WASHINGTON: January 28, 2021 – Newly confirmed Secretary of State Antony Blinken did not hesitate to express his agreement with a determination made on the last day of the Trump administration that China’s treatment of its Uyghur and Muslim minority populations is genocide.
The genocide determination presents a massive parting shot at China’s Communist Party (CCP) leaders, as the U.S. is the first country to make the designation, reports CBS News.
“President Joe Biden’s administration must uphold their campaign promises and commitment to Human Rights,” said Salih Hudayar, Prime Minister of the East Turkistan Government in Exile, the democratically elected official body representing East Turkistan.
In a rare show of exasperation, spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry Zhao Lijian told reporters on Thursday: “China has no genocide; China has no genocide; China has no genocide, period. The most important thing should be repeated three times.”
2. Boycott the Beijing 2022 Olympics.
3. Introduce the US declaration of genocide as an agenda for the UN Security Council
4. Prosecute China’s diplomats in the U.S., including its Ambassador Cui Tianki, for genocide under US Code 1091
5. Acknowledge East Turkistan as an Occupied Country. (East Turkistan was renamed Xinjiang after the CCP Occupation in 1949)
Beijing had previously expressed outrage at then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s determination days before President Joe Biden’s inauguration that “China is committing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, China, targeting Uyghur Muslims and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups.”
“China’s shameless denial of its ongoing genocide against Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples shouldn’t be left unanswered,” ETGE responded to China in a tweet on Thursday. “The U.S. should bring the genocide to the agenda of the UN Security Council and ACT to end it.”
On January 19, outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the CCP was guilty of “arbitrary imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty of more than one million civilians, forced sterilization, torture of a large number of those arbitrarily detained, forced labor, and the imposition of draconian restrictions on freedom of religion or belief, freedom of expression, and freedom of movement.”
Those acts fit within the United Nation’s definition of genocide.
According to the U.N. convention on the subject, qualifying acts include an intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. The threshold isn’t the killing of members of a targeted group, but rather any acts causing serious bodily or mental harm, the institution of measures intended to prevent births or forcible transfer of one group’s children to another.
There have been widespread allegations of forced sterilization and mandated birth control used by the CCP against Uighurs. In early January, the Chinese Embassy in the U.S. tweeted outlandish claims that such policies “emancipated” the group’s women and freed them from being ‘baby-making machines.’ The next day Twitter labeled the tweet as violating its rules and subsequently removed it.
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