The Next Global Superpower is Perpetrating a Genocide
October 2, 2020
Genocide, the act of deliberately killing a large group of people solely based on their ethnic group, religion, or nation. It’s been around just as long as mankind has. The term however, wasn’t created until 1944 when Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined the term in his book “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe”. The term was developed in response to the systematic oppression, and murder of Jewish people by the Nazis throughout Europe during World War II.
We often sit down and look at the gruesome imagery of the naked, malnourished Jewish corpses piled up in concentration camps, or the dismembered bodies of a family in their own home during the Rwandan genocide, or the countless mass graves of men, women, and children during the Armenian-Assyrian genocide. We look at these photos, and they serve as reminders of what we as humans are capable of. They remind us that we must act quickly, and decisively to end genocide before it begins.
China is committing a genocide. According to the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” put together by the United Nations, China is by all accounts committing a genocide against the Uyghur ethnic minority in Xianjiang. Act (C) of the ‘Genocide Convention’ defines genocide as “imposing measures intended to prevent births within a group”. China has detained over 1.5 million people, many of them have been sterilized, or forced to have an abortion, thus, fitting the description of the act.
China’s reasoning for this, according to interviews conducted by a VICE journalist who visited Xinjiang, is because of national security issues. According to the Chinese government, a number of Uyghur Muslims have joined various terror groups in the Middle East, however, that is no excuse to detain an entire ethnic group.
Those who have escaped the camps have described them as hellish and inhumane. Many report sexual abuse, torture, re-education, forced organ transplants (while still being conscious), forced abortions and sterilizations.
Satellite imagery also shows proof of large concentration camps in Xinjiang, along with the Chinese government destroying gravesites where generations of Uyghur have been buried and laid to rest to make room for car parks and playgrounds.
However, we still have more evidence of the atrocities being committed. In July of 2020, 13 tons of human hair were seized by federal authorities in New York, in the form of weaves, all traced to the region where the camps were located. This could mean that the Chinese government is also harvesting the hair of their detainees and selling them. The nation is no stranger to selling body parts though, they are notorious for harvesting the organs of dead prisoners after a 1984 regulation passed allowing it.
China, though on the path to becoming a developed nation, and on the path to becoming the world’s strongest economy, has committed atrocious things throughout its communist history. From crushing its own citizens with tanks during peaceful protests, to the social credit system. This nation, though rich in history and culture, has done atrocious things that violate even the most basic of human rights.
We must do all we can to put an end to the awful and immoral practices occurring in China.
“In general, those who resort to mass murder on a collective scale always put forward the justification that they acted on behalf of the nation.”
― Taner Akçam
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/15/uighur-genocide-xinjiang-china-surveillance-sterilization/
https://apnews.com/fff5fc7925f09916bf6b9d5f79bb4132
