United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday labeled “shocking“ and “disturbing” reports that China’s ruling Communist Party is using forced sterilization, forced abortion, and coercive family planning against minority Muslims.
Pompeo highlighted a report on the situation in China’s Xinjiang region by German researcher Adrian Zenz published by the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation expert group.
Pompeo, a persistent critic of China, including his treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, said in a statement that the findings were consistent with decades of Chinese Communist Party practices “that demonstrate absolute disregard for the sanctity of human life and dignity. basic human. “
“We call on the Chinese Communist Party to immediately end these horrific practices and call on all nations to join the United States in demanding an end to these dehumanizing abuses.”
An ethnic Uighur woman carrying her baby comes out of a restaurant in Urumqi City, Uyghur Autonomous Province of Xinjiang, China. China is accused of using forced sterilization and forced abortions against minority Muslims in the region [File: How Hwee Young/EPA]
In his report, Zenz said his findings represented the strongest evidence thus far that Beijing’s policies in Xinjiang met one of the genocide criteria cited in the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Crime of Genocide, namely “imposing measures aimed at preventing births within the country”. group”.
Zenz said analysis of Chinese government documents showed that natural population growth in Xinjiang had fallen “dramatically”. He said that in its two largest Uighur Muslim prefectures, growth rates fell 84 percent between 2015 and 2018 and more in 2019.
The Chinese embassy in Washington referred to a statement by Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, saying that “some institutions are bent on inventing disinformation on issues related to Xinjiang … Their allegations are simply unfounded and false.”
2019 documents revealed plans for a massive female sterilization campaign targeting 14 percent and 34 percent of all married women of childbearing age in two Uighur counties, Zenz wrote. The campaign, she said, probably aimed to sterilize rural minority women with three or more children, as well as some with two children, which is equivalent to at least 20 percent of all women of childbearing age.
“The budget figures indicate that this project had sufficient funds to perform hundreds of thousands of tubal ligation sterilization procedures in 2019 and 2020,” he wrote.
Zenz said that by 2019 Xinjiang planned to subject at least 80 percent of women of childbearing age in its four southern minority prefectures to intrusive birth-prevention surgeries: intrauterine device placement or sterilizations.
He said that in 2018, 80 percent of all new IUD locations in China were made in Xinjiang, while only 1.8 percent of the population lives there.
SOURCE:
Reuters news agency
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