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WASHINGTON: US Senators sought on Tuesday (October 27) to declare that China is committing genocide against Uyghurs and other Turkish-speaking Muslims, a step that could increase pressure on behalf of the estimated more than one million people in the camps. .
The resolution was introduced by senators from across the political spectrum, though it is unlikely to move immediately as the Senate is out of session until after next week’s elections.
The text states that China’s campaign “against Uighurs, ethnic Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and members of other Muslim minority groups in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region constitutes genocide.”
“This resolution recognizes these crimes for what they are and is the first step in holding China accountable for its monstrous actions,” said Senator John Cornyn, a Republican who sponsored it.
Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley said the resolution would show that the United States “cannot remain silent.”
“China’s assault on Uyghurs and other Muslim minority groups – increased surveillance, imprisonment, torture and forced ‘re-education camps’ – is genocide, pure and simple,” Merkley said.
Other co-sponsors include Marco Rubio, a close ally of President Donald Trump on foreign policy, and Robert Menendez, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Human rights groups say more than a million Uighurs languish in camps in the Xinjiang region as Beijing tries to forcibly integrate the community and uproot its Islamic heritage.
Supporters of China’s Uighur minority hold a rally in Istanbul on October 1, 2020 (Photo: AFP / Ozan Kose)
China has denied the numbers, describing the camps as vocational centers that teach skills to prevent the appeal of Islamic radicalism following a series of attacks.
The Trump administration has denounced the situation in Xinjiang and imposed sanctions on the top Communist Party official there, Chen Quanguo, but stopped short of declaring genocide.
Robert O’Brien, Trump’s national security adviser, said earlier this month that “if it’s not genocide, something similar” is happening in Xinjiang.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in an interview on Tuesday with news site The Print during a visit to India, said China’s actions “remind us of what happened in the 1930s in Germany.”
The campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, who leads Trump in pre-election polls, called China’s actions genocide and promised a tougher response.
USE CAUTION OF THE WORD
Successive US administrations have been reluctant to use the term genocide, wary of the legal implications at home and abroad.
The George W. Bush administration described Sudan’s scorched earth campaign in Darfur as genocide, while the Barack Obama administration said the same about the mass killings of the extremist group Islamic State, the rape and enslavement of Christians, Yazidis. and other religious minorities.
Then-Secretary of State John Kerry made the decision shortly after the House of Representatives unanimously described the Islamic State campaign as genocide.
Olivia Enos, a senior policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation who studies human rights in Asia, said a resolution on genocide in Xinjiang could pressure the administration to follow suit and pave the way for additional sanctions.
“Obviously it would be great for the executive branch to say that this is genocide and / or crimes against humanity,” Enos said.
“But I think that instead, this would be a very strong bipartisan message that the US government cares about the state of the Uyghur people, even and especially when the Chinese Communist Party does not,” he said.
The UN convention on genocide, drawn up after the Holocaust, obliges states to prevent and punish the “heinous scourge.”
It defines genocide to include actions such as murder and prevention of births “with the intention of destroying, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”
A data-driven study by German researcher Adrian Zenz found that China has forcibly sterilized large numbers of Uyghur women and pressured them to abort pregnancies that exceed birth quotas.
The Trump administration previously described Myanmar’s brutal campaign against the mostly Muslim Rohingya people as “ethnic cleansing.”
