Not long after World War II, one of the phrases that spread was “Never Again!” in reference to the heinous crimes committed by the Nazis against the Jews of Europe. Never Again would there be concentration camps, executions, gas chambers, and genocide of a specific group of people for racial, religious, or political reasons. Fortunately, Jews today have a homeland and a highly lethal army (and armed citizenry) to protect them.
However, it seems as if the phrase Never Again has lost some of its resonance given that there have been several genocides post-WWII and that there is an ongoing one in Communist China today, complete with internment camps, torture, executions, and the harvesting of body organs.
After the Communists took over China in 1950, they proceeded to kill an estimated 65 million of their own people because they were deemed “class enemies.”
Today, in the northwest region of China, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), more than 1 million Uyghur Muslims (and other religious “enemies”) have been imprisoned in concentration camps. We have satellite photos of these camps and testimony from some of the people who have escaped these camps.
In addition, several governmental and semi-governmental reports have been published detailing the crimes and genocide being perpetrated in the XUAR by Chinese authorities.
Despite this information, and some sanctions against China, it looks as if no one is literally going to rescue the Uyghurs from those concentration camps. No one is going to bomb the railways or roadways to those torture factories.
In 2020, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said, “I believe this genocide is ongoing, and that we are witnessing the systemic attempt to destroy Uyghurs by the Chinese-party state.” Secretary Anthony Blinken, under President Joe Biden, said he agrees with Pompeo and that what China is doing “speaks to an effort to commit genocide.” Also, 50 nations at the U.N. have denounced China’s treatment of the Uyghurs.
A 2021 report by the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, on behalf of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, concluded that “the People’s Republic of 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) based on an extensive review of the available evidence….”
It further explained that under Article II of the Genocide Convention, China has the “intent to destroy” the Uyghurs. It then presented several facts to bolster its conclusion. These include the following:
-- In 2014, President Xi Jinping launched the “People’s War on Terror” in XUAR. “High-level officials followed up with orders to ‘round up everyone who should be rounded up,’ ‘wipe them out completely … destroy them root and branch,’ and ‘break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins.’” Chinese officials likened the mass internment of Uyghurs to “eradicating tumors.” (Sound familiar?)
-- Han cadres (spies) are sent “to reside in Uyghur homes as monitors, resulting in the rupturing of family bonds.”
-- “In 2017, the XUAR legislature formally legalized the mass internment of Uyghurs under ‘De-Extremification’ regulations. … [E]xpansion of the mass intenment camps, increase the discipline and punishment….”
-- “[F]orcibly sterilizing Uyghur women of childbearing age and interning Uyghur men of child-bearing years, preventing the regenerative capacity of the group and evincing an intent to biologically destroy the group as such. … Uyghur women are subjected to forced IUD insertions, abortions, and injections or medication halting their menstrual cycle.”
-- “[I]n 2017, China began building a vast network of massive State-run, highly securitized boarding schools and orphanages to confine Uyghur children, including infants, full time.”
-- “[L]ocal authorities have eliminated Uyghur education.”
-- “[D]eliberate targeting of the guardians and transmitters of Uyghur identity for prolonged detention or death, including household heads, intellectuals, and cultural leaders….”
-- “[R]eports of mass death and deaths of prominent Uyghur leaders selectively sentenced to death by execution or, for elders in particular, by long-term imprisonment.”
-- "[S]ystematic torture and cruel treatment, including rape, sexual abuse, exploitation, and public humiliation, at the hands of camp officials and Han cadres assigned to Uyghur homes.”
-- “Internment camps contain designated ‘interrogation rooms,’ where Uyghur detainees are subjected to consistent and brutal torture methods, including beatings with metal prods, electric shocks, and whips…. [E]xtreme forms of physical and psychological torture within the camps, including mock executions, public ‘self-criticisms,’ and solitary confinement.”
-- “[S]eparate Uyghur children from their parents, and transfer Uyghurs on a mass scale into forced hard labor schemes in a manner that parallels the mass internment…. [D]eliberately inflicting collective conditions calculated to terminate the survival of the Uyghurs.”
In 2019, the China Tribunal, an Independent Tribunal into Forced Organ Harvesting from Prisoners of Conscience in China, concluded that “forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale and that Falun Gong practitioners have been one -- and probably the main -- source of organ supply. The concerted persecution and medical testing of the Uyghurs is more recent and it may be that evidence of forced organ harvesting of this group may emerge in due course.”
The tribunal also said that if the accusations against China are proved, “they will, inevitably, be compared to the worst atrocities committed in conflicts of the 20th century; but victim for victim and death for death, the gassing of the Jews by the Nazis, the massacre by the Khmer Rouge, or the butchery to death of the Rwanda Tutsis may not be worse than cutting out the hearts, other organs and the very souls of living, blameless, harmless, peaceable people.”
Never Again?
