Human rights activists and Uyghur organization leaders staged a protest on Monday in Paris to condemn President Emmanuel Macron’s enthusiastic welcome to China’s genocidal dictator Xi Jinping.
Xi landed in Paris on Sunday for an extended tour of Europe also including stops in Russia-friendly Serbia and one of China’s most eager partners in the predatory Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Hungary. In France, Xi held a trilateral meeting on Monday with Macron and European Union President Ursula von der Leyen that focused primarily on economic cooperation. Reports from the meeting indicated that neither Macron nor von der Leyen address the rampant human rights abuses Xi has commanded the Communist Party to commit in China, most prominently the deliberate extermination of the Uyghur people of occupied East Turkistan.
Groups representing the Uyghurs condemned Macron from celebrating France’s ties to China and failing to mention the ongoing genocide of their people. Groups representing the Tibetan community, which has also faced decades of occupation and ethnic cleansing, unfurled a banner reading “Free Tibet” on the Boulevard Périphérique in Paris, where Xi’s motorcade passed on the way to meeting Macron.
French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte Macron welcome Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan at Elysee Palace in Paris, France on 6 May 2024. (Umit Donmez/Anadolu via Getty Images)
China has for decades engaged in rampant human rights abuses against Uyghurs in East Turkistan, a former republic seized by communist mass murderer Mao Zedong and currently governed as a colony by Beijing, which refers to it as the “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region” (XUAR). Under Xi, however, that abuse expanded into a systematic genocide in which millions of people were forced into concentration camps, tens of thousands of women have faced forced sterilization, and the state has created a slave network in which it sells Uyghurs to factories supplying Western companies, where they are forced to labor in horrific conditions.
The major action in Paris denouncing Macron on Monday was a protest organized by the East Turkistan Government-in-Exile (ETGE) and the Uyghur Association of France in the Place de la Madeleine.
Mirqedir Mirzat, the deputy prime minister of the ETGE and president of the Uyghur Association of France, issued remarks demanding that Macron “unequivocally condemn” the genocide.
“As we speak, these camps are being transformed into formal prisons, an ominous sign that China intends no end to its genocidal policies,” Mirzat asserted.
“Recognizing the occupation and colonization of East Turkistan as the core issue, France must advocate for East Turkistan’s right to external self-determination, respecting its own historical commitment to the principle of self-determination,” Mirzat concluded.
In anticipation of Macron’s meetings with Xi on Sunday, the World Uyghur Congress issued a statement demanding Macron acknowledge the genocide during his time with Xi.
“France has the obligation to raise the continuous human rights abuses committed by the Chinese regime inside East Turkistan, Tibet, and Hong Kong, as well as across Europe with China’s growing transnational repression,” the president of the gorup, Dolkun Isa, asserted. “The Uyghur genocide must be raised publicly by Macron, urging Xi Jinping to end the ongoing erasure of our people, reflecting the resolution adopted by the Assemblé Nationale recognizing the Uyghur genocide.”
Groups supporting Tibet – south of East Turkistan and facing decades of policies to erase the local language, religion, and culture – unfurled a banner in Paris on Monday condemning Xi.
“Today, we confronted Xi with our message that his time is up and Tibet will be free as he was forced to drive under our banner and Tibetan flags,” Tenzin Yangzom, campaigns coordinator at International Tibet Network, said of the act of protest, according to Radio Free Asia (RFA). “President Macron and European leaders should not be rolling out the red carpet for a man guilty of genocide.”
No public statements out of the Élysée Palace indicates that Macron acknowledged the genocide or Xi’s deplorable human rights record. Macron himself shared various photos of himself alongside Xi on social media, celebrating decades of diplomatic relations with China and calling for increased economic ties to Beijing.
“Trade and market access, fair competition and investment, the situation in Ukraine and the Middle East: relations between China and Europe, our coordination, are of decisive importance,” Macron wrote in Chinese text on his Twitter account Monday.
Human rights experts have argued that expanding trade ties with China without exposing a market to human rights abuses, particularly slavery, is impossible, as the Communist Party does not allow due diligence in auditing supply chains.
In addition to the meeting with von der Leyen, Macron hosted a lavish dinner for Xi on Monday night. The French government also prepared an elaborate equestrian display to honor Xi at the presidential palace.
Dilnur Reyhan, a French-Uyghur sociologist, condemned Macron in a scathing column published on Tuesday by Le Monde, declaring him indifferent to unimaginable human suffering.
“France, in the name of a proclaimed reopening of the country after the [Wuhan coronavirus] years and a policy of rapprochement with China, hosts the architect and prime instigator of the genocide targeting my people and inexorably destroying them,” Reyhan wrote, continuing:
So, our nights riddled with nightmares, our dislocated genealogies, our sense of powerlessness and our fear of being erased from the history of humanity are meaningless to Macron. To invite the genocidal ogre to the Elysée Palace, to share a “more personal” time with him, all to improve our trade relations and celebrate 60 years of “diplomatic friendship” makes for a peculiar Ash Wednesday supper!
Reyhan noted that the French national legislature recognized the Uyghur persecution as a genocide in 2022, making Macron’s silence also offensive to the will of the French people who elected their lawmakers.