What just happened?
To put the recent events in context Dr Adrian Zenz, a senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington said, “In my view the implications are truly on a historical scale” as “For the first time we have evidence of Uighur forced labour directly in the picking of cotton”.
On 17th March 2021 the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation website reported that the Chinese Communist Party was suing Dr Zenz “in its latest attempt to cover up its crimes against Uyghur Muslims and other religious minorities in Xinjiang”. [1][2]
What does this mean?
According to Sudworth’s BBC report, these recent policies such as “guiding” the pickers to “consciously resist illegal religious activities” are deliberately designed to openly discriminate against Xinjiang’s Uighurs and other Muslim groups on religious grounds. [3]
However, Kapil Komireddi reports that from a historical perspective this treatment of minority Muslim Uighur groups is no great surprise and is a deliberate policy decision by the Chinese government. Prior to taking office there was speculation that China would “become more tolerant of Muslim Uighurs in the western region of Xinjiang”. Despite this pledge, after nine years Xinjiang is today practically the largest internment camp in the world. [4]
Disappointingly, it was reported that after undertaking a brief tour of Xinjiang, President Xi instructed the cadres of the Communist Party of China to “show absolutely no mercy” to its Uighur Muslim population. [16] The real objective of this treatment is a desire to achieve psychological debilitation and “to efface from the mental makeup of the Turkic people of Xinjiang their sense of themselves”.
There have been thousands of horror stories of the barbaric treatment at the hands of the Chinese government consistent with President Xi’s order. The sadistic and cruel torture of the detainees knows no bounds. According to the evidence from a prisoner there is severe overcrowding with up to 20 detainees reportedly packed into every cell. The detainees’ heads are shaved, hands and feet are bound at all times, and they are permanently watched by cameras. Their day begins at 6am and ends after midnight. They are made to eat gruel and are granted just two minutes a day to use a shared communal bucket as a toilet . To make their suffering worse they are forced to eat pork on a Friday which is forbidden in their faith. The remaining minutes of the day are deliberately designed with ethnic cleansing in mind in order to purge them of their religious and ethnic identity. They must endlessly chant slogans pledging subservience to Han Supremacy: “I love China! Thank you, Communist Party! I love Xi Jinping”. [5] [6] [7]
There is more compelling evidence of inmates forced to sit on spike embedded chairs, many of them starved into submission, suspended from ceilings, their fingers prised with pliers, their skin pierced with needles and their bodies are pumped full of mysterious medicine. [8]
It does not stop there. The most vulnerable people have had their basic freedom to go about their daily businesses completely eroded. For example they are compelled to download an app called Jing Wang, roughly translated as “clean internet” with the threat of detention hanging over their heads as a penalty for refusing. Once installed the app sweeps their phones, scans every variety of file, chronicles all the activity and sends a user-specific report to a government database. A government programme called “Integrated Joint Operations Platform” then analyses all this captured material using artificial intelligence to racially profile Muslim individuals and communities, predict crime, and direct police to specific locations where it anticipates trouble. The doors of some Muslim homes are stamped with QR codes which, when scanned by the authorities, display all the details of the people inside. [9]
In response to this treatment of the Uighur Muslim population the rest of the world have closed their eyes and all but sided with the Chinese state. As Kapil Komireddi reported in 2019 that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and Pakistan rushed to China’s defence after Western diplomats rebuked it for putting a million Muslims in concentration camps. [10]
In 2020, the US Congress passed important legislation in response to the light shone on this barbaric, cruel and inhumane ethnic cleansing of the Uighurs. It had the effect of sanctioning Chinese leaders and companies complicit in these discriminatory practices. However, the sanctions have arguably caused the retaliatory industrial scale censorship and cancellation of western businesses. [11][12]
The US Government, H&M and similar companies should be credited for their solidarity in standing up against the policies of ethnic cleansing and inhumane treatment of so many vulnerable people.
On 1st April 2021 in support of this assertion Statewatch and 51 other organisations signed an open letter calling on the European Commission to introduce measures to ban biometric mass surveillance as part of the upcoming legislative proposal on artificial intelligence. [13]
Governments around the world should open their eyes and work collaboratively to stop this barbaric treatment or the impact will be colossal with millions more vulnerable people facing the prospect of more ethnic cleansing.
Written by Adam Green
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References:
[1] Olney, Kristina – Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation – 17 March 2021 - CCP Sues VOC Senior Fellow Dr. Adrian Zenz in Latest Uyghur Genocide Denial Attempt | Victims of Communism.
[2] Ibid
[3] Ibid;
[4] Ibid;
[5] Komireddi, Kapol – Show no mercy: The tragedy in Xinjang – Can anything save the Uighurs? – Critic magazine – 8 June 2020;
[6] Ibid;
[7] Ibid;
[8] Ibid
[10] Ibid
[11] Ibid
[12] Ibid
[13] Ibid
[14] Statewatch – Statewatch | EU: To protect fundamental rights, a ban on biometric mass surveillance is needed – 01 April 2021.
Disclaimer: This article (and any information accessed through links in this article) is provided for information purposes only and does not constitute legal advice.