Witnesses and experts provided grim testimony about torture, rape, and other human rights violations in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) at the opening day of a tribunal in London investigating whether China's treatment of its ethnic Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims constitutes genocide.
Kicking off a series of hearings known as the "Uyghur Tribunal" to run on June 4-7 and again in September, Uyghur exiles described forced abortions, arbitrary arrests, and forced labor in Xinjiang, while international legal experts weighed in on the applicability of laws on genocide and other statutes.
The tribunal has no state backing and any judgments will be nonbinding on any government. Beijing has denounced the tribunal and smeared its participants.
More than a dozen witnesses and experts are providing testimony during the sessions held at the conference center of Church House, the London headquarters of the Church of England in Westminster. Nine people spoke at the session on Friday.
"My characterization of what is happening to Uyghurs and other related Turkic Muslim peoples in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) as 'cultural genocide' emerges from my analysis of both the actions taken by the state against these peoples since 2017 and the context in which they are taking place," said Sean Roberts, an international affairs professor at The George Washington University.
"The actions themselves are more than the implementation of a random collection of repressive policies," he said at Friday's session.
"Rather, they form a complex of policies, which are destroying Uyghurs' sense of nationhood. The context in which they are being carried out is that of China's settler colonization of the territory Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims peoples view as their homeland," said Roberts, who wrote a book on China's efforts to wipe out the cultural identity of the Uyghurs.
China has held up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in a network of detention camps since 2017.
Beijing has said that the camps are vocational training centers or re-education centers and has denied widespread and documented allegations that it has subjected Muslims living in the XUAR to indiscriminate killings, torture, rape, enslavement, forced separation of children from their parents, forced sterilization, labor, enforced disappearances, destruction of cultural and religious heritage, persecution, forced marriages, and the imposition of Han Chinese men into Uyghur households.
Muetter Illiqud of the Uyghur Transitional Justice Database, a Norway-based project that records disappeared and extrajudicially detained Uyghurs in the XUAR, said in written testimony that the Chinese regime has been actively executing coercive ethnocentric Sinicization policies to erase Uyghurs' language, culture, and belief system.
"Sinicization implies the diffusion of Chinese culture and influence, in this case to the detriment of local minorities' cultures," she said. "These specifically targeted assimilation policies have had an enormous impact on the social interactions and the collective psyche of the Uyghur people both at home and abroad, which in recent years also started to impact the lives of other Turkic/Muslim peoples in East Turkistan."
'Young men disappeared frequently'
Quelbinur Sidik, a teacher born in Urumqi who was assigned to teach Chinese in both a men's and women's re-education camp for nearly two years provided witness testimony on unsanitary conditions in the camps and evidence of rape, forced sterilization, and the forced medication of Uyghurs.
"Male police officers really like working in female camps, as most of them volunteer to be in these camps," she said in her written testimony. "They brag about whom and how they raped during their inner circles after getting drunk, and that's how the news got out at the first place."
Quelbinur also said that she found out that all women in the camp where she taught had received periodic shots to stop their menstrual cycles, and that some experienced side effects such as severe bleeding from both the shots and pills they were given.
The inmates were given only water and a small bun to eat, she noted. "No wonder they're losing weight day by day and look sicker and sicker," she said.
"It's one thing that they don't feed them enough, leave them in cold rooms without proper clothes, but they also beat them, rape and torture them, make them confess to the crimes they didn't commit," Quelbinur said...RFA
https://www.crimeandmoreworld.com/uyghur-tribunal-hears-grim-accounts-of-rape-and-torture-in-chinas-xinjiang/
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