Tue 30 June 2020:
US State Secretary Mike Pompeo denounced China Monday following the reports that Beijing forces birth control on Uighurs to suppress their population.
“The world received disturbing reports today that the Chinese Communist Party [CCP] is using forced sterilization, forced abortion, and coercive family planning against Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang, as part of a continuing campaign of repression,” Pompeo denounced in a statement.
He said German researcher Adrian Zenz’s “shocking revelations are sadly consistent with decades of CCP practices that demonstrate an utter disregard for the sanctity of human life and basic human dignity.”
Pompeo urged Beijing to immediately end “these horrific practices” and asked all nations to join the US in demanding an end to “these dehumanizing abuses.”
The 32-page report penned by Zenz and revealed Saturday is based on a research carried out in 2017-2018 which brought to light the Chinese government’s campaign of repression and mass internment directed against ethnic Uighur people in Xinjiang.
China’s Foreign Ministry rejected the claims by saying the government treats all ethnicities equally and called the report “fabricated”.
In his report, Zenz said his findings represented the strongest evidence yet that Beijing’s policies in Xinjiang met one of the genocide criteria cited in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, namely “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group”.
Zenz said analysis of Chinese government documents showed natural population growth in Xinjiang had fallen “dramatically”. He said that, in its two largest Uighur Muslim prefectures, growth rates fell by 84 percent between 2015 and 2018 and further in 2019.
The Chinese embassy in Washington referred to a statement by Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, saying that “some institutions are bent on cooking up disinformation on Xinjiang-related issues … Their allegations are simply groundless and false.”
Documents from 2019 revealed plans for a campaign of mass female sterilisation targeting 14 percent and 34 percent of all married women of childbearing age in two Uighur counties, Zenz wrote. The campaign, he said, likely aimed to sterilise rural minority women with three or more children, as well as some with two children – equivalent to at least 20 percent of all women of childbearing age.
“Budget figures indicate that this project had sufficient funding for performing hundreds of thousands of tubal ligation sterilization procedures in 2019 and 2020,” he wrote.
Zenz said that, by 2019, Xinjiang planned to subject at least 80 percent of women of childbearing age in its four southern minority prefectures to intrusive birth prevention surgeries – placement of intrauterine devices or sterilisations.
He said in 2018, 80 percent of all new IUD placements in China were performed in Xinjiang, while only 1.8 percent of the population lives there.
Xinjiang region is home to around 10 million Uighurs. The Turkic Muslim group, which makes up around 45% of Xinjiang’s population, has long accused China’s authorities of cultural, religious and economic discrimination.
Up to 1 million people, or about 7% of the Muslim population in Xinjiang, have been incarcerated in an expanding network of “political re-education” camps, according to US officials and UN experts.
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