Uyghurs continue to be persecuted by Chinese authorities but people are paying less attention to this extreme human rights violation which is making the situation disturbing, Michael Levitt wrote in Toronto Star.
The writer believes that the world’s indifference, inaction and silence towards the persecution of Uyghurs can be deadly for the victims. According to the leaked top-secret intelligence assessment from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) on Chinese government foreign interference in Canada, CSIS has taken specific actions to target Canadian MPs, (notably Conservative MP Michael Chong), linked to the February 2021 parliamentary vote condemning Beijing’s oppression of Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities.
During the last Parliament, while serving as an MP and chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the writer repeatedly raised the issue of the Uyghurs and advocated imposing Magnitsky sanctions to hold gross human rights abusers, like China, to account.
Already notorious for widespread human rights abuses in Tibet and Hong Kong, Chinese dictator President Xi Jinping and the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are doubtless delighted the minority it persecutes most the Uyghurs receives short shrift from foreign journalists and politicians.
A mainly Muslim, Turkic-speaking minority group in China, the Uyghurs have long suffered from the CCP’s discriminatory actions. Numbering around 10 million, they live in the country’s northwestern province, known officially as Xinjiang, Levitt wrote in Toronto Star.
In recent years, the CCP has increased its repression of the Uyghurs, which many experts denounce as genocidal. It includes state-imposed restrictions on religious freedom, language rights, cultural expression and freedom of movement.
Since 2017, the Chinese government has detained more than a million Uyghurs in what it calls “re-education camps” and subjected those not detained to extensive surveillance, religious restrictions, forced labour and involuntary sterilization.
Using satellite images, individual testimonies and leaked Chinese government documents, researchers have documented the CCP’s vicious campaign, describing it as “the largest incarceration of a minority group since the Holocaust.” A sobering reference if ever there was one.
Last year, a UN Human Rights office report revealed “patterns of torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” in the camps.
The writer also recalled his webinar, which was organized last week, highlighting the Uyghur genocide. In the webinar, when the “re-education camp” survivors gave their testimony, they were “Zoom bombed” multiple times in an attempt to silence their voices.
According to the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project (URAP), our event co-host, such harassment is commonplace when courageous Uyghurs share their horrific experiences.
If the post-Holocaust vow of never again still stands for something, it should be updated to never again now.
The writer requests people to use all means at our disposal economic, diplomatic, and cultural to step up pressure against China to end its genocidal persecution of the Uyghurs.
