Xinjiang
The Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt has sounded the alarm: “In China every day is Kristallnacht.”
Writing on the eighty-first anniversary of that infamous Hitlerian night – November 3 2019, Hiatt noted, “It was in a sense the starting gun for the genocide that culminated in the extermination camps of Auschwitz, Sobibor and Treblinka. In western China, the demolition of mosques and bulldozing of cemeteries is a continuing, relentless process.”
In 1943 or 1944, the Polish Jewish jurist Rafael Lemkin, who coined the word “genocide,” noted that it “does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation” but takes the form of a “coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.”
For Lemkin, a critical component of genocide was the “criminal intent to destroy or to cripple permanently a human group. The acts are directed against groups as such, and individuals are selected for destruction only because they belong to these groups.”
Describing “a cultural genocide with few parallels since World War II,” Hiatt reports, “At least 1 million Muslims have been confined to camps, where aging imams are shackled and young men are forced to renounce their faith. Muslims not locked away are forced to eat during the fasting month of Ramadan, forced to drink and smoke in violation of their faith, barred from praying or studying the Koran or making the pilgrimage to Mecca. And - in possibly the most astonishing feature of this crime against humanity - China has managed to stifle, through 21st century repression and age-old thuggery, virtually any reporting from the crime scene.”
Under the guise of “re-education” against “extremist thought” – being Muslim – China’s Xinjiang Province Uyghurs (the name has a number of spellings) are being systematically subjected to what might be history’s most meticulously orchestrated genocide – in the name of combating “extremism” and promoting the “Sinicizing” – making more Chinese – of Uyghurs, whose ancestors first arrived in China almost four thousand years ago.
In 2019, the Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD), a coalition non-governmental domestic and international organizations dedicated to the promotion of human rights and headquartered in Washington, conservatively estimated that 1.1 million Uyghur Muslims had been imprisoned in recent years. Moreover, citizens of Uyghur villages are required to attend “transformation through education” courses in Mandarin and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) theories and history.
Chinese authorities claim presence in the camps is “voluntary,” even though NGOs and international new media estimate that up to 1.5 million ethnic minorities – equivalent to just under 1 in 6 adult members of a predominantly Muslim minority group in Xinjiang – are or have been interned in these detention, internment and reeducation facilities.
Representatives of NGOs and international media regularly report that Uyghur women are forced to undergo unwanted abortions, subjected to the forced implantation of IUDs and required to endure quarterly medical exams to guarantee that the IUDs are in place. In addition, reliable reports indicate that while incarcerated in some of these “re-education camps,” Uyghur women are subjected to injections that cause temporary or permanent loss of menstrual cycles or prevent pregnancies and forced for ingest medications that may leave them permanently sterile.
In Xinjiang Province mass female sterilizations in 2019 targeted 14 and 34 percent off all married women of childbearing age in two Uyghur counties – equivalent to at least 20 percent of all childbearing-age women. In addition, the (CCP) government has funded hundreds of thousands of involuntary tubal ligations.
In 2019, the central government planned to subject at least 80 percent of women of childbearing age in four rural prefectures to birth prevention surgeries – placement of IUDs that, unlike those in Europe and the United States, can only be removed surgically.
Perhaps the CCP campaign against the Uyghurs, one of fifty-five officially recognized ethnic minorities, can be justified by the fact that – at somewhere between ten and twelve million people by most surveys and twenty million by the most generous measures – they represent 0.31 percent of the total Chinese population. It is difficult to believe Uyghurs present a real and present danger to China’s 1.3 billion Han Chinese – 91.6 percent of the population of mainland China.
China’s campaign has resulted in a preternatural decline in population growth among Uyghurs - from 11.45 per thousand in 2018 to 1.05 per thousand in 2019. Ethnic Han birthrates in the surrounding Uyghur regions are eight times higher.
In May 2018, one local prefecture issued a notice that violations of birth control regulations and women who exceeded the birth quota maximum of two children must “both adopt birth control measures with long-term effectiveness and be subjected to vocational skills and educational training” - government speak or euphemisms for “extrajudicial internment” and IUDs implantations or sterilization.
Uyghur women who refuse to terminate “illegal pregnancies” or do not pay related fines – equivalent to three to eight times the average annual disposable income of many Uyghur families - are referred to police authorities and subject to re-education internment.
In some areas, CCP and government officials justify imposed birth control and abortions as necessary responses to “the influence of extreme religions” which must be “dealt with severely.”
Uyghurs are subject to arrest and “re-education” for twenty-six types of illegal religious activities, such as leading prayers of forcing others to pray or wearing head scarfs, according to DW, Germany’s international broadcaster. Other subversive acts that could result in re-education include “advocating sharia law,” “distributing religious propaganda material,” acting as an unofficial imam or more innocuous acts such as suddenly giving up smoking or consuming alcohol – acts that might indicate a new commitment to Islamic traditions. The fact that so many of the “illegal acts” are of a religious nature “is further indication that the Chinese authorities are targeting the religion and cultural practices of its Muslim minorities in an attempt to eradicate them,” notes DW. Such activities are considered “disrupting social order.”
Western and other sources within China estimate that one million Uyghurs have now been sentenced to re-education camps in a Chinese effort to fight “extremist ideas” and provide “valuable skills” to Uighurs. However, DW reports “in the majority of cases, China is imprisoning Uighurs based on their religious practices and culture, rather than extremist behaviors.” As part of the Chinese crackdown residents of Xinjiang province are subjected to draconian methods of tracking and arrest, facial recognition profiling, repeated “house visits” by non-Uyghur neighbors, and the forced housing of one million ethnic Han civil servants in Uyghur homes - a form of social monitoring. “Trials” are carried out in secret, without defense attorneys and, frequently without the accused even present.
DW cites researchers and activists who say imams and those deemed religious are more likely to be sent to prison, sometimes for decades, most likely because they are considered "irreformable."
In February 2020, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) published the report Uyghurs for sale, that began with the statement: “Under conditions that strongly suggest forced labour, Uyghurs are working in factories that are in the supply chains of at least 83 well-known global brands in the technology, clothing and automotive sectors, including Apple, BMW, Gap, Huawei, Nike, Samsung, Sony and Volkswagen.
“This report estimates that more than 80,000 Uyghurs were transferred out of Xinjiang to work in factories across China between 2017 and 2019, and some of them were sent directly from detention camps. The estimated figure is conservative and the actual figure is likely to be far higher. In factories far away from home, they typically live in segregated dormitories, undergo organised Mandarin and ideological training outside working hours, are subject to constant surveillance, and are forbidden from participating in religious observances.”
On June 29, 2020 U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials reported the seizure of 13 tons of hair products worth an estimated $800,000 and “suspected to be made out of human hair taken from people locked inside a Chinese internment camp,” according to Time magazine. “Reports by the AP and other new organizations have repeatedly found that people inside the internment camps and prisons, which activists call ‘black factories,’ are making sportswear and other apparel for popular U.S. brands.”
In late May 2020, Radio Free Asia, a United States government–funded, nonprofit international broadcasting corporation, noted that Uyghur culture and tradition dictate that women leave their hair long and ”there is no history of people selling their hair… raising suspicions about whether in addition to using forced labor to manufacture hair products, the raw hair may be coming from detainees in the XUAR’s [Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region] camp network.”
RFA reported “at least 10 female former camp detainees have described having their heads shaved immediately upon entering the detention facilities, although they were unsure of what happened to their hair after it was cut.”
RFA reported “a Chinese human rights lawyer and activist who is now living in exile in the U.S., told RFA that the shaving of heads is regulation in Chinese prisons and detention centers, and suggested that local authorities would likely try to profit from the practice.”
In recent weeks major American news publications and media have shown irrefutable efforts of Chinese destruction between 10,000 and 15,000 of mosques – great and small, in cities and small villages, shrines and other religious sites and the leveling of cemeteries – some dating back a thousand years and maintained by countless generations – for parking lots and office buildings.
In November 2019, The Globe reported “The destruction of these places of worship is not only tearing Uyghurs from their faith, but also from their communal bonds. The internment of imams, worshippers, and volunteers constitutes part of a broader campaign to devastate Uyghur communities. The captivity of one and a half million Uyghurs (possibly up to three million) in 21st-century concentration camps has separated parents from their children and devastated every family in the Uyghur homeland.
“Belief in Islam is certain to result in a Uyghur interned or jailed. Instead of leveraging congregations of the faithful toward building communities, the Chinese government threatens and coerces Uyghurs to inform on neighbors who pray or even utter the simple Islamic greeting of As-Salaam Alaikum.”
At the height of the Vietnam War a deacon challenged those in the pew with the question “Where is the voice of the American bishops?”
“Where is the voice of the American bishops when, each day, this country drops thousands of tons of bombs on Vietnam?” the soon-to-be-ordained-a priest veteran of two tours in that war and recipient of a Purple Heart questioned again.
“But let us drop just one ton of prophylactics and then we’ll hear from the bishops!” he declared.
Half a century later, as Americans prepare for predetermined presidential nominating conventions and the release of (historically meaningless) party platforms and from halfway around the world, ten million Uyghur Muslims and other Turkic minorities in China are asking “Where is the voice of American Christians? Where is the voice of America’s pro-life Christians when our women are sterilized and aborted? Where is the voice of America’s Christians when our children are ripped from their parents and communities to have their cultures torn from them? Where is the voice of America’s Christians when we can no longer bury our dead and our houses of worship are being destroyed?”
Today the deacon might question “Where is the voice of America’s Christians in the face of this genocide?”