In China, history is repeating itself. The state is murdering its own people and the world is looking the other way.
For China, it is nothing new. Every Chinese leader has presided over extermination campaigns – Mao Zedong presided over the great leap forward and the cultural revolution in which tens of millions were killed but it was justified as a necessary outbreak.
After many decades Deng Xiaoping placed tanks into Tiananmen Square. Several thousand protesters were killed in a single day. Deng would later say Tiananmen was painful, but it did the common good.
Xi Jinping has become the chief architect of the biggest extermination drive of the 21st century – the Uighur genocide in Xinjiang, like his ancestors President Xi also has an explanation. He demands to be fighting Islamist radicalism. Though, the world has gathered enough proof to the contrary.
As per the interviews and raw data, China wants to end the Uighur people. As there are nearly a million of them in forced labour camps but this is just the start, if the world keeps ignoring the threat China will turn these labour camps into death camps.
The world needs to keep up the pressure.
The Chinese denaied twice the Tur sunay Ziyawudun. Her second stint lasted nearly ten months. On Thursday she testified at the US Capitol.
“I was taken on March 8, 2018, and kept there for more than 10 months. Buses would arrive every day with more detainees. It was very overcrowded. There was a bucket in the corner for a toilet and cameras watching us inside the cell,” Ziyawudun said.
“We were always hungry. Each meal was a watery soup and a bun. We were given injections of unknown medications. Every day we had to endlessly swear loyalty to the Chinese government and reject our faith. We had to watch endless videos about Xi Jinping,” she said.
A long list of human rights violations is the proof of forced confinement, overcrowded cells, surveillance cameras, scientific experimentation and brainwashing.
“Girls would be taken away and only be brought back days later. I saw girls lose their sanity because of it and then I myself was taken, along with another woman. I was tortured with an electric stick pushed inside my genital tract. I could hear the other woman’s screams in the next room,” Ziyawudun said.
“I knew the guards were raping her. After that, she never stopped crying. One time an order came, all the women had to be sterilized or fitted with an IUD. Many young women were crying, screaming when they were told they would be sterilized and could never have children. I left the camp in December 2018. before my release, the officials warned me, if I spoke about my experience there would be heavy consequences,” she added.
“I still did not feel free. One day I saw a former cellmate. She had survived but she was dead inside, completely finished by the rapes. The government’s goal is to destroy everyone.”
Ziyawudun described what is the worst of humankind. Rape and sexual violence is the norm inside these camps. They are used as tools of torture. All of it confirmed and carried out by the Chinese government. Ziyawudun’s last words are quite striking, she says her cellmate was dead inside that’s exactly what China is trying to do!
Systematically, China is trying to dehumanise Uighurs, remove their culture and identity and replace it with the Han culture and the world has been a dramatic failure on this concern.
New Zealand parliament, this week, was discussing the Uighur crackdown and they removed the word genocide from the final report.
Former President Trump privately supported the crackdown, his successor doesn’t want conflict he wants competition.
The United Nations is a sitting duck for Chinese influence. The secretary-general is yet to designate a special representative for Uighurs. There are representatives for climate change financing Yemen even the recent coup in Myanmar but none for Uighurs.
Other than a trade or the South China Sea, there is no plan, there is only right and wrong. The West has already tried sanctions both on Chinese officials and goods produced in the Xinjiang province but a country equipping for genocide doesn’t care about consents.
It is a defining moment in history. The world has been here before, a brutal administration destroying an ethnic group in death camps, back then we responded late and the cost was millions of lives.
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