The Council on American-Islamic Relations says it is unacceptable for a U.S. company to build a hotel in a location of an ongoing genocide.
(RFA) The largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy group in the United States has called on the Hilton hospitality company to halt the construction of a hotel on the site of a destroyed Uyghur mosque in northwestern China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).
Recent reporting by the UK newspaper the The Daily Telegraph revealed that Chinese authorities had torn down the mosque in the city of Hotan (in Chinese, Hetian) and were planning to replace it with a large shopping center, including a Hampton, a hotel brand owned by Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc.
Huan Peng Hotel Management Company, Ltd. told the newspaper that the land on which the hotel is being built was purchased at a public auction by a local landowner in 2019. The Chinese company signed a contract with him in August 2020 to develop a Hampton hotel.
RFA’s Uyghur service confirmed that the destroyed mosque was the Duling mosque in central Hotan, a city of 409,000 people in southwestern Xinjiang.
On June 15, Edward Ahmed Mitchell, national deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), wrote a letter to Christopher Nassetta, chief executive officer of Virginia-based Hilton Worldwide, calling on the company to “stand on the right side of history by announcing that Hilton will be canceling this project and ceasing all operations in the Uyghur region of China until its government ends its persecution of millions of innocent people.”
In a telephone interview with RFA, Mitchell said that opening a hotel in a place where a genocide is occurring is immoral and illegal.
The U.S. State Department in January designated abuses in the region were part of a campaign of genocide. The parliaments of Belgium, the Czech Republic, Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Lithuania have passed motions determining that China’s policies in the XUAR constitute genocide.
Authorities in the XUAR are believed to have held up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in a vast network of internment camps since early 2017. China says they are vocational training centers to combat radicalism and prepare young Uyghurs for employment and it stridently rejects genocide accusations.
“Hilton has got to do the right thing, they have got to cancel this project, Mitchell said. “If they continue with the project, they are being complicit in a genocide. Simple as that.”