist indoctrination, forced abortions, forced sterilization, torture, slavery, gang rape, and other atrocities.

The OIC, alongside the world’s most prominent Muslim political leaders, have largely ignored the Uyghur genocide. Some OIC members, such as Saudi Arabia, have actively endorsed the genocide of Muslim communities. China has received invitations to premier OIC events despite not having a significant Muslim population — partially due to the Communist Party’s attempts to eliminate said population.

OIC Secretary-General Hissein Brahim Taha met on Wednesday with a senior “Xinjiang” communist leader, Ilzat Ahmatjan, in Saudi Arabia.

“During the meeting, relations between the OIC and the People’s Republic of China and the prospects for strengthening these relations in various fields and the situation of the Muslim community in the People’s Republic of China were discussed, in addition to developments of the Palestinian cause,” the OIC said in an official statement.

The statement did not express any disapproval or concern for the treatment of Muslims in East Turkistan.

The East Turkistan Government in Exile — which advocates for the restoration of sovereignty to the region as it was before mass murderer Mao Zedong’s colonization in 1949 – denounced the OIC for failing to raise its voice in concern for the Muslims of China, particularly the oppressed East Turkistan region.

“The East Turkistan Government in Exile vehemently condemns the OIC’s cooperation with the atheistic Chinese Communist Party and their puppets in occupied East Turkistan,” East Turkistan’s Minister for Culture, Education, and Religious Affairs Adil Ablimit said in a statement. “This flagrant betrayal is a stark violation of Islamic principles, human rights, and moral decency.”

The president of the organization, Mamtimin Ala, urged the OIC to “be a voice for the oppressed Muslims, not an enabler of their oppressors.”

The OIC is far from the only international Muslim group defending China’s eradication of Islam on its soil. Across the border from East Turkistan, the Taliban jihadist organization in Afghanistan has regularly celebrated its friendly ties to the Communist Party, cutting business deals and securing a formal ambassador to Beijing, the first formal recognition the Taliban received since taking over the country in 2021. Taliban terrorists, who claim to be devout Muslims, have not issued any negative statements regarding the genocide of Muslims in China since seizing power.

On Friday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry touted the visit to East Turkistan a delegation of Pakistani think tank experts under the auspices of the Communist Party.

“In 2023 alone, Xinjiang received nearly 400 delegations and groups that consist of over 4,300 visitors,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told reporters. “From Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan, Egypt, France, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, the Arab League, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and other countries and international organizations.”

“They visited many places there. They listened to clergies giving sermons at mosques and the Islamic institutes and visited cultural heritage sites to see how Xinjiang’s traditional culture is protected,” he claimed, maligning the extensive evidence of genocide as “lies” and encouraging China-friendly international groups to participate in visits whitewashing the Uyghur genocide in the future.

The Chinese state-run Global Times newspaper quoted one of the members of the Pakistani delegation, editor Moiz Farooq, complimenting China for its repression of East Turkistan and describing evidence of genocide as “the agenda of the West to show the worst of Xinjiang [sic].”

Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.