Miami Mayor Francis Suarez revealed he doesn’t know who the Uighurs are in an interview with conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt on Tuesday morning.
Mr Suarez, who launched his campaign for the Republican nomination for President earlier this month, is a longshot candidate in the crowded Republican primary field. Audio clips like the ones he produced in his interview with Hewitt are unlikely to help his odds.
“Penultimate question, Mayor: will you be talking about the Uighurs in your campaign?” Hewitt asked after Mr Suarez had criticised the Biden administration’s China policy.
“The what?” Mr Suarez responded.
“The Uighurs,” Hewitt repeated.
“What’s a Uighur?” Mr Suarez said.
“Okay, we’ll come back to that,” Mr Hewitt said. “You’ve got to get smart on that.”
Several hours after the interview, Mr Suarez said he “didn’t recognise the pronounciation” of Uighur that Hewitt used in the interview.
The Uighurs are an ethnic group native to the Xinjiang region of northwest China. They are officially recognised as one of China’s ethnic minorities, with the vast majority of the population practicing Islam and living in the Tamir Basin. For much of the last decade, the Uighur population has reportedly been subjected to grevious human rights abuses by the Chinese government including mass internment, forced labour and sterilisation, and re-education.
Organisations like Human Rights Watch have decried the Chinese government’s abuse of the Uighur population, which some experts believe amounts to genocide or crimes against humanity. The situation has been among the worst human rights crises of the last ten years.
But for whatever reason, Mr Suarez did not seem to understand what Hewitt was talking about when their conversation turned to the Uighurs’ plight. Before concluding his interview with Hewitt, Mr Suarez voluntarily returned the conversation to his lack of knowledge about the Uighurs.
“You gave me homework, Hugh,” Mr Suarez said. “I’ll look at what a — what’d you call it, a Weeble?”
Hewitt was not impressed.
“The Uighurs,” he said. “You really need to know about the Uighurs, Mayor. You’ve got to talk about it every single day, okay?”
“I will search Uighurs,” Mr Suarez replied. “I’m a good learner, I’m a fast learner.”
Mr Suarez’s unfamiliarity with the Uighurs was particularly striking given that he had spent an earlier portion of the interview bashing the Biden administration for supposedly failing to develop a strategy to stand up to an “increasingly hostile” China.
Mr Suarez, who also criticised Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to China last week, said members of the Biden administration “have very little, if any, practical understanding of the real world.”
Mr Suarez is one of three Republican presidential candidates from Florida, including former President Donald Trump and Gov Ron DeSantis. Two weeks ago, Mr Suarez was present in Miami as Mr Trump was indicted at the city’s federal courthouse for his alleged mishandling of classified documents after leaving the White House.
