Chinese officials are perpetrating a genocide against Uighur Muslims, according to a U.S. determination that equates the repression with the Nazi atrocities against Jews during the Holocaust.
“I have determined that the PRC, under the direction and control of the [Chinese Communist Party], has committed genocide against the predominantly Muslim Uighurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a Tuesday bulletin. “I believe this genocide is ongoing, and that we are witnessing the systematic attempt to destroy Uighurs by the Chinese party-state.”
That parting shot from Pompeo is expected to put President-elect Joe Biden’s team on a historically confrontational course regarding Beijing’s human rights abuses. The decision is the culmination of years of State Department moves to highlight and condemn the repression underway in Xinjiang, an initiative sometimes balanced against President Trump’s economic priorities with China before the coronavirus pandemic scuttled most trade talks.
“Since the Allied forces exposed the horrors of Nazi concentration camps, the refrain ‘Never again’ has become the civilized world’s rallying cry against these horrors,” Pompeo said. “The Nuremberg Tribunals at the end of World War II prosecuted perpetrators for crimes against humanity, the same crimes being perpetrated in Xinjiang.”
Chinese officials have defended their establishment of so-called “vocational education and training centers” as an effective counterterrorism measure, but Uighur survivors have described being beaten by guards on account of their religious beliefs. Chinese officials have acknowledged their determination to “uphold the sinicization of religion in China,” an ambition that has motivated the mass detentions and surveillance to prevent Uighurs Muslims from propagating their cultural and religious traditions.
“These determinations are a call to action for the incoming administration, Congress, and our allies,” Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican who co-authored a bill passed last month that required a genocide determination within 90 days, said Tuesday. “We must ensure that the U.S. and free nations do all we can to end these atrocities and ensure that it remains a priority of our nation’s China policy.”
Pompeo’s decision takes that assessment out of the hands of the Biden team, which described the Uighur crackdown as a “genocide,” but also aspires to cooperate with China on international climate change initiatives.
“There was some concern as to how in actual reality, what the Biden administration would really do about the situation in Xinjiang, in connection to other goals,” Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation senior fellow Adrian Zenz, an expert in the Uighur repression, told the Washington Examiner. “This locks them more into taking the human rights situation seriously, and of course, it’s a huge affront to the Chinese government.”
International law requires a country that identifies a genocide to “undertake to prevent and to punish” the perpetrator, a major undertaking given China’s stature as a global rival to the United States.
“For the past four years, this administration has exposed the nature of the Chinese Communist Party and called it what it is: a Marxist-Leninist regime that exerts power over the long-suffering Chinese people through brainwashing and brute force,” Pompeo said. “While the CCP has always exhibited a profound hostility to all people of faith, we have watched with growing alarm the party’s increasingly repressive treatment of the Uighurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups.”
That statement drew applause from human rights activists, although the praise was qualified in some quarters by frustration that he opted not to make a similar finding on behalf of the Muslim Rohingya suffering at the hands of Myanmar security forces.
“The integrity and effectiveness of the U.S. government’s human rights policy depends on a willingness not only to speak truthfully, but to do so in a consistent manner,” Refugees International President Eric Schwartz said Tuesday. “In the incoming Biden administration, such a willingness — reflected in a determination of genocide and crimes against humanity against the Rohingya — would help to defend the rights of all those subject to egregious abuses around the world.”
U.S. officials reportedly decided to declare the Uighur abuse a genocide in light of China’s attempt to suppress birth rates among the beleaguered ethnicity, an operation exposed by Zenz and celebrated more recently by Chinese diplomats in Washington.
“It really does what this atrocity deserves,” Zenz said. “It’s the largest incarceration of an ethnoreligious minority since the Holocaust, in my view.”
