Turkey on Tuesday summoned China’s ambassador after his office took to social media to denounce two top Turkish politicians over their criticism of Beijing’s crackdown on Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
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The Chinese embassy said it “strongly” condemned Good Party leader Meral Aksener and Ankara mayor Mansur Yavas for posting tweets commemorating a deadly April 1990 conflict between Uyghur separatists and Chinese government forces.
Accounts of those events vary but they are believed to have been followed by mass arrests of Uyghurs, tens of thousands of whom have since taken refuge in Turkey.
Aksener, who forms part of the right-wing opposition to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, tweeted that Turks “will not remain silent to the oppression.”
Turks will fight for the “absolute independence” of the Uyghurs’ self-proclaimed republic of East Turkestan, Aksener said.
Yavas, who is a leading member of the main opposition CHP party, tweeted the Turks “feel the pain of the massacre in East Turkestan as if it happened today”.
In its account of the 1990 standoff, Amnesty International said “protests and rioting, reportedly led by members of an Islamic nationalist group, resulted in many deaths”
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