Less than 24 hours before the swearing-in of Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States, outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Tuesday announced that China has committed crimes against humanity, vis-a-vis atrocities against the Uyghur Muslims and other religious, ethnic minorities in Xinjiang province.
"After careful examination of the available facts, I have determined that the PRC (Peoples Republic of China), under the direction and control of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), has committed genocide against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang, Pompeo said in a determination statement.
I believe this genocide is ongoing, and that we are witnessing the systematic attempt to destroy Uyghurs by the Chinese party-state, he said.
The governing authorities of the second-most economically, militarily, and politically powerful country have made clear that they are engaged in the forced assimilation and eventual erasure of a vulnerable ethnic and religious minority group, even as they simultaneously assert their country as a global leader and attempt to re-mold the international system in their image, the Secretary of State claimed.
Pompeo said China has been committing crimes against Uyghurs and other ethnic, religious minorities in Xinjiang since at least March 2017 These crimes are ongoing and include: the arbitrary imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty of more than one million civilians, forced sterilisation, torture of a large number of those arbitrarily detained, forced labour, and the imposition of draconian restrictions on freedom of religion or belief, freedom of expression, and freedom of movement.
The Nuremberg Tribunals at the end of World War II prosecuted perpetrators for crimes against humanity, the same crimes being perpetrated in Xinjiang, he said. Pompeo said that the United States calls upon China immediately to release all arbitrarily detained persons and abolish its system of internment, detention camps, house arrest and forced labour; cease coercive population control measures, including forced sterilisations, forced abortion, forced birth control, and the removal of children from their families.
It also asked China to end all torture and abuse in places of detention; end the persecution of Uyghurs and other members of religious and ethnic minority groups in Xinjiang and elsewhere in China, and afford Uyghurs and other persecuted minorities the freedom to travel and emigrate. The top American diplomat said for the past four years, the Trump Administration has exposed the nature of the Chinese Communist Party and called it what it is: a Marxist-Leninist regime that exerts power over the long-suffering Chinese people through brainwashing and brute force.
We have paid particular attention to the CCP's treatment of the Uyghur people, a Muslim minority group that resides largely in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in Western China. While the CCP has always exhibited a profound hostility to all people of faith, we have watched with growing alarm the Party's increasingly repressive treatment of the Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups, he said.
The exhaustive American documentation of the Chinese actions in Xinjiang confirms that since at least March 2017, local authorities dramatically escalated their decades-long campaign of repression against Uyghur Muslims and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups, including ethnic Kazakhs and ethnic Kyrgyz, he said.
Their morally repugnant, wholesale policies, practices, and abuses are designed systematically to discriminate against and surveil ethnic Uyghurs as a unique demographic and ethnic group, restrict their freedom to travel, emigrate, and attend schools, and deny other basic human rights of assembly, speech, and worship. Chinese authorities have conducted forced sterilisations and abortions on Uyghur women, coerced them to marry non-Uyghurs, and separated Uyghur children from their families, he said.
Party apparatchiks, Pompeo said, have denied international observers unhindered access to Xinjiang and denounced reliable reports about the worsening situation on the ground, instead spinning fanciful tales of happy Uyghurs participating in educational, counter-terror, women's empowerment, and poverty alleviation projects.
Meanwhile, they are delivering far darker messages to their own people, portraying Uyghurs as malignant tumors, comparing their faith to a communicable plague, and exhorting the party faithful to implement a crushing blow, telling them you can't uproot all the weeds hidden among the crops in the field one-by-one; you need to spray chemicals to kill them all, Pompeo said.
Since the Allied forces exposed the horrors of Nazi concentration camps (in World War II), the refrain Never again has become the civilised world's rallying cry against these horrors. Just because an atrocity is perpetrated in a manner that is different than what we have observed in the past, does not make it any less of an atrocity, said the Secretary of State.
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