Good evening,

Ladies and gentlemen,

Good afternoon. It is my great honor to be here today, standing in solidarity with all of you to remind the free and democratic world that allowing China to host another Olympics is giving China the green-light to continue to commit genocides and crimes against humanity.

People around the world must have heard of China’s ongoing genocide in East Turkistan and religious repression in Tibet. Yet, the world is not sufficiently informed of what is happening in Southern Mongolia.

Southern Mongolia, popularly known as Inner Mongolia, is another nation, actually the first nation, to be occupied and colonized by the Chinese Communist regime since 1949.

Seeing what is happening in Southern Mongolia today, some reporters and journalists asked me whether “Inner Mongolia” is becoming the second “Xinjing”. I told them, “no, Xinjiang is actually becoming the second Inner Mongolia”. It is a wide-spread fear among the Uyghurs and Tibetans that their nations will turn out to be another Southern Mongolia, a nation whose indigenous population was reduced to only 20% of the total population after 7 decades of genocide, ethnic cleansing, population transfer, cultural eradication and environmental destruction.

If we look back at the past 72 years, the Southern Mongolians have experienced at least two waves or two forms of major genocides: One is the large-scale genocide in the late 1960s through the early 1970s. The entire Mongolian population was subjected to torture, rape, indiscriminate killing for just being Mongolian. Estimated 100,000 Mongolians were tortured to death and half million persecuted within the period of two years.

The second major genocide is the ongoing cultural genocide that the government of China is carrying out in Southern Mongolia after the 2020 popular uprising. Speaking Mongolian, wearing Mongolian clothes, and being Mongolian in general is a crime in Southern Mongolia today. Mongolian language is banned in all schools and public occasions altogether; any signs, sculptures, and building that have Mongolian characteristics are taken down and smashed; “Speak Chinese and become a civilized person” is the official slogan; at least 10,000 Mongolians were arrested during the 2020 uprising; a region-wide intensive training called “Training for the Firm Inculcation of Chinese Nationality Common Identity” is carried out across the region, targeting the entire Mongolian population.

50 years ago when China carried out the wholesale genocide against the Southern Mongolians, the world did not speak out; when the Tibetans were subjected to mass killing in the 1959 and 1989, the world did not take any meaningful action; when thousands of Chinese students were massacred in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the world did not care much about it; now the Uyghurs are subjected to a text-book example of genocide, the world is busy issuing free passes to the Chinese regime; when the basic freedom of Hongkong is taken away and Taiwan is threatened to be invaded, the free world is taking a sit-and-see approach; when neighboring nations are bullied, African content and South-Central America are becoming the de facto colonies of China, the free world is busy engaging in negotiation with China; when 138 out of 195 countries on our planet have been engaged by China for the Belt and Road Initiative, the free and democratic world is still not grasping how real, how serious and how eminent the China threat is. What the ever-shrinking free and democratic world is not realizing is when China comes for them, there will be no one left to speak for them.

Thank you.

Enghebatu Togochog

Director of Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center