Why Are People Boycotting the 2022 Winter Olympics?
glamour.comthe Washington Post . Survivors of the camps have reported acts of torture, rape, and forced sterilization. Though China to have closed the camps, in 2020 a BuzzFeed News revealed that the government had built “high-security camps—some capable of housing tens of thousands of people” in which to forcibly house Uyghurs. “Uyghurs are basically having their cultural identity destroyed over time,” Peter Irwin, Senior Program Officer at the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP), tells Glamour.If you’re following the Olympics, you know that Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva with her quad jump, and that Leslie Jones’ commentary as the art form it is.
Regular viewers don’t have the same visuals of forced labor, family separations, and life under surveillance in Xinjiang. But most people are connected to the region, which is responsible for the vast majority of in China.“Even though we may never have met someone who is Uyghur, we may never have been to China, each of us owns a t-shirt that likely has cotton that comes from Xinjiang and was likely made by slave labor,” Naomi Kikoler, director of the Center for the Prevention of Genocide at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, this week. “I don’t think we often talk about the level of proximity that we sometimes have to acts of potential genocide.”In response to the treatment of Uyghurs, the U.S.
and nine other countries are carrying out a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 winter Olympics. It’s a symbolic gesture—American , but diplomats won't attend the games.
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