Washington must take "concrete action" for Uyghurs, official says

"

" to help the Uyghurs, Salih Hudayar, prime minister of the self-proclaimed government in exile of East Turkestan, told AFP on Thursday, March 18, on the sidelines of a rally for Uyghurs in Washington .

On the first day of a meeting between the heads of the American and Chinese diplomacy in Alaska, Salih Hudayar said not to expect anything "

" from this meeting, but to hope that "

”.

Read also: Uighur camps: China on the dock

"

" added this representative of the Uyghurs, a Muslim and Turkish-speaking minority in northwest China.

According to Salih Hudayar, the United States must boycott the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing, as well as products made in Xinjiang, the region where the Uyghurs live.

Experts estimate that more than a million Uyghurs are or have been detained in political re-education camps in this vast semi-desert territory.

Beijing rejects the term internment camps and speaks instead of "

" intended to help the population find employment and thus remove them from extremism.

The heads of US and Chinese diplomacy arrived Thursday in Alaska for their first face-to-face since the election of Joe Biden.

At the head of the Washington delegation, Secretary of State Antony Blinken used the description of "

" to refer to the repression by the Chinese authorities of the Uyghurs, a term already used by his predecessor Mike Pompeo.

But, in an interview on Wednesday in Tokyo with Nippon TV, Antony Blinken avoided taking a position on the question of a possible boycott of the Beijing Winter Games, contenting himself with saying that he was "

”relating to the human rights situation in China.