Winter Olympics Uyghur Solidarity Gathering
Our Peace Catalyst team in Seattle recently hosted its first live peacemaking event in over two years. Two local churches (The Practicing Church and Holy Trinity Edmonds) combined their efforts to host the local Uyghur American community in a community-wide Listening Event on the last day of the Winter Olympics. The timing was in solidarity to the worldwide Uyghur community whose concerns about holding an Olympic games in a nation where genocide is happening in real time were ignored by the IOC. The Chinese state-sponsored human rights violations taking place are breathtaking in scope. From grandparents in their 70s and 80s to young teenagers, over 1.8 million people have been taken from their homes and forced to live in what can only be called concentration camps. The USA and several other countries responded to the genocide with a diplomatic boycott of the Olympic games.
Ever since the Chinese state-sponsored genocide began in earnest in 2017, Uyghur Americans have been cut off from their relatives back in their homeland. At the Seattle event, several members of one family spoke eloquently about the pain of not knowing the safety of their loved ones. In written feedback after the event, one of our participants wrote, “This event was the first opportunity I had to hear from Uyghurs in person and meet them. It is chilling to read the stories of torture, abuse, and genocide online, and even to learn about it from Uyghurs via Zoom calls. However, the impact is far more when you are sitting in the same room. Their testimonies were a reminder that the Uyghur genocide is not something far off on the other side of the world; it is here and now. The call to love our neighbors doesn't stop at our physical neighbors because they are impacted by the unknown circumstances of their loved ones in China.”
In prepared remarks, our staff peacebuilder Bill Clark spoke to the 70+ people gathered about two articles that impacted him and many others. Chamath Palihapitiya, a minority owner of the NBA's Golden State Warriors, said in a podcast that he co-hosts and that aired on Saturday Jan. 15th that "nobody cares about what's happening to the Uyghurs." Two days later, on Jan 17th , the BBC published an article describing how the Burton Corporation, famous for their snowboards and sponsorship of elite athletes, is helping the Chinese government open up the Uyghur and Kazakh homeland to winter sports. As a company, they were demonstrating their agreement with Chamath’s words. We think it is wrong and immoral for an international company like Burton to make a profit in a region that has concentration camps, forced labor factories, and hundreds of thousands of people picking cotton against their will. Read more at Winter Olympics 2022: China sells Xinjiang as a winter sports hub - BBC News
Will you join us and consider signing the open letter to Burton and adding your voice to the growing call to this company not to value profits over the Uyghur people? https://openletter.earth/open-letter-to-the-burton-corporation-6ed8340f
