https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/201 ... -humanity/
And from Last Week Tonight, because despite being a comedian, Oliver usually does more in-depth reporting on under-reported topics than most mainstream news: https://youtube.com/watch?v=17oCQakzII8Elizabeth M. Lynch is founder and editor of China Law & Policy.
Sitting in a hearing room in Congress, in a gray plaid hijab, her dark blond hair poking out, Mihrigul Tursun begins to cry. She is there to share the plight of her fellow Uighurs in Xinjiang. Her translator reads aloud Tursun’s prepared statement about her three separate detentions by the Chinese government in Xinjiang’s internment camps. As the translator recounts Tursun’s first detention — upon her release, she learned that one of her 4-month-old triplets had died — Tursun struggles to hold back tears. But when the translator recounts the torture — little food, a tiger chair, electric shock treatment and a liquid that stopped her menstrual cycle and likely resulted in her sterilization, which has been confirmed by U.S. doctors — Tursun can’t hold back any longer. She starts to sob.
As Tursun’s translator, Zubayra Shamseden, who is also the outreach coordinator for the U.S.-based Uyghur Human Rights Project, wrote in an essay back in April, the Chinese government “wants to erase Uighur culture and identity by remaking its women.” Shamseden’s take — that if you want to eradicate a people, you must destroy its women — was not lost on the drafters of the Genocide Convention or the lawyers who shaped the doctrine of crimes against humanity. Both include nonlethal atrocities that are disproportionately perpetrated against women. Acts designed to prevent births and forcibly transfer children from their families could constitute genocide. Similarly, rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization and sexual violence each constitute a crime against humanity.
Though international law recognizes the gendered nature of mass atrocities, the world has paid little attention to the gender disparities of China’s campaign against the Uighurs. While women likely make up only an estimated 27 percent of the 1.5 million Uighur and other Turkic Muslims detained in Xinjiang’s internment camps, their treatment has an outsize impact on Uighur culture. By targeting women, China is attempting to dilute the Uighur population and destroy its culture.
Tursun’s testimony was the first time the international community heard that women in Xinjiang’s camps were forced to undergo treatment that disrupts their menstrual cycles. Since then, others have said the same thing. Gulbahar Jelilova, a businesswoman and another Uighur internment victim who was held in a cell with 40 other women, also stated that female inmates were injected weekly with a substance that stopped their periods.
Allegations of rape in the camps have surfaced, too. Sayragul Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh who was forced to work in one of the women’s camps in Xinjiang, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that every evening, the guards would take the pretty inmates with them, returning them in the morning. She also saw incidents of gang rape, including of one female inmate while other inmates were forced to watch. Shamseden told me that she too has heard that rape is common in the camps — as well as outside of the camps, where Uighur women are forced into situations where sexual harassment and sexual assault by their Han Chinese male bosses are prevalent.
In 2018, the government ramped up a program for Communist Party cadres to stay with a Uighur’s family home for five days every two months to “teach” the Uighurs about national unity. But this is another opportunity for Han Chinese men to take advantage of Uighur women. When I told Australian genocide expert Deborah Mayersen about these home visits, she immediately likened the situation to Ottoman Empire soldiers staying in Armenian homes prior to the Armenian genocide, where they were able to rape Armenian women with impunity.
Then there are the Chinese government’s efforts to minimize Uighur births and remove their children from their care. As gender studies expert Leta Hong Fincher highlighted in her recent book, the government has offered incentives for Uighur couples to have fewer children and for Uighur women to marry outside of their race. A large number of Uighur children have also been removed from their families and placed in boarding schools, according to a recent report, leaving the Chinese state to raise them.
The sexual violence against and forced sterilization of Uighur women and removal of Uighur children constitute crimes against humanity. So why isn’t the international community taking a stand? Why isn’t more attention paid to eyewitness accounts from women held in different camps that are eerily similar and mounting up? Especially since China has resisted international attempts to freely investigate what is happening in Xinjiang.
The United States is one of the few countries trying to do something. Last month, in a rare show of bipartisan support, the Senate passed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, and this month the administration issued a flurry of sanctions on Chinese companies and citizens. But there has been no mention of the stories of rape, forced sterilization or sexual harassment in any of these responses.
Even if the camps are disbanded, China’s gendered policies would remain. In addition to demanding that the Chinese government close the internment camps, the U.S. government — and the rest of the world — must insist that the government end the abuse of Uighur women as well.
Moreover, as noted above, while Trump is seldom consistent about anything except his own pursuit of power and self-aggrandizement, the current US regime has not been consistent in holding the Chinese government accountable for these atrocities:...more than one million Muslim minorities have been rounded up, detained, and forcibly indoctrinated by the Chinese regime. Witness accounts, satelite imagery, and Communist Party documents reveal what appear to be the largest imprisonment of people on the basis of religion since the Holocaust.
https://axios.com/trump-uighur-muslims- ... ffa21.html
Trump also reportedly told Xi, as noted in the LWT link, that constructing concentration camps was "...exactly the right thing to do." Of course, from a man who is currently building his own system of concentration camps for minorities, and implemented a Muslim ban, this should hardly be surprising.In an Oval Office interview on Friday afternoon, President Trump told me that he held off on imposing Treasury sanctions against Chinese officials involved with the Xinjiang mass detention camps because doing so would have interfered with his trade deal with Beijing.
Driving the news: Asked why he hadn't yet enacted Treasury sanctions against Chinese Communist Party officials or entities tied to the camps where the Chinese government detains Uighurs and other Muslim minorities, Trump replied, "Well, we were in the middle of a major trade deal."
"And I made a great deal, $250 billion potentially worth of purchases. And by the way, they're buying a lot, you probably have seen."
Trump continued: "And when you're in the middle of a negotiation and then all of a sudden you start throwing additional sanctions on — we've done a lot. I put tariffs on China, which are far worse than any sanction you can think of."
The big picture: China hawks in the Trump administration have privately expressed frustration that the president hasn't used the Global Magnitsky Act to sanction Chinese officials for what many consider one of the worst human rights atrocities of this era.
Trump countered that he signed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020 on Wednesday.
Between the lines: But that new law is Congress' attempt to pressure Trump to enact sanctions. Trump already had all the authority he needed to sanction China for the camps. Congress passed the Global Magnitsky Act in 2016 — a law designed to counter human rights violations like those being committed in Xinjiang, where witnesses say the Chinese government imprisons, brainwashes, and tortures ethnic and religious minorities.
China hawks in Congress, such as Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, have repeatedly urged the Trump administration to sanction Chinese officials connected to the Xinjiang mass detention camps.
But in Friday's interview with Axios, Trump said: "When you say the Magnitsky Act, just so you know, nobody's mentioned it specifically to me with regard to China."
"If somebody asked me, I would take a look at it," he continued. "But nobody's asked me. I have not been spoken to about the Magnitsky Act. So if somebody asks me about it, I'd study it. But at this moment, they have not asked me about it."
In his book, John Bolton writes that Trump gave President Xi a green light to continue with the Xinjiang camps — an allegation Trump denies.
The other side: While the Treasury Department hasn't taken action with Magnitsky sanctions — which would allow the U.S. government to take harsh measures such as seizing the U.S. dollar assets of targeted Chinese officials — other departments of the Trump administration have taken concrete steps to penalize China for the human rights crisis in Xinjiang.
Since September 2019, the Commerce Department and the State Department have imposed export restrictions on a total of 21 Chinese government entities and 16 Chinese companies deemed complicit in the abuses in Xinjiang.
And the State Department has imposed visa restrictions on Chinese Communist Party officials deemed responsible for the abuse of Uighurs. Additionally, the U.S. has taken minor steps to stop the import of goods produced by Uighur forced labor.
A senior administration said he believes the U.S. government is the only government in the world that has imposed actual costs on China for the Xinjiang situation.
I also asked President Trump whether — as Bolton charges — he asked President Xi to increase China's farm purchases from the U.S. to help Trump win in 2020. Bolton claims Trump made the request when the leaders met in Buenos Aires in December 2018.
"No, not at all," Trump said. "What I told everybody we deal with — not just President Xi — I want them to do business with this country. I want them to do a lot more business with this country."
"By the way, what's good for the country is good for me," Trump continued. "What's good for the country is also good for an election."
"But I don't go around saying, 'Oh, help me with my election.' Why would I say that?"
"And remember, when I'm dealing with him, the whole room is loaded up with people. We're in a large room with many people in that room. I wouldn't want to say a thing like that. I don't even know if that would be wrong because, you know, but why would I say a thing like that? And I certainly wouldn't say it anyway, but I certainly wouldn't say it in a room full of people."
So, this story isn't about anti-Chinese propaganda, or about "Western hypocrisy". Those things exist, but they do not erase or excuse the reality of what is being done to ethnic and religious minorities in China. This is about an ongoing atrocity perpetrated by the Chinese government against millions of its own people, one in which its apologists are culpable, the US government is culpable, in which companies that profit off of forced labour in China are culpable, and in which anyone who buys a product made with forced labour in China is culpable.
