Evidence of the criminal policies of the CCP, and calls for an international trial.
How do you call
the planned, intentional campaign to wipe out an entire portion of mankind,
singled out for ethnic, religious, or cultural reasons? Since the time of
Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959), the Polish lawyer and legal expert who coined the
term to indict crimes against the Jews perpetrated by Nazis in the 1930s and
1940s, the word you are looking for is “genocide.”
It is a word
with moral, legal, and even philosophical weight. “Genocide” does not imply
only the massacre of a large number of people, which is horrible enough and
unfortunately happened many times in history. A massacre is called “genocide”
if it implies the intent to erase a whole human community, a goal planned and
implemented as systematically and scientifically as possible. As such, it is
the product of ideology and thus typical of the modern era, in spite of the
fact that we claim to live, since a couple of centuries, in the “era of
democracy.”
French
historian Reynald Secher is one of the finest experts of the first genocide in
history, the systematic extermination of Catholics in Vendée between 1793–1794,
at the time of the French Revolution. He elaborated on the notion of
“genocide,” forging another neologism, “memorycide.” The latter occurs when
even memories of the human groups subject to genocide are being destroyed, to
cancel all of their traces and records from history.
Furtherly
elaborating on such materials, recent scholars have moved forward to introduce
the notion of “cultural genocide,” i.e. the drive toward the annihilation of a
population and a culture before and beyond its physical extermination.
This is what is
happening in Xinjiang, the region predominantly inhabited by Muslim Uyghurs and
other Turkic minorities, which they prefer to call East Turkistan. Precisely
for this reason, some lawyers think that the Chinese Communist regime can and
should be brought as soon as possible before the International Criminal Court,
despite the fact that China has not signed the relevant treaty.
There is now a
new report on all this, Genocide in East
Turkistan, published by Campaign for Uyghurs, founded, and chaired now, in
Washington, D.C. by Ms. Rushan Abbas.
The report
illustrates what Bitter Winter has constantly chronicled in recent months. The
CCP’s intention to destroy an entire population was not even stopped by the
COVID-19 pandemic. Muslims in Xinjiang have been and are harassed in all
possible ways. Intimidations, unlawful detentions, religious and cultural
discrimination, and even humiliating practices such as compelling them to eat
pork and drink alcohol (forbidden in Islam), and to transform their home decor
from traditional Uyghur to cheap Westernized style. Those who try to protest
are sent to the dreadful transformation through education camps.
In the report,
a special emphasis is put on the fate of Uyghur women, a topic that Ms. Abbas
holds dear and has also addressed in a recent article for Bitter Winter. One
million Han Chinese CCP cadres have been sent to live with Uyghur families to
control their daily life. This operation is nicknamed by the CCP the “Double
Relative Program” (meaning that each Uyghur family has both real blood
relatives and false CCP-imposed ones), and may mean that Uygur girls and women
are obliged to share the same bed with CCP spies, with consequences not
difficult to predict. The plague of imposed weddings between Han Chinese chosen
by the CCP and Uygur women is also common, and generates additional pain. As
Campaign for Uyghurs denounces, this often amounts to what is nothing less than
rape.
Several reports
on the persecution of Uyghurs have been published, but the peculiarity of
Genocide in East Turkistan is its specific attention to the medium and
long-range effects of the CCP policy in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
Its most important parts are in fact the introduction, on the legal concept of
“genocide,” and the chapters where the CCP genocidal intention is clearly
demonstrated. Examples include efforts to disrupt families, deportation and
re-education of Uygur children whose parents and relatives have been sent to
the camps, and forced sterilizations and abortions to prevent Uygur births.