State Department accuses China of genocide against Uighur Muslims
The State Department on Tuesday declared China’s human rights abuses in the Xinjiang region a “genocide” against ethnic Uighur Muslims in one of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s final acts before leaving office.
In a statement, Pompeo accused Beijing’s ruling Communist Party of committing “crimes against humanity against the predominantly Muslim Uighurs and other members of ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang” as far back as March 2017. It's a designation that President-elect Joe Biden administration is expected to retain.
Specifically, Pompeo alleged that China was guilty of “the arbitrary imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty of more than one million civilians, forced sterilization, torture of a large number of those arbitrarily detained, forced labor, and the imposition of draconian restrictions on freedom of religion or belief, freedom of expression, and freedom of movement.”
A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Pompeo’s statement.
In an interview on Fox News on Tuesday afternoon, Pompeo described China’s actions as “the stain of the century,” and said his declaration represented “simply a continuation of the work this administration has done to try and convince the Chinese Communist Party to cease this terrible, terrible set of human rights violations that have been taking place.”
The declaration by the State Department marks an escalation of the outgoing Trump administration’s pressure on the Chinese Communist Party, which has interned more than a million Uighurs in work and reeducation camps across the northwestern region.
The designation came after months of internal study at the agency, and is not expected to be reversed by Biden's team. Secretary of State nominee Antony Blinken told a Senate panel Tuesday that labeling the events in Xinjiang a genocide would be "my judgment as well."
The declaration comes less than a week after the Department of Homeland Security effectively banned imports of all cotton and tomato products from Xinjiang over concerns of widespread forced labor in the agricultural sector, which U.S. officials say is akin to “modern day slavery.” The consequences of those bans will be far reaching, as an estimated 1 in 5 global cotton products contain fibers from Xinjiang.
The House of Representatives has passed an even stronger bill that would ban any imports from Xinjiang unless companies can prove forced labor was not used in their production. That bill stalled in the Senate amid a lobbying campaign from apparel and technology companies, but it remains unclear whether the legislation will have a better chance of passage with a Democratic-controlled Senate.
