Several members of a Chinese ethnic minority group spoke at Georgetown University Wednesday about the Chinese government’s alleged human rights violations against their own people in an effort to inspire student activism on campus.

The presentation was sponsored by the Uyghur Human Rights Coalition (UHRC), an organization dedicated to launching a grassroots movement to protest the Chinese government and its policies. Its members plan to present similar information at six other universities in the Washington, D.C. area with similar information.

Member of the UHRC Mandy Chan (GRD) was involved in bringing the speech to campus.

“The public still largely does not know who we are, and we want them to know so that they can help if they want to,” Chan said.

The Uyghurs are the indigenous Turkic people of the Xinjiang region of Northwest China. Predominately followers of Islam, they have a culture and history distinct from the Chinese they live among. According to Chan, they have disagreed with occurrences in their country for years, but have only recently begun sporadic resistance movements.

“We are suffering under the Chinese, and if we had the means of a strong movement we could finally do something about it,” said one Uyghur, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation by the Chinese government. He is a recent refugee of Xinjiang now studying in America.

According to him, the Chinese government has harshly disciplined any activity that it believes encourages nationalism among the Uyghurs and, in the process, has committed gross human rights violations.

These violations include “arbitrary and summary executions, arbitrary arrests and prolonged detentions without charge or trial, denial of access to lawyers and particularly cruel methods of torture to extract confessions,” he said.

However, Zhang Yuanyuan, press director of the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., denies the claims made in the presentation.

“They are wild, groundless accusations, not based on any fact,” he said. “The Uyghurs are one of many ethnic groups enjoying a happy life under the Chinese government.”

The refugee spoke passionately about the political, religious and cultural persecution he has experienced living in Xinjiang.

“The Chinese say that we have religious freedom, but we are still restricted from practicing our religion whenever we want,” he said.

“That [religious freedom] is what it says in the Constitution, and you can’t find flaws in the Constitution. But China is ruled by the will of the leaders, not by the Constitution.”

He additionally attributed widespread cancer in the Lop Nor area to the testing of nuclear bombs by the government from 1964 to 1996.

Dilara Jappar, a student at George Mason University who formerly lived in Xinjiang, discussed her own experience with discrimination in education and employment.

“When we were in the Chinese schools, they didn’t teach us anything about ourselves, nothing about our country [Xinjiang],” she said. “We almost lost our identity, and that is just a different form of genocide.”

Chan said that the UHRC is trying to promote awareness of these human rights violations throughout the District and at its various universities through several activities. These events, each designed to promote Uyghur culture, include informational booths with food, photos and dancing.