CHINA'S CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY TOWARDS UYGHUR MUSLIMS

Under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), crimes against humanity are serious specified offenses that are knowingly committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack against any civilian population. “Widespread” refers to the scale of the acts or number of victims.

A “systematic” attack indicates a pattern or methodical plan. Crimes against humanity can be committed during peace time as well as during armed conflict, so long as they are directed against a civilian population.

Human Rights Watch said China is “committing crimes against humanity” toward Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in the country’s western Xinjiang region.
Chinese authorities have systematically persecuted Turkic Muslims their lives, their religion, their culture.

 

"Break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins. Completely shovel up the roots of “two-faced people,” dig them out, and vow to fight these two-faced people until the end".-Maisumujiang Maimuer, Chinese religious affairs official

 

The Chinese government’s oppression of Turkic Muslims is not a new phenomenon, but in recent years has reached unprecedented levels. As many as a million people have been arbitrarily detained in 300 to 400 facilities, which include “political education” camps, pretrial detention centers, and prisons.

 

Courts have handed down harsh prison sentences without due process, sentencing Turkic Muslims to years in prison merely for sending an Islamic religious recording to a family member or downloading e-books in Uyghur. Detainees and prisoners are subjected to torture and other ill-treatment, cultural and political indoctrination, and forced labor. 

 

The oppression continues outside the detention facilities: the Chinese authorities impose on Turkic Muslims a pervasive system of mass surveillance, controls on movement, arbitrary arrest and enforced disappearance, cultural and religious erasure, and family separation.

Human rights groups say the Chinese are committing horrific crimes against Uighurs.
The UN has raised the alarm. The US and Canada have called it genocide.
But China has repeatedly denied the accusations. 

 In 2017, according to official statistics, arrests in Xinjiang accounted for nearly 21 percent of all arrests in China, despite people in Xinjiang making up only 1.5 percent of the total population.
Since 2017, Chinese authorities have used various pretexts to damage or destroy two-thirds of Xinjiang’s mosques about half of those have been demolished outright.

Important Islamic sacred sites have been demolished across the region.As part of regional authorities’ intrusive “Becoming Families” surveillance, development, and indoctrination campaign, officials impose themselves for overnight stays at the homes of Turkic Muslims, a practice that authorities say “promote[s] ethnic unity.” 

In another particularly chilling practice, some Turkic Muslim children whose parents have been arbitrarily detained are placed in state institutions such as orphanages and boarding schools, including boarding preschools.

China’s far western region of Xinjiang has become a “dystopian hellscape” where Uighurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities face systematic and state-organised “mass internment and torture amounting to crimes against humanity.

Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities face crimes against humanity and other serious human rights violations that threaten to erase their religious and cultural identities.
Torture and other ill-treatment are systematic in the camps and every aspect of daily life is regimented in an effort to forcibly instil secular, homogeneous Chinese nation and Communist party ideals

It’s increasingly clear that Chinese government policies and practices against the Turkic Muslim population in Xinjiang meet the standard for crimes against humanity under international criminal law.

Source : https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/19/break-their-lineage-break-their-roots/chinas-crimes-against-humanity-targeting

https://www.voanews.com/east-asia-pacific/human-rights-watch-calls-out-chinas-crimes-against-humanity-toward-uyghurs-0 

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/10/china-accused-of-crimes-against-humanity-of-uighurs-in-xinjiang