Francis Suarez Has No Idea Who The Uyghurs Are: “What’d You Call It, A ‘Weeble’?”

 Republican Miami Mayor Francis Suarez admitted during an interview with Hugh Hewitt this week that he was completely unaware of one of the largest human rights issues in the world.

Suarez, a long-shot Republican presidential candidate, was asked by Hewitt about the Uyghurs, a minority group in China who are locked up in concentration camps and forced into re-education facilities.

After talking briefly about China, Hewitt asked Suarez, “Will you be talking about the Uyghurs in your campaign?”

“The what?” Suarez responded.

“The Uyghurs,” Hewitt said.

“What’s a Uyghur?” Suarez asked.

 

Hugh Hewitt: “Will you be talking about the Uyghurs in your campaign?”

2024 GOP presidential candidate Francis Suarez: “What's a Uyghur?” pic.twitter.com/AlRkjZCJyK

— The Recount (@therecount) June 27, 2023

Several minutes later, at the end of the interview, Suarez said, “And you gave me homework, Hugh.”

“I’ll look at what a, what was it, what did you call it, a Weeble?” Suarez said laughingly.

“The Uyghurs. You really need to know about the Uyghurs, Mayor,” Hewitt, who was not laughing, responded. “You’ve got to talk about it every day, okay?”

“I'll look at — what’d you call it, a ‘Weeble?’”

— 2024 GOP presidential candidate Francis Suarez on Uyghurs pic.twitter.com/wAW8lGg0IK

— The Recount (@therecount) June 27, 2023

Reports have surfaced in recent years of violent gang rape against the Uyghurs and other religious minorities detained in the Chinese concentration camps in Xinjiang.

Qelbinur Sidik, who was forced to teach inside the camps, made allegations in an interview published by CNN in 2021. Sidik’s story begins by noting that a policewoman told her very early on that she had been assigned to investigate reports of rapes and torture taking place at the facility. Sidik said that the policewoman described to her how the male guards at the camp often bragged while drinking about how they “raped and tortured girls.”

Sidik said that her first encounter with new detainees was approximately 100 men and women who were chained in shackles around their hands and feet. She said that even those that came in physically and mentally strong eventually were broken by the brutal system that the communist Chinese had installed in the camps, where an estimated nearly 2 million religious minorities are being detained. She said that she witnessed “horrific traged[ies]” while working at the camp where women were regularly “crying loudly.”

Another witness, Tursunay Ziyawudun, told CNN that she committed no crime when she was sent to the camps. After a month in the camp, authorities released Ziyawudun, only to arrest her a short time later for a nine-month “nightmare.” Ziyawudun, who is now in the U.S., told CNN that large numbers women were often crammed into small spaces, allowed minimal time to basic facilities like toilets, and were brutally punished for small things like using the facilities for too long.

During an interrogation session, Ziyawudun said that she was beaten so intensely that she passed out. Another time, guards forced her on to a table where they “inserted a stun baton” inside her and “twisted and shocked” her until she “blacked out” from the pain. A couple of weeks later she was ganged raped by several men, an experience she said happened to her multiple times while in the camps.

“They were extremely sadistic, causing pain and damage to the body by beating and smacking my head on the wall,” Ziyawudun said, “It was their way of punishing us.”