U.S. Declares that Chinese Communist Party Actions Against Uighur Muslims Is Genocide

On the last full day of Donald Trump's presidential administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has classified the actions against Uighur Muslims in the Xinjiang region of China as genocide. Secretary Pompeo wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal explaining the decision:

The facts are chilling. Since 2017, the Communist Party has forced more than a million people into internment camps in the Xinjiang region, on the pretext that they need “re-education.” Arbitrary and indefinite detentions lasting months or years at a time are common inside this modern gulag. Survivors tell of torture, sexual abuse including rape, forced labor, the use of electric shock to extract false confessions, and unexplained deaths in custody. Uighurs scarcely fare better outside the camps—Xinjiang has become a proving ground for an Orwellian surveillance state.




Of particular repugnance to pro-life Americans—and key in my determination that the atrocities in Xinjiang rise to the level of genocide—is the Communist Party’s efforts to stop Uighur women from giving birth via forced abortion and sterilization. Involuntary contraception measures, such as forced insertions of intrauterine devices, are also deployed. “They want to destroy us as a people,” said one such victim. The party has coerced Uighur women to marry non-Uighur men, and separated Uighur children from their families. Birthrates in Xinjiang dropped roughly 24% from 2018 to 2019, compared with a 4.2% decline across China overall. Not every campaign of genocide involves gas chambers or firing squads.



According to Axios