Hotel on Uighur mosque site: US Muslim groups make Hilton boycott call

Virginia: A group of 40 Muslim-American civil rights organisations in the US has launched a worldwide campaign against the Hilton group of hotels for its reported plan to build a hotel on the site of a Uighur mosque bulldozed by authorities in China's Xinjiang region.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said that it has decided to make a Hilton boycott call across the world after an indirect negotiation with the Hotel Group to cancel their hotel project on the site turned futile.

Announcing the global boycott campaign against Hilton at a news conference held in front of its headquarters in Virginia, Nihad Awad, executive director of CAIR, said though it was an individual's choice where to live on travel, do business meetings or hold events, weddings or banquets, the Hilton Group's hotel proposal is nothing but a human rights violation that contributes to the destruction of Uighur culture and faith.

China is said to be on a constant and deliberate campaign to obliterate the Uighur Muslim population by mass confinement, forcible sterilisations, separating children from families and destroying religious and cultural identities. The site that has prompted the boycott was a mosque in Hotan prefecture, destroyed in 2018 which Hilton plans to turn into a Hampton Inn hotel.

A bipartisan US congressional commission called in July urged Hilton Worldwide not to allow its name to be associated with the controversial hotel project, reported Al Jazeera.

About 16,000 mosques in 900 Xinjiang locations were partially or completely destroyed between 2017 and 2020, according to research by the Australian Strategic Policy institute.