Remembering Urumqi, A Test The World Is Still Failing – OpEd |
September 2025’s massive military parade in Beijing — a spectacle featuring DF-17-class hypersonic systems and J-20 stealth aircraft, and foreign autocrats standing beside Xi — was presented as a message of strength to the world. However, it also served, chillingly, as a cover for silence: while tanks rolled past Tiananmen, independent investigators, survivors, and UN OHCHR (2022) experts continue to document systematic abuses in Xinjiang that require urgent, ongoing scrutiny. The contrast could not be more stark — a state asserting power on the global stage while turning its back on a humanitarian crisis that human rights organisations and UN assessments describe as serious and persistent.
Meanwhile, on 5 July 2009, Uyghur students in Urumqi marched for justice and faced live fire—an atrocity that claimed hundreds of lives and foreshadowed the camps to come. Sixteen years later, the world’s promise of ‘never again’ rings hollow as Beijing’s persecution has expanded into genocide.
Sixteen years after the streets of Urumqi ran red with the blood of peaceful Uyghur students, Xinjiang has become a laboratory of cultural erasure and mass atrocity. In July 2009, unarmed Uyghurs demanding justice were met with bullets and batons—an early sign of the ‘vocational training’ camps that today hold between 1 million and 1.6 million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims under perpetual surveillance, forced labour and coercive sterilisation. These camps are not anomalies but the culmination of a systematic campaign that Beijing now dignifies as counter-terrorism. As the U.S., Canadian and Dutch governments have recognised, the scope and scale of these abuses........