Exiled Uyghur youths in Turkey face hardships as China continues oppression in Xinjiang

Taipei [Taiwan], November 28 : Uyghur youths, who live in exile in Istanbul due to genocide, forced labour and sterilisation of their community in communist China, face enormous economic hardship and trauma.
Citing a recent trip to Turkey with Campaign for Uyghurs, Julie Milisap for Taiwan Times reported that her team had the opportunity to meet with a group of exiled Uyghur youths.
She stated that the crimes against humanity come into even more brutal focus on World Children's Day, observed on November 20.
When pressed, many of the young men revealed that they did not have homes, and were sleeping in internet cafes when they could scrape up the 15 Turkish lira to pay the entrance fee.
One boy shared that his brother had been taken to the concentration camps because he visited him in Turkey.
Several of the youths were reportedly not responding to the conversation, as their gazes were fixed on their hands, twisting in their laps, as several had lost their parents to the Chinese regime's camps, reported Taiwan Times.
"The feeling of dehumanization was palpable. I couldn't breathe as I stared at their faces. The feeling of anger over their circumstances made me feel ill," said Milisap.
Earlier this week, a man was reported desperately trying to unite with his kids after his wife went missing in one of the camps, one of tens of thousands in the Uyghur diaspora who have experienced the pain of missing family members.
World Children's Day was a timely occasion for the realities of the Chinese regime and the genocide of the Uyghur community in Xinjiang to be exposed.
Over 500,000 Uyghur, Kazakh and other Muslim children have been placed in Chinese state-run orphanages while their parents are detained in concentration camps, reported Taiwan Times.
Milisap stated that the attempt to socially engineer the Uyghur community to make it disappear will fail. However in that process, the human cost is unbearably high.
For the last six years, millions of East Turkistan people, mostly of Muslim faith, have been held in concentration camps, prisons and slave labour camps.
According to survivors' accounts, they are being tortured, killed for their organs, raped, sterilised and executed.
Classified documents known as the China Cables, accessed last year by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, threw light on how the Chinese government uses technology to control Uyghur Muslims worldwide.
However, China regularly denies such mistreatment and says the camps provide vocational training. People in the internment camps have described being subjected to forced political indoctrination, torture, beatings, and denial of food and medicine, and say they have been prohibited from practising their religion or speaking their language.