China guilty of genocide on our people, Uyghur human rights activists alarm
"China is committing genocide on our people, from 3 to 5 million Uyghurs have been thrown into concentration camps, further millions have been banished into forced labour; the Beijing government wants to deprive the Uyghurs of their national identity, children are taken from their parents, women are subjected to forced sterilisation and abortion, and are married off to Chinese men," Uyghur human rights activists Rushan Abbas and Abdulhakim Idris tell PAP.
"The government of the People's Republic of China wants to annihilate the Uyghurs, destroy them as a nation, break the succession of generations, tear families apart and uproot our culture," says Abbas, who together with her husband founded the Washington-based Campaign for Uyghurs (CFU) NGO in 2017. Abbas and Idris emigrated to the US years ago.
"We decided to establish the CFU organisation after my entire family, who had remained in Xinjiang, disappeared in 2017. Xinjiang is the official name of the western-Chinese region inhabited by the Uyghurs, although the term is colonial. We prefer East Turkistan," Idris explains.
"I last spoke with my mother on April 25 2017. Since then I have had no news about my parents, both of whom are over 70, nor my sisters and brothers," Idris says. He admits that the repressions against the Uyghur Muslim minority affect him personally, but notes that this is true for everyone in the 150-200-thousand strong Uyghur diaspora worldwide. "Everyone has loved ones with whom they have no contact, who were incarcerated in concentration camps, or sent to forced labour," Abbas and Idris says.
"Then, in 2017 and 2018, the Chinese authorities mounted a huge wave of arrests. The matter drew no world-wide attention, and this is why we called our organisation into being. In September 2018 Rushan spoke publicly about the camps, arrests, also about the history of my family. Six days later her sister was kidnapped," Idris tells PAP.
"This was no coincidence, this was simply revenge for my activity. They also took my aunt - these were my two closest persons still in China," Abbas says. Her aunt was released in 2019, she still has no contact with her sister. Abbas subsequently found out that Gulshan Abbas has been sentenced to 20 years in prison in a secret trial on charges of alleged "terrorism."
"My sister is a retired doctor, a normal, average person. She is educated, knows Chinese well, was never politically involved, has not travelled to Muslim countries - e.g. the Beijing authorities treat travel to Turkey as a serious offence. The charges are unfounded," Abbas argues. "At least now I know where she is being kept. It is a prison combined with a forced labour camp working for a clothing manufacturer, who probably makes clothes for sale in Europe and elsewhere in the world," she adds.
"The fact that I don't know what has happened to my parents tortures me every day. If I knew they were dead, I'd cry but I'd accept it. As it is, every day I hope they are still alive," Idris says. Abbas adds that besides her husband's parents, also the fate of 14 of his cousins and nephews is unknown - in 2017 the youngest of them were 2 or 3 years old - as well as the whereabouts of his three sisters and brother and their spouses - 24 people in all.
"Genocide, slave labour, millions missing - for us these are not just statistics, but concrete people. This is personal; we speak the truth about this and the authorities in Beijing cannot tolerate that. This is why we are constantly attacked and demeaned by Beijing and the Chinese state-owned media, which aim to discredit our work," Abbas says.
Abbas, who visited Poland with her husband while on a tour of Europe during which they spoke with politicians, activists, scientists, students and media, always comes to meetings with a picture of her imprisoned sister.
"It is important to realise that China's policy towards the Uyghurs meets the criteria of genocide contained in the UN Convention on preventing and punishing acts of genocide," Abbas says. Passed in 1948, the convention lists five acts carried out "with the purpose of the complete or partial destruction of national, ethnic, racial or religious groups" that it classifies as genocide.
Alongside the killing of such a group's members, the document also lists as genocide heavy bodily and mental damage suffered by the members, their deliberate placement in living conditions designed to destroy them physically, the application of preparations designed to halt births within the group and the forced relocation of the members' children to other groups.
"Incarcerated Uyghurs are subject to physical and mental torture. They are treated as slaves, forced to work and ceaselessly indoctrinated," Abbas recounts.
Abbas underlines that taking children away from parents and depriving them of their nationality was also a crime recognised as genocide, to which close to a million Uyghur children have been subjected. "And because of the forced sterilisations and abortions, Uyghur children are not even given the chance to be born. Women are forced to terminate their pregnancies even when they are in the final trimester. They are forcefully placed in clinics and operated upon," Abbas tells PAP.
"On top of all this - as the Chinese authorities themselves admit - 1.1 million Chinese Communist Party activists have moved in with Uyghur families to monitor their lifestyle," Abbas says. She adds that households today mainly consist of women as most of the men have been placed in concentration camps or sent into forced labour. "Their wives and daughter must now cater to the party executives sent to oversee them, and thus they become exposed to sexual harassment in their own homes," Abbas says.
The party executives leave after several weeks and file reports about the families they supervised. if a controller concludes that someone does not meet the communist party's lifestyle guidelines - e.g. regarding restrictions in religious practices - they may land in a concentration camp.
Abbas says that Uyghur women are forced to marry Chinese men. Refusal - e.g. because a girl does not want to marry someone who is not religious - is branded as "extremism" and threatens with the entire family's deportation to a concentration camp.
In Xinjiang the Chinese authorities are guilty of serious human rights violations against the Uyghurs and other, mainly Muslim, minorities, which may be seen as a violation of international law and a crime against humanity, said a 2020 report by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR). In January 2021 the US government officially recognised Beijing's operations in Xinjiang as genocide. Similar statements were contained in unbinding resolutions by the parliaments of, among others, France, Britain, Canada and the Netherlands.
The Chinese authorities refute these accusations, claiming that a stern policy is necessary to protect the region from separatism, terrorism, and religious extremism. Beijing initially denied the network of concentration camps, but subsequently began describing them as "vocational training centres." The Chinese authorities also claim that not a single act of terrorism has been recorded in the region since they launched their campaign. (PAP)
