LONDON UNITED KINGDOM - SEPTEMBER 11: People take part in a demonstration against Chinaâs ... [+]
Evidence for crimes committed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) against Uighurs in Xinjiang continues to mount. The Chinese government’s own data speak volumes to the CCP’s intent to significantly reduce, if not ultimately eliminate, the next generation of Uighurs.
The data collected by Adrian Zenz, a senior researcher at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, indicates that the CCP had a goal of forcibly sterilizing or implanting IUDs in at least 80 percent of Uighur women of child-bearing age in four southern rural prefectures. He believes that the actual rate is closer to 90 percent.
This is heaping cruelty upon cruelty. Between 1.8 million and 3 million Uighurs have been separated from their spouses, prospective spouses, and loved ones due to their arbitrary detention.
If 80 to 90 percent of Uighur women of child-bearing age are being effectively sterilized, and another significant percentage are separated from their spouses while in detention, what will become of the next generation of Uighurs?
This is the question that animates my new report, which argues that the U.S. government should issue an atrocity determination stating clearly whether genocide and crimes against humanity are being perpetrated against this vulnerable Muslim minority group in China.
Misconceptions about genocide and crimes against humanity have often impeded U.S. willingness to call a spade a spade. Unlike common conceptions, genocide does not require a massive number of deaths. Rather, it requires the intent to eliminate, in whole or in part, a group through killing, subjecting the group to conditions aimed at elimination, restricting and preventing births, and separating children from families. All of these elements appear to be at play in the situation facing Uighurs.
The CCP’s involuntary “family planning” actions are among the most egregious offenses committed against Uighurs. Not only are Uighur women being subject to forced sterilizations (including being tested like guinea pigs in the camps and injected with unknown substances), their pre-born babies are being forcibly aborted. Newborns are even subject to infanticide just to comply with the CCP’s arbitrary birth spacing requirements that Uighur women have children three to four years apart.
The CCP’s ruthlessness doesn’t end at birth. Uighur children whose parents are in detention are being sent to so-called orphanages, kindergartens, or pre-schools with live-in boarding-school-like conditions where they are surrounded by fortified walls, barbed wired fences, and subject to 24-hour surveillance. These are hardly traditional educational institutions.
The CCP is tearing apart Uighur families limb-by-limb. Husbands from wives in detention, mothers and fathers from their children arbitrarily detained in indoctrination centers disguised as schools, Uighur babies torn from their mother’s bodies and sent prematurely to the grave at the behest of the CCP.
These modern-day horrors should have been relegated to the history books, but instead are being repeated with mind-boggling frequency while many around the world stand idly by.
Let it not be said that the U.S. is among them.
The U.S. has taken some commendable actions, including the sanctioning of senior CCP officials like Xinjiang Party Secretary Chen Quanguo. But it has stopped short of identifying the atrocities as genocide and crimes against humanity.
The Secretary of State has the authority to issue an atrocity determination at any point in time. No lengthy legal deliberation at the State Department is necessary, and no follow-on action is technically required. There is no hierarchy of atrocity crimes, meaning that it is not better or worse for the U.S. to determine that Uighurs only face either crimes against humanity or genocide. Neither is it impossible for the U.S. to determine that both genocide and crimes against humanity have been committed.
What is more important is that a determination is made and publicly issued.
Action typically follows. In previous instances where the U.S. issued an atrocity determination, as in the case of ISIS genocide, Congress responded by creating a special fund overseen by USAID to ensure assistance to those who suffered. Relief represents a beacon of hope for communities ravaged by atrocities and trying to recover.
Likewise, such a determination has the potential to galvanize much-needed political momentum to take other steps that alleviate the plight of Uighurs, including possible extensions of Priority-2 refugee status for survivors of these atrocities, and the potential of the International Olympic Committee to reconsider the genocidal Chinese regime’s suitability to host a privileged sporting event come 2022.
The U.S. should take swift action to hold the CCP accountable in a way that will communicate just how serious the U.S. government is about safeguarding the Uighur people’s rights.
