Bitter Winter, a magazine covering human rights and religious liberty, says the dozens of detainees include religious figures and imams who had been arrested and released in the past years.

The crackdown comes while a new system of "political re-education" is being implemented. It involves detaining inmates for 15 days, releasing them and then detaining them again after 15 days.

Bitter Winter says at first, some Kazakh Muslims found the new system better than the previous one which saw the detainees would disappear for years. However, soon they discovered the new system was more disruptive.

"Farmers cannot normally attend to their fields. Small businesses go bankrupt. Loans are not paid. Periodical separations between husbands and wives lead to tensions and a soaring divorce rate," the report said.

The Covid-19 lockdowns have exacerbated the problems. They even impoverish the families of those who are not "re-educated" in the detention camps, Bitter Winter reports.

As long as people have money, they can escape arrest and detention by bribing police, some Muslims say. If they don't have money for bribes, they are forced into "re-education."

Media reports and rights groups say the arrests in the Muslim-majority Xinjiang province are the government's response to Muslims who staged widespread protests slamming their religious leaders's detention.

Uyghur sources say since 2014 more than 1,000 imams and other religious figures have been detained in Xinjiang.

The crackdown continues despite China facing global ire for its brutal persecution of the Turkic-origin-Uyghur and other minorities in the region.

Since 2014, the Communist regime has unleashed a systematic, genocidal pogrom to crush Muslim Uyghur and other minorities. This is the culmination of longstanding Chinese-Uyghur conflict amid an active insurgency, rights groups say.

It's estimated one million Muslims, mostly Uyghurs, are detained in secretive detention camps in Xinjiang. They are subject to brutal oppression including forced sterilisation and forced birth control, rape, forced labour, torture, internment, brainwashing and killings.

Western nations have slammed the persecution of Uyghurs and termed it genocide.

Former UN human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, who visited China this year, released a report about the situation on 30 August. It accused China of committing "serious human rights violations" against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province, which may amount to "crimes against humanity."

In his 2020 book Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future, Pope Francis mentioned "poor Uyghurs" as "persecuted people," triggering a backlash from Chinese authorities.

Source

• UCA News

The Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, a foreign policy think tank based in Washington, D.C., prepared the 55-page report. It is one of the think tank's first independent reports into the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) actions in Xinjiang province.

The Uyghurs are an ethnic minority. The mostly Muslim group lives alongside other ethnic and religious minorities in the region.

"The Uyghur Genocide: An Examination of China's Breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention," report confirms Chinese authorities have created a massive network of internment camps in Xinjiang.

The camps are purportedly for "re-education" and "terrorism prevention."

The report's claims are unequivocal. It concludes "the People's Republic of China (China) bears State responsibility for committing genocide against the Uyghurs in breach of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide Convention) ..."

The authors say they came to this conclusion after an "extensive" review of the available evidence and after applying "international law to the evidence of the facts on the ground."

In 1948, the UN Genocide Convention designated five acts that would constitute "genocide." The report says China has infringed in all five areas, quoting these as being:

killing members of the group

causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group

deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part

imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group

forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Committing just one act "with the requisite intent can sustain a finding of genocide," the UN convention says.

Cam survivors report stories of Uyghur women being systematically raped, tortured and sterilised.

Forced birth control through use of intrauterine devices (IUD) has increased dramatically in Xinjiang while being on the decline throughout the rest of China.

Uyghur women's formerly high fertility rates have seen precipitous drops in fertility in recent years.

Leaked manuals from the camps say wearing traditional clothing is among the "crimes" inmates can be detained for.

Chinese government officials have denied accusations of genocide. They insist the camps have helped prevent terrorism in the region.

China's foreign minister, Wang Yi is calling the accusation of genocide "preposterous." He says the report is "rumour fabricated with ulterior motives and a total lie."

On Jan. 19, former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared Chinese authorities had committed genocide against Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang.

He cited forced labor, torture, forced abortion, sterilisations and birth control as some of the abuses behind his statement.

During his confirmation hearings, current US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that he agreed with Pompeo's genocide assessment.

Source

• Catholic News Agency
• Image: Asia News

Myanmar's Cardinal Charles Maung Bo, president of the Federation of Asian Bishops' Conferences, and Indonesia's Cardinal Ignatius Suharyo were among the senior figures calling for an investigation into grave human rights violations against the Uyghurs.

Other signatories included the former archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams; seven Anglican bishops; the Coptic-Orthodox archbishop of London, Archbishop Angaelos; the former master of the Dominicans, Father Timothy Radcliffe; some of Britain's most senior rabbis; Muslim faith leaders including the chief convenor of Myanmar's Islamic Centre, Al-Haj U Aye Lwin; the Dalai Lama's representative in Europe; a leading humanist; the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England; Wales' lead bishop on international affairs, Bishop Declan Lang of Clifton; and several Catholic priests.

While the Uyghurs have faced repression for many years, a campaign of persecution has intensified in the past few years, with evidence to suggest that the Chinese Communist Party regime is aiming to eradicate the Uyghur cultural and religious identity.

At least a million — perhaps as many as three million — Uyghurs are incarcerated in prison camps, where they face systematic and severe torture, sexual violence and slave labour.

Outside the camps, the Chinese regime has established an Orwellian surveillance state, with artificial intelligence, facial recognition technology, cameras on every block and Chinese agents living with Uyghur families to monitor them 24 hours a day.

In recent months, further evidence has emerged of the transfer of Uyghurs across China for slave labour and forced sterilization of Uyghur women.

As the faith leaders note in their statement, "recent research reveals a campaign of forced sterilization and birth prevention targeting at least 80 per cent of Uyghur women of child-bearing age in the four Uyghur-populated prefectures — an action which, according to the 1948 Genocide Convention, could elevate this to the level of genocide."

Religious practice has been a particular target, with the destruction of mosques and Muslim burial grounds. Men with beards of a certain length or women wearing headscarves can end up in a prison camp.

Religious acts such as fasting during Ramadan, or praying, are punished and there have been reports of Uyghurs being forced to eat pork and drink alcohol.

China's state media has declared that the aim in this crackdown on the Uyghurs is to "break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections and break their origins."

As The Washington Post put it in an editorial: "It's hard to read that as anything other than a declaration of genocidal intent." Leaked high-level Chinese government documents last year speak of "absolutely no mercy."

The 76 faith leaders' statement is not the first time that religious leaders have spoken out, but it is the first time so many have done so with such unity, urgency and in such numbers across faith communities.

"We have seen many persecutions and mass atrocities.

These need our attention.

But there is one that, if allowed to continue with impunity, calls into question most seriously the willingness of the international community to defend universal human rights for everyone — the plight of the Uyghurs," they write.

"After the Holocaust, the world said, ‘Never again.'

Today, we repeat those words ‘Never again' all over again. We make a simple call for justice, to investigate these crimes, hold those responsible to account and establish a path towards the restoration of human dignity."

Comparisons with the Holocaust

The statement follows a letter last month from the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Marie van der Zyl, to the Chinese ambassador in London, Liu Xiaoming, and a message from former chief rabbi Lord Sacks, both of whom took the rare step of making comparisons between the Holocaust and crimes committed against the Uyghurs.

According to van der Zyl, nobody could see the evidence and fail to note what she describes as "similarities between what is alleged to be happening in the People's Republic of China today and what happened in Nazi Germany 75 years ago: People being forcibly loaded on to trains; beards of religious men being trimmed; women being sterilized; and the grim specter of concentration camps."

Rabbi Lord Sacks wrote a Twitter thread saying: "As a Jew, knowing our history, the sight of people being shaven-headed, lined up, boarded onto trains and sent to concentration camps is particularly harrowing. That people in the 21st century are being murdered, terrorized, victimized, intimidated and robbed of their liberties because of the way they worship God is a moral outrage, a political scandal and a desecration of faith itself."

Maajid Nawaz, a prominent Muslim counter-extremism activist in the UK, went on hunger strike last month to mobilize support for a petition to secure a debate in the British parliament on the Uyghur crisis and a call for the imposition of targeted Magnitsky sanctions on the perpetrators of atrocities.

"Serious allegations of organ harvesting, half a million children missing, 13 tonnes of hair being found, and by the way, those 13 tonnes of hair being off another half a million Uighur human beings," he said.

"With all of this all out in the open and now known, the real question is people were scared to speak about it before, why?"

Genocide, he added, "leaves no room for neutrality … because genocide is fundamentally a war against humanity."

At the end of July, Anglican Bishop James Langstaff of Rochester appealed in the House of Lords for sanctions against China in response to "gross human rights abuses."

And Cardinal Bo wrote in a recent statement on freedom of religion or belief for all in the context of the controversy over Hagia Sophia in Turkey: "In China, the Uyghur Muslims are facing what amounts to some of the contemporary world's worst mass atrocities and I urge the international community to investigate."

There are, however, two major world faith leaders whose voices carry significant moral influence who have yet to speak: Pope Francis and Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby.

Perhaps they have had their reasons for biding their time until now. Yet now that so many of their own clergy are speaking out, the world will be looking to these two spiritual leaders for their response.

And their response does not have to be complicated. It does not have to be political. A simple expression of prayer and solidarity would suffice. But silence is no longer acceptable.

When it comes to genocide, crimes against humanity and mass atrocities, the world expects faith leaders to take a stand. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said: "Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act."

Holy Father and Archbishop Welby, the world is waiting to hear you.

• Benedict Rogers is East Asia team leader at international human rights organization CSW and a member of the Stop the Uyghur Genocide Campaign.
• First published in UCANews.com Republished with permission.

The cardinals of Myanmar and Indonesia are among the signatories of a statement calling for action to stop "one of the most egregious human tragedies since the Holocaust: the potential genocide of the Uyghurs and other Muslims in China."

Uyghur genocide and other atrocity crimes are known to be occurring in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (which the Uyghurs call East Turkestan).

Other signatories include: former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams; London's Coptic-Orthodox Archbishop; some of Britain's most senior Rabbis; Muslim faith leaders; the Buddhist Society UK President; the Dalai Lama's representative in Europe; and the chief executive of Humanists UK.

"We have seen many persecutions and mass atrocities. These need our attention.

"But there is one that, if allowed to continue with impunity, calls into question most seriously the willingness of the international community to defend universal human rights for everyone - the plight of the Uyghurs," the statement says.

"After the Holocaust, the world said ‘Never Again.' Today, we repeat those words ‘Never Again', all over again.

"We make a simple call for justice, to investigate these crimes, hold those responsible to account and establish a path towards the restoration of human dignity."

The statement continues, saying "at least one million Uyghur and other Muslims in China are incarcerated in prison camps facing starvation, torture, murder, sexual violence, slave labour and forced organ extraction."

They note outside the prison camps,

• basic religious freedom is denied
• Mosques are destroyed
• children are separated from their families, and
• even owning a Holy Quran, praying or fasting can result in arrest.

Recent research reveals a campaign of forced sterilisation and birth prevention targeting at least 80 per cent of Uyghur women of childbearing age in the four Uyghur-populated prefectures.

According to the 1948 Genocide Convention, this action could elevate China's actions to the Uyghur people to the level of genocide.

China's state media says their goal is to "break their [Uyghur] lineage, break their roots, break their connections and break their origins."

Commenting on the Uyghurs' plight, the Washington Post says the state media's words make it "hard to read that as anything other than a declaration of genocidal intent." High-level Chinese government documents speak of "absolutely no mercy."

Parliamentarians, governments and jurists have a responsibility to investigate, the statement says.

"As faith leaders, we are neither activists nor policy-makers. But we have a duty to call our communities to their responsibilities to look after their fellow human beings and act when they are in danger. In the Holocaust some Christians rescued Jews."

"We urge people of faith and conscience everywhere to join us: in prayer, solidarity and action to end these mass atrocities. We make a simple call for justice, to investigate these crimes, hold those responsible to account and establish a path towards the restoration of human dignity."

Source

• The Tablet
• Jewish World Watch
• Image: Jewish World Watch