Throwing pies and posing as Chinese President Xi Jinping, activists staged protests inside and outside Volkswagen’s shareholder meeting on Wednesday over the German automaker’s alleged use of Uyghur forced labor in Xinjiang, where it has a plant. joint venture.
Outside the room, the activists wore a bobblehead Xi’s mask and a flat paper mask of Volkswagen CEO Oliver Blume, who were arm in arm. The Xi figure held a metal ring attached to a chain leading to two handcuffed people representing Uyghur workers in blue workers’ uniforms.
Behind them, World Uyghur Congress activists held large banners reading: “Camps, forced labor, family separations: VW’s major shareholders in Lower Saxony must not keep silent about crimes against Uyghurs,” referring to the location. from the Volkswagen headquarters.
“Genocide of the Uyghurs! VW has to withdraw from East Turkistan!” read another sign, a reference to the name the Uyghurs call their homeland in present-day Xinjiang.
Inside the showroom where shareholders gathered, other protesters, including a woman who was topless and had “dirty money” painted on her back, yelled at executives and waved a banner reading: “End forced labor.” of the Uyghurs,” according to Reuters. Other activists expressed concern about climate change.
At one point, an activist threw a cake at company executives, one of whom was speaking at the podium, the video shows.
After the interruption, security personnel escorted the activists out of the auditorium.
controversial joint venture
Activists are upset that Volkswagen has a joint-venture factory with its Chinese partner SAIC Motor Corp. in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
China has come under harsh international criticism for its serious abuses of the rights of the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs, including forced labour.
The US government and several Western parliaments, including the German Bundestag, have declared the abuses to amount to genocide or crimes against humanity.
Volkswagen has defended the plant, where workers now carry out quality checks on assembled vehicles, saying it is a typical joint venture operation in China and there have been no signs of mistreated workers.
The Berlin director of the World Uyghur Congress, Gheyyur Qurban, read a statement at the shareholder meeting, briefing corporate executives on China’s efforts to try to eliminate the Uyghur population in Xinjiang through intrusive surveillance, detention in camps of internment and other rights abuses in a way that no one from the outside realizes.
“In the middle of this dystopia is Volkswagen,” he said, adding that the Volkswagen plant that is part of the joint venture operates in the vicinity of more than 20 detention camps.
“This makes it the only automaker in the world with a presence in the region,” Qurban said. “Volkswagen tirelessly emphasizes that it will not tolerate any violation of human rights at this plant.”
Qurban then directed questions at Blume, asking how Volkswagen can dismiss human rights violations at the Urumqi plant if it has no direct influence over it and what checks the company has taken to ensure no human rights violations, including forced labor, take place. . there.
China has said the camps were vocational training centers meant to prevent religious extremism and terrorism in the troubled region, and are now closed.
Hanno Schedler, a consultant for genocide prevention and the responsibility to protect at the Society for Threatened Peoples, said his human rights group wants Volkswagen to close the Urumqi plant because the working conditions of Uyghur workers inside are unknown. “an open-air prison” in Xinjiang.
“Today we are here to show Volkswagen, but also the German public, that it is important that a company like Volkswagen with its big involvement, its big commitment in China and in East Turkistan, Xinjiang, has a special responsibility to fight the genocide. fight against family separations, fight against sterilization, the forced sterilization of women, and fight against forced labor,” he said.
Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.
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