Miami Mayor Francis Suarez says he has to do his homework on Uyghurs after telling podcast listeners that diminishing China’s power was crucial in reinforcing U.S. economy.
“We need to depower China of the trillion dollars of annual that we give them in the form of our trade deficit and the stealing of our IP. We need to use that to reinforce our allies in our region, of course our own economy and our supply chain which was exposed during COVID and was basically bottled up by an increasing hostile adversary in China,” he told conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt on Tuesday.
Suarez, who announced he will be running to secure the Republican Party’s presidential nomination earlier this month was on The Hugh Hewitt Show: Highly Concentrated to discuss issues he hopes to tackle as president.
About 13 minutes into the 16 minute segment, Hewitt asks Suarez if he will be talking about Uyghurs in his campaign. Sanchez then asked what a Uyghur was.
Hewitt told Suarez he really needed to know about the Uyghurs, it was something had to talk about everyday.
After returning to the topic a short time later, Suarez told Hewitt he would do his homework and look into what a Uyghur was.
“I will search Uyghurs. I’m a good learner. I’m a fast learner,” Suarez said.
Big swing and a miss on the Uyghurs, Hewitt noted as he bid his farewell to Suarez.
Chinese officials claim the Uyghur population is rife with extremists who pose an existential threat to the country and need to be re-educated. Experts on Xinjiang, a region in northwest China also known as Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and human rights advocates say China is engaged in ethnic cleansing of a minority group that makes up less than 1% of China’s total population.
“I just genuinely don’t know how people don’t know about that … There’s a genocide underway in China. Its a genocide, right. Its a million people. Its a genocide. We need to know about it and talk about it,” Hewitt said.
Mayor Suarez later addressed the controversy on Twitter, stating he was well aware of the suffering faced by the Uyghurs in China.
“They are being enslaved because of their faith. China has a deplorable record on human rights and all people of faith suffer there. I didn’t recognize the pronunciation my friend Hugh Hewitt used. That’s on me.”
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Who are the Uyghurs?
Uyghurs are a Turkic ethnic group native to East Turkestan also known as Xinjiang, which is a region located in northwest China that spans 640,000 square miles. The region borders Mongolia, Russia Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan, according to the Uyghur American Association.
Most Uyghurs primarily speak Uyghur, a Turkish language written in modified Arabic script. Though a small number of Uyghur people are Christian, most practice Sunni Islam.
There are approximately 12 million Uyghurs that live in Xinjiang, though Uyghur scholars in the diaspora contend that the Uyghur population of East Turkistan is much higher, the Uyghur American Association reported.
Uyghurs also do not physically resemble the Han people, the majority population native to the region, because of their European and Southwest and Central Asian ancestry.
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What’s happening to the Uyghur population in China?
Since 2017, the Chinese government has detained more than a million Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim minority groups in “extrajudicial internment camps” and engaged in other crimes against humanity, citing evidence of rape, torture and forced abortion and sterilization, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
The Biden administration has labeled China’s actions “genocide,” and experts say the intent is to destroy Uyghur culture, identity and religion.
Chinese officials have portrayed the detention centers as “vocational education and training centers” – benevolent, state-run schools designed to help stamp out extremism.
China’s mistreatment of the Uyghur people dates back even earlier, they have faced prohibitions on their religious and cultural practices since the formation of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, according to reporting by Smithsonian Magazine.
Over the next decade, Uyghurs began to leave the region. It wasn’t until the 1990s that Uyghur independence gained support in China, Smithsonian Mag reported.
A riot broke out in Xinjiang’s capital in July 2009 that resulted in the deaths of about 200 people and injuries to many others marked the beginning of the genocide, according to the Uyghur American Association.
