Lawmakers urge probe of Xinjiang genocide, reports of ‘systematic' rape in internment camps

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Written by northsouth

Category: Asia

Published: 04 February 2021

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LONDON - International lawmakers have called on their governments to urgently probe allegations of genocide and crimes against humanity in northwest China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in response to shocking new allegations of widespread rape by former internment camp detainees.

A report by the BBC on Tuesday included interviews with several women who claimed they were "systematically raped, sexually abused, and tortured" while held in the XUAR's vast network of internment camps, where authorities are believed to have held up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities since early 2017.

Tursunay Ziawudun spent nine months detained at a camp before she was able to flee the country and relocate to the U.S. She told the BBC that women were removed from their cells "every night" and raped by masked Chinese men, and that she was tortured and later gang-raped on three occasions.

Gulzira Auelkhan, and ethnic Kazakh who was held for 18 months in a camp, said she was forced to handcuff detainees to their beds, remove their clothes, wait outside the room while various Chinese men entered, and then help the detainee shower after they left.

One woman described watching someone be gang-raped in front of around 100 detainees, while others detailed torture that included being penetrated and sodomized with electric batons, as well as receiving "vaccines" that left them sterilized.

On Wednesday, Ziawudun told RFA additional details about her abuse in the camp, saying that the first time she was raped, four men came to get her from her cell.

"They don't immediately start raping you. First, they interrogate you, coerce you, scream at you, threaten you, then rape you in turn with torture," she said.

"They're Chinese men wearing masks and black clothes. I don't know what kind of people they are. During my three 'talks,' different people gang-raped me."

Ziawudun said that when she told her husband about the rape she enduring in the camp, he was "horrified, but not surprised."

"He said he could sense what happened to me without me saying a single word. His tears fell and said he could never blame me for what happened," she said.

"You can see the intense hatred in the eyes of the Chinese police towards us. They believe they have a duty to torture us even to death. I think there's an order from above to destroy us. I can feel that they're ordered to destroy us one way or another, even though they're not publicly executing us."

Beginning in October 2018, Beijing acknowledged the existence of the camps, but described them as voluntary "vocational centers," despite reporting by RFA which has found that detainees are mostly held against their will in poor conditions, where they are forced to endure inhumane treatment and political indoctrination.

While former detainees have reported isolated incidents of rape and sexual abuse in the XUAR's camps, the BBC's investigation provides some of the most damning evidence that such practices occur on a systematic and widespread basis.

And experts believe that while President Xi Jinping and other high-ranking members of the central government may not have ordered such abuses, it is extremely unlikely that they are not aware of them.

Calls for probe

In response to Tuesday's report, members of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC)—a group of more than 200 lawmakers from across the globe—noted that the international community has been too complacent about abuses in the XUAR and warned that "the time for mere words has long passed."

"IPAC is united in horror and in condemnation of sickening reports of the torture and rape of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in the internment camps of Xinjiang," the group said in a letter signed by more than 30 lawmakers.

"Eyewitness testimonies broadcast by the BBC have exposed depraved and dehumanizing treatment of those detained in several camps."

IPAC called for a coordinated effort to hold China to account.

"We again call for a U.N. led or international legal investigation of crimes against humanity and genocide that are taking place in Xinjiang, and in the meantime for individual states to respond to their obligations under the genocide convention and take collective urgent political action in response to this evidence," the letter said.

IPAC's statement included signatures by U.S. Senators Marco Rubio, co-chair of the bipartisan and bicameral Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), and Robert Menendez, ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as well as lawmakers from Australia, Canada, Denmark, the EU, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the U.K.

The BBC report also prompted statements from human rights advocates, including Sophie Richardson, China director for New York-based Human Rights Watch, who echoed concerns that more must be done to confront China on the situation in the XUAR.

"Where. Is. The. Prosecution? Because the evidence of *persecution* just keeps coming," she said in a tweet.

German researcher Adrian Zenz, who in a June 2020 report linked decreases in the birthrate and natural population growth rate in the XUAR in 2018 to forced sterilization and concluded that such measures amount to genocide under United Nations definitions, also weighed in, tweeting, "It's time our political leaders stopped pretending this isn't a big deal."

When Zenz's study came out, official Chinese media vilified him and said Beijing is "considering suing" him for libel, while the foreign ministry denounced him.

But on Tuesday, the senior fellow at the Washington-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and leading expert on China's policies toward Uyghurs doubled down, saying the BBC report "could tick another box of the U.N. Genocide Convention" and pointing to criteria that include "causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group."

US actions

The BBC's investigation follows the Jan. 19 announcement by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that he had "determined" China is "committing genocide and crimes against humanity" in the XUAR against Uyghurs and other ethnic groups, and that Beijing and the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) "must be held to account."

Pompeo's designation, which came on his last full day as top U.S. diplomat and marked the first time China's policies in the XUAR were labeled genocide by a foreign government, cited "the forced assimilation and eventual erasure of a vulnerable ethnic and religious minority group."

The new Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, has endorsed the designation, suggesting that President Joe Biden's administration will pursue a more forceful approach in holding China accountable for its abuses in the region. Emily Horne, the spokesperson for Biden's National Security Council, told the Washington Examiner over the weekend that "President Biden has called the oppression of the Uyghurs a genocide, and he stands against it in the strongest possible terms."

On Jan. 20, the first day of the Biden administration, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying slammed Pompeo's "venomous lies" and called the determination "nothing more than a piece of wastepaper."

Former President Donald Trump's administration in July leveled sanctions against several top Chinese officials deemed responsible for rights violations in the region, including regional party secretary Chen Quanguo, under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act.

The move, which marked the first time Washington had sanctioned a member of China's powerful Politburo, followed Trump's enactment in June of the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020 (UHRPA), which passed nearly unanimously through both houses of Congress at the end of May. The legislation highlights arbitrary incarceration, forced labor, and other abuses in the XUAR and provides for sanctions against the Chinese officials who enforce them.

Myanmar ruling party leaders arrested in sweeping military crackdown

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Written by northsouth

Category: Asia

Published: 01 February 2021

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RANGON - Myanmar's military has arrested leader Aung San Suu Kyi, the country's president, and state ministers in wave of detentions of ruling National League for Democracy figures an early Monday morning that followed rising tensions over disputed 2020 election results, an NLD spokesman said.

"We have heard that the military has been arresting people from our party, and that it has detained the State Counselor and the President," NLD spokesman Myo Nyunt told RFA's Myanmar Service.

Picked up in detentions launched hours before the new parliament was slated to convene Feb. 1 were State Councilor Aung San Suu Kyi, President Win Myint, and the state ministers from the region of Yangon, the country's largest city, and Shan, Kayin, and Mon states, he said.

"Han Thar Myint and Thein Lwin, members of the NLD CEC are detained, too. I am waiting for their arrest now," said Myo Nyunt, referring to the party's Central Executive Committee. He did not elaborate on the grounds for the arrests.

"They will give the excuse that they have arrested us over the alleged voting fraud case. We want everything to be in line with the law. Since they are an armed group, they can do whatever they want," the spokesman added.

There was no immediate statement from the military, while the number and whereabouts of the detained politicians were not immediately clear.

The military, which had called on the government to postpone the convening of parliament, also arrested MPs, political activists and student leaders, sources told RFA.

"I am detained," Mya Aye, a 1988 democracy movement activist and leader of the group Federal Democratic Forces, posted on his Facebook a few minutes before his account was deactivated at dawn on Monday.

The BBC' reported that there were soldiers on the streets of the capital, Naypyitaw, and Yangon, and that telephone and internet lines in Naypyitaw have been cut.

Monday's detentions followed a string of veiled threats of a coup by Myanmar's military last week over claims of voting fraud in the Nov. 8 elections, which the NLD swept in an outcome confirmed by electoral authorities.

Aung San Suu Kyi, a 75-year-old Nobel laureate who has spent nearly two decades under house arrest, was set to launch her second five-year term in late March.

The army and its political proxy, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), have contended for weeks that there was widespread voter fraud and have increased pressure on the Union Election Commission (UEC) to investigate. Neither the military nor the USDP have submitted any evidence of actual voter fraud, but they have raised questions about outdated voter lists and other problems.

In response to talk about a coup, the UEC issued a statement on Thursday insisting that elections were devoid of fraud as alleged by the military, despite some voter list errors which it said it would investigate.

Intervention by the military is troubling to many in Myanmar, which endured brutal, corrupt military rule and international pariah status from 1962 to 2011, when it began a transition to democratic rule.

"The doors just opened to a very different future," said Thant Myint-U of the NGO Burma Campaign UK. "I have a sinking feeling that no one will really be able to control what comes next."

The apparent coup "needs to be met with the strongest international response. The military need to be made to understand that they have made a major miscalculation in thinking they can get away with this," he said on Twitter.

Thousands flee Hong Kong for UK fearing China crackdown

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Written by northsouth

Category: Asia

Published: 31 January 2021

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LONDON/HONG KONG - The number of people from Hong Kong making the decision to leave their hometown and move to Britain since Beijing imposed a strict national security law on the Chinese territory last summer is expected to swell to hundreds of thousands.

Thousands have already made the decision, some because they fear punishment for supporting the pro-democracy protests that swept the former British colony in 2019.

Others say China's encroachment on their way of life and civil liberties has become unbearable, and they want to seek a better future for their children abroad. Most say they do not plan to ever go back.

The moves are expected to accelerate now that five million Hongkongers are eligible to apply for visas to Britain, allowing them to live, work and study there and eventually apply to become British citizens.

Applications for the British National Overseas (BNO) visa officially opened on Sunday, though many have already arrived on British soil to get a head start.

The British government said some 7,000 people with BNO passports — a travel document that Hongkongers could apply for before the city was handed over to Chinese control in 1997 — have arrived since July on the previously allowed six-month visa.

It estimates that over 300,000 people will take up the offer of extended residency rights in the next five years.

Andrew Lo, founder of Anlex Immigration Consultants in Hong Kong, said: "Before the announcement of the BN(O) visa in July, we didn't have many enquiries about UK immigration, maybe less than 10 a month.

"Now we receive about 10 to 15 calls a day asking about it."

Mike, a photojournalist who wanted to be identified only by his first name, said he plans to apply for the visa and move to Leeds with his wife and young daughter in April.

His motivation to leave Hong Kong came after the city's political situation deteriorated following the anti-government protests and he said he realised that the city's police force was not politically neutral.

The police have been criticised by pro-democracy supporters for brutality and the use of excessive violence.

Mike said moving to Britain was important as he believed the education system in Hong Kong would be affected by the political situation and it would be better for his daughter to study in the UK.

Mr Lo said that with the new visa, the barrier to entry to move to the UK becomes extremely low, with no language or education qualification requirements.

BNO passport holders need to prove that they have enough money to support themselves for six months and prove that they are clear of tuberculosis, according to the UK government.

Currently, Mr Lo assists three to four families a week in their move to the UK. About 60% of these are families with young children, while the remaining are young couples or young professionals.

Cindy, a Hong Kong businesswoman and the mother of two young children, arrived in London last week.

In Hong Kong she had a comfortable lifestyle. She owned several properties with her husband and the business she ran was going well. But she made up her mind to leave it all behind as she felt that the city's freedoms and liberties were eroding and she wanted to ensure a good future for her children.

Cindy, who wanted to be identified by her first name only, said it was important to move quickly as she feared Beijing would soon move to halt the exodus.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson said this week that the visa offer showed Britain was honouring its "profound ties of history" with Hong Kong, which was handed over to China on the understanding that it would retain its Western-style freedoms and much of its political autonomy not seen on mainland China.

Beijing said on Friday that it would no longer recognise the BNO passport as a travel document or form of identification, and criticised Britain's citizenship offer as a move that "seriously infringed" on China's sovereignty. It was unclear what effect the announcement would have because many Hongkongers carry multiple passports.

Beijing drastically hardened its stance on Hong Kong after the 2019 protests turned violent and plunged the city into a months-long crisis.

Since the security law's enactment, dozens of pro-democracy activists have been arrested, and the movement's young leaders have either been jailed or fled abroad.

Because the new law broadly defined acts of subversion, secession, foreign collusion and terrorism, many in Hong Kong fear that expressing any form of political opposition — even posting messages on social media — could land them in trouble.

Miriam Lo, who runs Excelsior UK, a relocation agency, said: "This is a really unique emigration wave – some people haven't had time to actually visit the country they're relocating to. Many have no experience of living abroad.

"And because of the pandemic, they couldn't even come over to view a home before deciding to buy."