Morgan Moone
China’s detainment and forced sterilization of Turkic Muslims defies international law and reminds us of the role that the United States can play to prevent genocide
By: Sanjuanita Gonzales, Law at the Margins Intern
The Chinese government is detaining over one million Muslims in internment camps forcing them to renounce their religious and ethnic identities and swear allegiance to the Chinese Communist party (“CCP”).
In 2018, China rejected the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination’s allegation that the State had turned the Xinjiang region into something that resembled a massive internment camp.
Instead, the narrative from Beijing has been that these camps were created as an attempt to “reeducate” and guide those who were susceptible to radical Islamic extremism after a series of deadly attacks were carried out by Muslim Uyghurs in 2014.
Until 2019, tales from those who claimed to have been detained in these camps were purely anecdotal. Then, a massive leak of internal documents shed light on the inner workings of the CCP.
A History of Turmoil
Uyghurs are a Turkic-speaking minority ethnic group originating from and culturally affiliated with the general region of Central and East Asia. They are recognized as native to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in northwest China and are mostly Muslim with Islam as an important part of their life and identity.
The Uyghur-Chinese Conflict dates back to as early as the 1950’s when the state orchestrated a mass migration into the Xinjiang region in order to raise the Han population.
Although Xinjiang saw a rise in Islamic piety in the 80’s, China implemented harsh and repressive policies toward Islam after 2001 which resulted in violent incidents including the deadly riots in Urumqi in 2009.
In 2014, the conflict escalated after Uyghur separatists seeking autonomy from Beijing carried out a series of attacks which grew larger in scale. China’s response was ruthless.
Strike Hard Campaign Leads to Increased Surveillance
As tension grew between the Uyghur and Han people, President Xin Jinping declared a war against terrorism, infiltration, and separatism and launched the “Strike Hard Against Violent Extremism Campaign,” which instructed officials to show absolutely no mercy in their crackdown on the Uyghur population.
The Strike Hard Campaign was the first of many efforts to curb Uyghur mobility. A recent report from the New York Times suggests that a mass surveillance program harvested data from the phones of millions of China’s Uyghur population. According to researchers at a San Francisco mobile security firm, hackers assembled tools that “disguised themselves as commonly used apps that could remotely turn on a phone’s microphone, record calls, or export locations.”
Counter-terrorism legislation introduced in 2015 further extended surveillance measures and required Uyghurs to submit to collection of DNA samples, iris scans, facial scans, and voice prints. A grid-style social management system enabled high levels of policing and eventually, numerous “convenience police station” checkpoints were set up throughout the region.
The same counter-terrorism legislation criminalized wearing veils, growing beards, and other religious practices including fasting, daily prayer and halal eating practices.
A “Three Illegals and One Item” Campaign banned “illegal” publicity materials, religious activities and religious teaching, as well as items deemed by authorities to be tools of terrorism. Officials warned Uyghurs to turn in Qurans and prayer mats or suffer the consequences.
These collective campaigns ultimately led to a policy aimed at suppressing birth rates among Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in the Xinjiang region through forced sterilizations, intrauterine device insertions, and family separations.
“Long Term Effectiveness.” Ensuring Sterilization.
A report released by China scholar Adrian Zenz documents the Chinese government’s attempt to reform its family planning policy in 2017. The policy stated that violations where women had exceeded the birth quota by two or more children, must “both adopt birth control measures with long-term effectiveness and be subjected to vocational skills education and training.”
This policy resulted in mass female sterilizations in rural Uyghur regions and internment of women who had violated the campaign’s directive. Compulsory (i.e. forced) sterilization is a term that has been used for government-mandated programs which bring about the sterilization of people. Attempts to rationalize these programs include, but are not limited to, population size control, limiting the spread of HIV, and “gender” normalizing. This is precisely what was occurring in Uyghur regions.
Various women who have since been released from internment camps share similar stories of being given unknown drugs and injections that caused irregular bleeding and loss of menstruation cycles. Doctors later determined that these women had been sterilized. Women who had more than two children were forced to pay a fine, offered free surgical sterilization, and were threatened with internment if they refused to submit to the procedure. Still, others were forcibly fitted with intrauterine contraceptive devices.
In 2014, just over 200,000 IUDS were inserted in Xinjiang. By 2018, that number jumped to nearly 330,000. Eighty percent of all new IUD placements performed in China in 2018, were in Xinjiang a region that makes up only 1.8 percent of the nation’s population.
Further evidence suggests government officials conduct night raids to look for pregnant women and kids who surpass the legally permitted child threshold. Numerous accounts have surfaced of children being stripped from their parents and placed in orphanages under the care of the state.
History has shown us that the implications and consequences of sterilization programs lead to the deprivation of reproductive freedom and the potentially devastating extermination of a large group of people.
Each of the measures taken by the CCP, from its mass surveillance to its forced sterilizations, are evidence of a systematic approach to track, detain, and reduce the Uyghur population. The programs come close to being defined as genocide under international law.
Genocide Classification under International Law
China’s forced sterilization of over a million Turkic Muslims is genocide under international law. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the United Nations in 1948. Genocide is defined as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
To constitute genocide, there must be a proven intent on the part of perpetrators. State members of the United Nations look for indicators such as relevant contextual information. Intent may be explicit in the statements of paramilitary actors who are affiliated with the state and case law has associated intent with the existence of a state or organizational plan or policy.
Chinese Communist Party documents are saturated with language of disease. President Xi Jinping likens Islam to a contagion and suggests Uyghurs have been infected by unhealthy thoughts. A manual released to train Chinese officials on how to respond to those asking questions about the whereabouts of their missing family members indicates they refer to those who are detained as infectious and in need of curing before they can be released.
Then, there’s Adrian Zenz’s research which shows Beijing has set an unprecedented near-zero birth rate target for 2020 to be achieved through their family planning policy. These policies are draconian measures to drastically reduce birth rates among Uyghurs and other Muslims. China’s widespread efforts and application of forced sterilization, birth control and abortion on hundreds of thousands of Uyghur women is a carefully orchestrated assault intended to subjugate Uyghurs.
All of the policies previously discussed prove that China is intending to prevent births within the Uyghur population.
The purported justification for the camps’ existence is incoherent and irrational. The camps are not detaining those solely deemed a political threat, they are detaining all who engage in religious practices and exceed the legal child limit.
There is no reasonable relation between combatting existing extremist ideology and imprisoning those who simply seek to practice their religious beliefs. China is making a very dangerous and nefarious assumption that all Muslims are political threats.
Preventing Genocide: A Legislative Role for US Intervention
On May 28, 2020, Congress passed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020. The Act’s purpose was to direct the United States to address the human rights violations and abuses by the Government of the People’s Republic of China through the mass surveillance and internment of over 1,000,000 Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, Kyrgz, and members of other Muslim minority groups in the Xinjiang region.
The Act imposes financial sanctions and visa bans against the Chinese government officials responsible for the religious persecution of these Muslim ethnic groups. Since the act’s passage, the U.S. has implemented sanctions on three Chinese officials and 11 companies believed to be using forced Uyghur labor to manufacture products abroad.
While the Uyghur Human Rights Policy is a step in the right direction, it is not enough.
The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act was introduced in Congress on March 11, 2020. The act seeks to ensure that goods made with forced labor in Xinjiang do not enter the United States Market. The act has been stagnant since its introduction in the House.
On Thursday, more than 190 organizations from over 36 countries formed the global End Uyghur Forced Labor Coalition. The coalition calls on apparel brands and retailers to stop using forced labor in Xinjiang. The coalition demands a call to action and provides a template to submit to brands and retailers in the apparel and textile sector.
Preventing genocide is a collective responsibility and we must do everything in our power to ensure that no one is subjected to cruel or inhumane punishment because they belong to an ethnic, national, religious or racial group. The U.S. cannot stand idly by. An individual retains bodily integrity and personal autonomy. Procreation is fundamental to the very existence and survival of a class of people and it is a choice that individuals should be allowed to make free from state coercion. Forced sterilization is a violation of a most basic liberty and it deprives an individual of their right to procreate. Any attempt to rationalize forced sterilizations begs the question, “which group of people do you deem undesirable?”
We must continue to advocate for the passage and implementation of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act by calling our representatives, voicing our outrage and concern and ask that China be held accountable for its human rights abuses.
