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China’s cultural eradication of their Islamic majority amounts to ‘genocide’, a Canadian parliamentary subcommittee concludes.
Canada has officially become the first government to call a spade a spade this week and label the CCP’s treatment of the Uighur people a genocide.
In an important development for the mission to liberate China’s Islamic minority from both cultural and literal annihilation, the Subcommittee on International Human Rights of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development in Canadian Parliament has designated atrocities by the Chinese government against the Uighur people in East Turkistan to be genocide in line the with UN Genocide Convention.
The subcommittee said it came to its conclusion after hearing two days of testimony from witnesses that include ‘survivors of the government of China’s atrocities’ in the region.
#BREAKING: Canadian parliamentary committee labels Xinjiang abuses as "genocide" against Uyghurs, the first parliamentary body to do so.#IPAC 🇨🇦 co-chairs @GarnettGenuis, @IrwinCotler and other members have campaigned tirelessly for this judgement.https://t.co/flMfBtyd8b
— Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) (@ipacglobal) October 21, 2020
‘Nearly two million Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims are being detained, including men, women, and children as young as 13 years old,’ the subcommittee said in a news release. ‘Witnesses noted that this is the largest mass detention of a minority community since the Holocaust.’
The international community has long been dancing around the fact that China, the world’s second largest economy, has been committing human rights abuses against the Uighur’s on an extraordinary scale in order to protect various trade and defence deals, and ostensibly to let sleeping dogs lie.
Overtures towards ‘public condemnation’ given by western regimes like the US and Australia towards what China has labelled ‘re-education camps’, where Uighur citizens are sent to be indoctrinated by CCP propaganda and renounce any semblance of the Islamic faith, have fallen on deaf ears. Very little in the way of formal judgement has been passed against the regime, as parliaments perform an outrage not translated into their foreign policy.
Canada is the first to break this cycle. The subcommittee has called on the federal government to recognise China’s actions in the region as genocide and to implement so-called Magnitsky legislation against officials responsible.
As the report itself states, the designation of the Uighur crisis as a genocide is a crucial step as ‘language is important and helps to structure the thinking and response of leaders and policy makers.’ The genocide designation carries with it a moral responsibility under the UN Genocide Convention to take urgent and concrete measures to end the Uighur extermination.
In the past 3 years, 1-3 million Uighurs have been detained in camps, Uighur women have been sterilised in an attempt to diminish the population, Uighurs have been subjected to forced labour and modern slavery, Uighur language has been banned in many schools and prefectures, and even the most basic expressions of religious sentiment have been criminalised.
It is incumbent upon the international community at large to follow in Canada’s footsteps and hold the Chinese government to account lest we risk losing this ancient and important culture in the most violent and abhorrent way possible.
