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‘Grievous horror’ in Xinjiang

In the build-up to Holocaust Memorial Day, Rene Cassin co-hosted an interfaith event on Monday to highlight the Uighurs’ plight.

Uighur advocate Ziba Murat, who participated, said it was “incredibly meaningful [to] recognise our suffering”.

Murat’s mother, a Uighur doctor, was sentenced to 20 years in jail in China in March 2019 after disappearing six months earlier.

Gulshan Abbas was officially sentenced on terrorism-related charges, but relatives say she was jailed because of family members’ human rights activism in the United States.

“It is bittersweet to see the situation acknowledged for the grievous horror that it is,” Murat told Al Jazeera, adding she did not “know for certain” whether her mother was still alive.

“It’s so hard to be recognising that things have built to this point, but it’s important to acknowledge how the international community is failing the mandate of ‘never again’,” she said.

Murat warned of a “dire future” for China’s Uighur population unless other countries stop conducting “business as usual” with Beijing and instead press for closing the internment camps.

“Our entire ethnic identity and very lives have been targeted, that is the meaning of genocide,” she said. “Any government who cares about human rights and human dignity must bring these horrific abuses and those missing Uighurs to any dialogue with China going forward.”

Other events drawing attention to the issue in line with this year’s commemoration include a special ceremony at the West London Synagogue on Wednesday.

“We believe that, as survivors of intolerance, persecution and ultimately genocide, and as ‘speakers by experience’ … we have both the moral authority and with it the moral duty to act,” Hasenson-Gross said.

‘One cannot stand silently by’

Jonathan Wittenberg, the senior rabbi of Masorti Judaism in the UK, said Beijing was in effect executing a “deliberate state-sponsored policy to destroy” the Uighurs through its treatment of the minority group.

“One cannot stand silently by while such things happen in the world,” Wittenberg, whose parents fled Nazi Germany as refugees, told Al Jazeera after taking part in Monday night’s interfaith event.

“This is about our shared common humanity, and that’s a call to us all,” he said. “There’s something very important about not letting persecutors feel as though they have the power to do anything they like.”

Critics of Xinjiang’s internment camps, including the UK government, say inmates at the network of facilities have been subjected to human rights violations including arbitrary detention, forced labour, torture and forced sterilisation, among others.

China denies those accusations and claims the camps are “re-education” centres. Chinese officials have long insisted that mass “education and training” is necessary in Xinjiang in order to fight what they call the “three evil forces of extremism, separatism and terrorism”, and boost economic development there.

At the time of publication, the Chinese embassy in the UK had not responded to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

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WASHINGTON — The World Bank said on Monday that it would scale back development work in China’s Xinjiang region after speculation that a $50 million loan it granted in 2015 for an education project was being used to fund Muslim detention camps.

The bank has been conducting a review of the project since Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, and Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts, expressed concern about it in August and after an independent researcher found evidence suggesting that funds were being used to buy police batons and tear gas launchers.

The Chinese government has been facing criticism for detaining more than a million Muslim Uighurs and placing them in “re-education” camps where they are forced to renounce their religious beliefs and embrace the ideology of the Communist Party.

The bank said it had conducted an extensive review of the project and was not able to substantiate the allegations. However, the bank acknowledged the challenge of rigorously monitoring the situation and said it was making changes to the project.

The loan was intended to support five vocational schools in the region by upgrading teams of teachers and curriculums. Some of this money was going to “partner schools” that were indirectly receiving World Bank funding and were not under the bank’s supervision.

“In light of the risks associated with the partner schools, which are widely dispersed and difficult to monitor, the scope and footprint of the project is being reduced,” the bank said in a statement. “Specifically, the project component that involves the partner schools in Xinjiang is being closed.”

The bank said it was also increasing its supervision of the project, which is supposed to continue through next year, by assigning a staff member from Washington to jointly head it and bringing on a senior manager from the bank to participate in site visits.

The situation was one of the first leadership tests for David Malpass, the former Treasury Department official who took over as the World Bank’s president this year.

The Trump administration has stayed largely quiet on China’s human rights record while the two countries have been locked in trade negotiations for more than a year. In recent months, however, officials have shown more willingness to pressure China on the matter.Last month, the Trump administration imposed some commercial restrictions on Chinese technology companies and other organizations believed to be involved in the repression, and said it would impose a visa ban on officials thought to be responsible for human rights abuses.

Also in October, Vice President Mike Pence criticized China’s record on human rights in a speech last month, scolding American companies that do business there and censor their employees from speaking about repressive tactics. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo compared the “abusing” of Uighurs to the surveillance state depicted in George Orwell’s book “1984.”

Mr. Malpass has already made clear that he wants to scale back the bank’s lending to China given the size of its economy. In 2017, the bank lent $2.42 billion to China. This year, the total is expected to fall to $1.33 billion.

The decision is likely to further rankle Beijing. The Chinese government has taken offense to criticism from the United States about Xinjiang and defended its practices there as counterterrorism measures.

“China demands that the U.S. immediately discard its double standards in terrorism, and stop using Xinjiang as a pretext to interfere in China’s internal affairs,” Geng Shuang, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said last week.

Source: nytimes.com

Since initiating market reforms in 1978, China has shifted from a centrally-planned to a more market-based economy and has experienced rapid economic and social development. GDP growth has averaged nearly 10% a year—the fastest sustained expansion by a major economy in history—and more than 850 million people have lifted themselves out of poverty. China reached all the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015 and made a major contribution to the achievement of the MDGs globally. Although China’s GDP growth has gradually slowed since 2012, as needed for a transition to more balanced and sustainable growth, it is still relatively high by current global standards.

With a population of 1.4 billion, China is the world’s second largest economy. It has contributed around 30% of global growth in the past eight years.

Although China has made impressive economic and social development gains, its market reforms are incomplete, and its per capita income remains that of a developing country and only about a quarter of the average for high-income countries. The country is on track to eliminate absolute poverty by 2020 according to China’s current poverty standard (per capita rural net income of RMB 2,300 per year in 2010 constant prices). However, there are still an estimated 372.8 million people below the “upper middle income” international poverty line of $5.50 a day.

Rapid economic ascendance has brought on many challenges as well, including high inequality (especially between rural and urban areas), challenges to environmental sustainability, and external imbalances. China also faces demographic pressures related to an aging population and internal labor migration.

China’s rapid economic growth exceeded the pace of institutional development, and there are important institutional and reform gaps that it needs to address to ensure a sustainable growth path. Significant policy adjustments are required for China’s growth to be sustainable. Managing structural reforms and related risks will not be straightforward given the complexity, size, and global importance of China’s economy.

China’s 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-2020) addresses these issues. It highlights the development of services and measures to address environmental and social imbalances, setting targets to reduce pollution, to increase energy efficiency, to improve access to education and

healthcare, and to expand social protection. The 13th Five-Year Plan’s annual growth target is 6.5%, reflecting the rebalancing of the economy and the focus on the quality of growth while maintaining the objective of achieving a “moderately prosperous society” by 2020 (doubling GDP for 2010-2020).

Last Updated: Oct 01, 2019

Source: worldbank.org

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Pope Francis has met with the pro-abortion president of Argentina, Alberto Fernandéz. He met with Fernandéz’ mistress, too. Francis has met with contraceptive impresario Bono, with Obama, the tormentor of the Little Sisters of the Poor, and with hard-left activist Angelina Jolie. He’s met with George Clooney, Mark Zuckerberg, and Tim Cook. He even traveled to Havana to meet with the murderous communist dictator Fidel Castro, who spent half a century slaughtering Catholics in Cuba.

The Merciful One invited another murderous communist dictator, Chinese president and enthusiastic population-culler (usually by means of forced sterilization or forced late-term abortion) Xi Jinping, to the Vatican, but Xi had other chumps to hoodwink and so didn’t have time.

Written by  Jason Morgan | Remnant Columnist

Source: remnantnewspaper.com

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Supporters of the deal will say that the Vatican is playing a long game. But if so, it’s too long for the millions of Uighurs in prison camps, slavery, or under Orwellian surveillance; too long for the churches which are bulldozed, closed, under surveillance, or whose crosses are torn down and priests jailed; too long for prisoners of conscience whose organs are harvested; too long for Hong Kong, whose freedoms are being rapidly dismantled. Compromise for short-term gain may be defensible; total sell-out for no gain at all and an undermining of the church’s moral authority is not.

At a time when much of the rest of the world is starting to wake up to the repression, mendacity, and dangers of the Chinese Communist Party regime, the Vatican is getting even deeper in bed with it. And at a time when that regime is intensifying repression of religion—including Catholics—in China, Pope Francis is renewing an accord with Beijing that has yielded no benefits yet save for President Xi Jinping and only disunity and suffering for the Catholic Church.

Two years ago, the Vatican signed a provisional agreement with Beijing, valid for two years. It had been a long time coming, and I and others tried to warn of the dangers before the deal was done. When it was announced, I expressed concerns—but also tried to give a pope whom I admire the benefit of the doubt.

China is already breaking the deal. Only last week in Jiangxi province, dissenting Catholic priests have been placed under house arrest, in breach of an agreement to protect clergy from coercion. Priests from Yujiang diocese, under surveillance, have been forbidden from “engaging in any religious activity in the capacity of clergy” after they refused to join the regime’s so-called “patriotic church,” and Bishop Lu Xinping was barred from celebrating Mass.

This was predictable from the start. Everything about the deal was wrong.

Firstly, the timing: in the midst of the worst crackdown on religion since the Cultural Revolution.

The text was, and remains, secret, so no one other than its negotiators and the pope know the details.

And the result was to give an atheist dictatorship a decision-making role in the appointment of bishops.

But two years ago, while I expressed my skepticism, I held out for the possibility that I was wrong and that the pope was right. I am, after all, only a 7-year-old Catholic, having been received into the church on Palm Sunday 2013 in Myanmar by Cardinal Charles Bo, and I didn’t come into the church to take on the Vatican hierarchy, let alone the pope. Indeed, I am not—other than on this issue—a critic of Francis. I love his emphasis on mercy and forgiveness, and I came into the church just 11 days after he was elected to the papacy. I have grown up as a Catholic with him and I want to support him.

Yet in the past two years, nothing has made me think that my skepticism about the deal was misplaced. On the contrary, I remain more convinced today than ever that the deal is very profoundly naïve, wrong, immoral, and dangerous. I don’t doubt the good intentions behind it, but they are deeply misplaced.

For a start, why was the release of Catholic clergy and laity in jail before the deal was signed not made—and secured—as a precondition? As it is, to my knowledge there have been no releases and yet more arrests and detentions, as the Jiangxi case shows.

Even in Hong Kong, the regime appears to have already exerted an influence over the Catholic diocese, directly or indirectly. Cardinal John Tong issued instructions to all priests to “watch your language” in homilies and avoid making politically provocative comments. The diocese has issued new instructions to Catholic schools to discourage students from participating in protests, and published religious textbooks with guidance on how Hong Kong students can “contribute to their nation” with a clear pro-Beijing slant, and it effectively banned an initiative by Catholic activists to mobilize a prayer campaign for Hong Kong. It is unclear whether the pressure for these measures came from Beijing or Rome, or out of fear in the diocese of the wrath of both.

The brazenness of the regime—tightening the screws in Jiangxi just days before the renewal of the agreement—illustrates how one-sided this deal is. Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said last week that the agreement was implemented “successfully” and that the two sides “will continue to maintain close communication and consultation and improve bilateral relations.”

From Beijing’s point of view, he is right. The deal has succeeded in furthering the regime’s control of the church in China, repressing dissent, and buying the pope’s silence.

Francis—who most Sundays highlights one or another area of injustice and human rights around the world, and rightly so when he prays the Angelus—has stayed conspicuously silent on the persecution of Christians in China, the atrocities committed against the Uighurs which may well amount to a genocide, or the repression in Hong Kong or Tibet. Until now, not a word of prayer or solidarity for the repressed peoples of China has passed his lips publicly. Such is the tragic price of this worthless deal.

Ideally, I would advocate for this deal to be abandoned. And I do in principle, absolutely. But there are two reasons I don’t in practice, just yet. First, I know it will fall on deaf ears. The diplomats in the Vatican are determined, and it will be renewed. Second, we still do not know in detail what is in the agreement. It is difficult to categorically reject a text we have not yet fully seen.

So instead I say this to Rome: If it’s such a great deal—despite all the evidence to the contrary—tell us what’s in it. Come on, pleasantly surprise us! As a Catholic, I believe in miracles and I am prepared to be persuaded. But secrecy and silence are not the way.

So reveal, review, and then—if it’s as bad as the current evidence suggests—repeal the deal.

Supporters of the deal will say that the Vatican is playing a long game. But if so, it’s too long for the millions of Uighurs in prison camps, slavery, or under Orwellian surveillance; too long for the churches which are bulldozed, closed, under surveillance, or whose crosses are torn down and priests jailed; too long for prisoners of conscience whose organs are harvested; too long for Hong Kong, whose freedoms are being rapidly dismantled. Compromise for short-term gain may be defensible; total sell-out for no gain at all and an undermining of the church’s moral authority is not.

The Chinese Communist Party knows how to make use of what Lenin described as “useful idiots.” Mao was adept at using “fellow travellers.” When you have Vatican officials extolling the virtues of Chinese communism, as the chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, did when he described it as the best example of Catholic Social Teaching, it is evident that the Vatican has provided Beijing with both useful idiots and fellow travellers.

I will always genuflect at an altar in a Catholic Church. What I won’t do—and I don’t think any Catholic should do—is kowtow to a brutal, repressive, tyrannical regime. I don’t think the pope should be made to do so either.

Source: foreignpolicy.com

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Trump signed a law sanctioning Chinese officials responsible for anti-Uyghur policies even as allegations leaked that the U.S. president had encouraged China in the constriction of detention camps.

By Eleanor Albert

June 18, 2020

On Wednesday, U.S. President Donald Trump signed into law the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020. The bill authorizes the imposition of U.S. sanctions against Chinese officials responsible for the detention and persecution of Uyghurs, a Turkic, Muslim ethnic group predominantly residing in the Xinjiang autonomous region in western China.

The Chinese government has long had concerns about the Uyghurs’ religious and ethnic ties to neighboring states, as well as spates of violence against government workers and civilians over the years. However, the latest Beijing-directed crackdown, which dates back to April 2017 according to leaked official documents, appears to be a sweeping effort to eradicate even the possibility of separatist sentiment and activity by targeting Uyghur cultural identity itself. Many reports describe arbitrary detentions, forced labor in nearby factories, forced loyalty pledges to the Chinese Communist Party and renunciation of Islam, as well as accounts of prison-like conditions with detainees subject to torture and other abuses. Estimates of detained Uyghurs range from 1 to 2 million in dozens of internment camps.

In the United States, these reports led to increasingly loud calls to take punitive action. The Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020 passed both houses of the U.S. legislature nearly unanimously in May; previous versions had been introduced last year. Under the new legislation, the U.S. government can freeze the assets of individuals and entities found responsible for human rights abuses in Xinjiang, as well as ban the identified individuals from entry to the United States. Moreover, the bill requires the submission of periodic reports to Congress on human rights abuses in Xinjiang, efforts to protect U.S. citizens and residents from harassment and intimidation by the Chinese government in the United States, China’s technology capabilities to facilitate internment and mass surveillance in Xinjiang, as well as classified reports on the scope and scale of the Chinese government’s detention and forced labor policies against Muslim minority groups.

The U.S. Department of Commerce previously blacklisted a number of Chinese entities in October 2019 and May 2020, imposing restrictions on exports and access to U.S. technology for their alleged complicity in human rights abuses in Xinjiang.  U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Vice President Mike Pence, U.S. ambassador at large for international religious freedom Sam Brownback and U.S. ambassador at large for counterterrorism Nathan Sales, have also publicly condemned China’s Xinjiang policies.

The White House announced the president’s signing of the act into law as a damaging account of Trump’s foreign policy machinations over the last several years leaked ahead the publication of former National Security Advisor John Bolton’s book. Among the alleged exchanges between Trump and China’s Xi Jinping is the U.S. president’s supposed encouragement of Beijing’s construction of internment camps in Xinjiang.

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“According to our interpreter, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which he thought was exactly the right thing to do,” Bolton writes. Another official said something similar, “which meant we could cross repression of the Uyghurs off our list of possible reasons to sanction China, at least as long as trade negotiations continued.”

Pushback and condemnation of Beijing’s position on human rights and religious freedom have by and large been a bipartisan feature of the U.S. Congress. However, human rights concerns have not been a pillar of the United States’ China policy under the Trump administration, with the executive branch favoring a more transactional approach heavily oriented toward trade. In that context, this new bill should not be viewed as a radical shift for greater U.S.-China policy, but rather a signal that Trump is doubling down on tough talk amid not only intensifying bilateral exchanges between Washington and Beijing, but also a tense domestic political climate in the United States.

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