Mike Pompeo demands China end ‘Uygur sterilisations in Xinjiang’
- Report alleges widespread campaign to reduce population of mostly Muslim minority group via forced birth control
- Facing calls for investigation, China’s foreign ministry calls story ‘fake news’
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday demanded that China end the alleged forced sterilisation of Uygur women after a report of a campaign against the mostly Muslim minority.
While individual women have spoken out before about forced birth control, the practice is far more widespread and systematic than previously known, according to an Associated Press investigation based on government statistics, state documents and interviews with 30 ex-detainees, family members and a former detention camp instructor.
China has called the allegations baseless but the United States demanded an immediate end to the campaign described in the report.
“We call on the Chinese Communist Party to immediately end these horrific practices and ask all nations to join the United States in demanding an end to these dehumanising abuses,” Pompeo said.
The hundreds of millions of dollars the government pours into birth control has transformed Xinjiang from one of China’s fastest-growing regions to among its slowest in just a few years, according to new research obtained by AP in advance of publication by China scholar Adrian Zenz.
“This kind of drop is unprecedented … there’s a ruthlessness to it,” said Zenz, a leading expert in the policing of China’s minority regions. “This is part of a wider control campaign to subjugate the Uygurs.”
Birth rates in the mostly Uygur regions of Hotan and Kashgar plunged by more than 60 per cent from 2015 to 2018, the latest year available in government statistics. Across the Xinjiang region, birth rates continue to plummet, falling nearly 24 per cent last year alone – compared to just 4.2 per cent nationwide, statistics show.
The state regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forces intrauterine devices, sterilisation and even abortion on hundreds of thousands, the data and AP interviews show. Even while the use of IUDs and sterilisation has fallen nationwide, it is rising sharply in Xinjiang.
China sends Uygurs from Xinjiang camps to other parts of country
The population control measures are backed by mass detention both as a threat and as a punishment for failure to comply. Having too many children was a major reason people were sent to detention camps, the report found, with the parents of three or more ripped away from their families unless they could pay huge fines. Police raid homes, terrifying parents as they search for hidden children.
After Gulnar Omirzakh, a Chinese-born Kazakh, had her third child, the government ordered her to get an IUD inserted. Two years later, in January 2018, four officials in military camouflage came knocking at her door anyway. They gave Omirzakh, the penniless wife of a detained vegetable trader, three days to pay a US$2,685 fine for having more than two children.
If she did not, they warned, she would join her husband and a million other people from ethnic minorities locked up in internment camps.
“God bequeaths children on you. To prevent people from having children is wrong,” Omirzakh said. “They want to destroy us as a people.”
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Former camp detainees said they were given injections that stopped their periods, or caused unusual bleeding consistent with the effects of birth control drugs.
Government documents studied by Zenz also showed that women in some rural minority communities in the region received frequent mandatory gynaecological exams and bimonthly pregnancy tests from local health officials.
China’s foreign ministry called the story “fabricated” and “fake news”, saying the government treated people of all ethnicities equally and protected the legal rights of minorities.
“Everyone, regardless of whether they’re an ethnic minority or Han Chinese, must follow and act in accordance with the law,” ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said on Monday when asked about the AP story.
How many of us wear clothing made by forced Uygur labour?
Outside experts say the birth control campaign is part of a state-orchestrated assault on the Uygurs to purge them of their faith and identity and forcibly assimilate them.
They are subjected to political and religious re-education in camps and forced labour in factories, while their children are indoctrinated in orphanages. Uygurs, who are often but not always Muslim, are also tracked by a vast digital surveillance apparatus.
“The intention may not be to fully eliminate the Uygur population, but it will sharply diminish their vitality,” said Darren Byler, an expert on Uygurs at the University of Colorado. “It will make them easier to assimilate into the mainstream Chinese population.”
“It’s genocide, full stop. It’s not immediate, shocking, mass-killing on the spot type genocide, but it’s slow, painful, creeping genocide,” said Joanne Smith Finley, who works at Newcastle University in Britain. “These are direct means of genetically reducing the Uygur population.”
The Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), a group of North American, European and Australian members of parliament from a range of political parties, said it would push for a legal investigation on “whether or not crimes against humanity or genocide have taken place” in Xinjiang.
Britain said it was aware of reports which “add to our concern about the human rights situation in Xinjiang”.
“Of course we will be considering this report very carefully,” junior foreign office minister Nigel Adams told parliament.
The rights group World Uygur Congress said the report showed a “genocidal element of the [Chinese Communist Party’s] policies” and called for international action to confront China.
Associated Press and Agence France-Presse
