Late on Tuesday evening, December 3, the House of Representatives passed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act in a landslide vote of 407 to 1, with 23 not voting. Added to a similar bill that passed the Senate unanimously in September, this amounts to a momentous victory for the persecuted Uyghur population of East Turkestan (the name preferred by the Uyghurs for the region commonly known as Xinjiang, China). This version of the bill would force President Trump to condemn abuses against the millions of Uyghurs in China, impose sanctions against Chinese leadership responsible for the mass detention camps and enact export controls on technology that could be used in China’s omnipresent surveillance operation.
It is also a victory for the Uyghur diaspora here in the United States, a small group that has worked tirelessly to mobilize their own community and others to ensure this legislation’s passage. Jewish World Watch has partnered consistently with members of the local Uyghur community to raise awareness of the desperate plight inside China of their friends and family and to encourage members of Congress to endorse this game-changing legislation. The real-life stories of missing relatives and heartfelt activism of our Uyghur brothers and sisters has educated and touched the hearts of many elected officials, inspiring numerous members of Congress to immediately pledge their support. We stand in solidarity and celebration with them in the wake of this important vote.
The Senate version of this bill, introduced by Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Bob Menendez (D-NJ), unanimously passed the Senate on September 11, 2019. The House bill passed Tuesday is more far-reaching than the Senate version, as it promises to enact export controls to prevent U.S. technology from being used to bolster the Chinese government’s Orwellian surveillance capabilities.
The House and Senate versions must now be reconciled. It will then be up to President Trump to sign this extraordinarily bipartisan bill and thereby condemn Beijing’s human rights abuses. Senator Menendez called Tuesday’s vote “recognition that the U.S. government cannot afford to stand idly by as millions of Uyghur Muslims continue to be unjustly imprisoned, subjected to a mass surveillance state, and forced into labor camps by an autocratic regime.” Do not stand idly by is Jewish World Watch’s mandate and rallying cry, a promise by our community to speak out and to take action in the face of any mass atrocity plaguing the world. We applaud both chambers of Congress for embracing this call to action and taking proactive steps to stop the unconscionable abuses and hold the architects of these atrocities accountable.
The Uyghur human rights movement reached a tipping point last month, when two separate leaks of hundreds of pages of official Chinese government documents corroborated what activists, rights groups and journalists have been alleging for years – that Beijing is perpetrating a systematic and widespread cultural genocide against the Uyghurs, which likely rises to the level of crimes against humanity.
The first set of documents, first published by the New York Times on November 16 and now known as the Xinjiang Papers, revealed the underpinnings of the Chinese government’s crackdown on the Uyghurs in over 400 pages. Just days later, on November 24, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) published the China Cables–highly classified Chinese government documents revealing the operations manual for running the mass detention camps in East Turkestan and exposing the mechanics of the region’s Orwellian system of mass surveillance. According to the Associated Press, the Consortium verified the trove of documents by examining contemporaneous state media reports and public notices, consulting experts, cross-checking signatures and confirming the contents with former camp employees and detainees.
The Times and ICIJ’s exposés offered a terrifying window into the crackdown on ethnic Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in East Turkestan and quickly prompted new cries for accountability. The classified documents confirm what Jewish World Watch and our partners have feared for too long, that engineered cultural genocide is undeniably underway and that the systematic and widespread nature of Beijing’s rights-effacing policies rises to the level of mass atrocity crimes. The documents lay bare the Chinese government’s deliberate strategy to lock up ethnic minorities as a preventative measure – even before a crime is committed – to rewire their thoughts through forced ideological and behavioral re-education facilities run in secret. The papers also demonstrate how Beijing is pioneering a terrifying new form of social control drawn on data collected by mass-surveillance technology. In total, the documents reveal a vast system that uses the “organs of dictatorship” to target, surveil, and grade an entire ethnic group in order to forcibly assimilate and control its members. In the words of Xi Jinping, the documents instruct Chinese officials to “show no mercy” in wiping the human slate clean of the Uyghur culture and, potentially, the Uyghur people altogether.
The leaks reveal explicit details on the inner-workings of the concentration camps Beijing claims are voluntary vocational centers intended to benefit and enrich the lives of the Uyghurs:
- Internment is not voluntary
- A system called the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP) identifies people considered suspicious using indicators as innocuous as going abroad, asking others to pray, or using cell phone apps that cannot be monitored by the government. The system spits out names of people that officials then target and round up
- The detention campaign is massive in scale: a bulletin notes that in a single week in June 2017, the IJOP identified 24,612 “suspicious persons” in southern Xinjiang, with 15,683 sent to “education and training,” 706 to prison and 2,096 to house arrest
- Police stations at front gates, watchtowers, double-locked doors and video surveillance are in the camps “to prevent escapes”
- Cell phones are strictly prohibited to prevent “collusion between inside and outside”
- Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims are scored on how well they speak Mandarin and follow strict rules on everything down to bathing and using the toilet–scores that ultimately determine if and when they can leave
- “Manner education” is mandatory
- “Vocational skills improvement” is offered only after a year in the camps
The documents have jumpstarted what had been a slow-moving legislative process in motion since January, when the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act was first introduced. The leaked dossier could also just reveal the tip of the iceberg in terms of the extent of China’s abuses. There is no question that they expose foundational acts that have characterized mass atrocities since time immemorial — classification and dehumanization.
This rare look into Chinese policy revealed that China’s leadership has viewed Uyghurs as sub-human, prone to violence, and uncivilized. This “othering” has been a common factor leading to genocides, and a likely indicator that much more grave and rights-effacing tactics are in the works. One Uyghur teacher who suffered abuse in one of the camps told the Associated Press: “They didn’t see us as humans. They treated us like animals – like pigs, cows and sheep.”
Indeed, reports of far more egregious violations have been revealed as awareness of the Uyghur crisis has grown. At first, our Uyghur friends have told us, they stayed quiet, fearing that their relatives might be harmed further if they spoke out. Since their despair reached the level that they felt compelled to raise the alarms in order to seek justice, many accounts of a multitude of gross human rights violations have been revealed: forced indoctrination, deprivation, torture, and sanctioned rape inside the camps; children forcibly separated from their parents and placed in orphanages where their Uyghur identifies are completely wiped away; Uyghurs being used for organ harvesting and forced labor; busloads of Uyghurs leaving the camps in the dead of night, never to be seen again – suggesting there may be extrajudicial killings. While some of these accounts may have once seemed outlandish without corroborating evidence, which is exceedingly difficult to obtain given Chinese control over the region, the two recent leaks suggest that such atrocities may well be taking place as a part of the practice of othering and social engineering that Beijing has adopted towards the Uyghurs.
It is now clear that China is guilty of gross and systematic human rights violations, with culpability beginning at the highest level of government and permeating all other levels. The inhumane detention camps of East Turkestan and the depravities occurring inside them constitute crimes against humanity, and we commend the U.S. House and Senate for treating the Xinjiang Papers and China Cables as grounds for urgent action.
We ask both houses of Congress to quickly reconcile the two versions of the Uyghur Human Rights Acts, so that momentum is not lost.
We urge President Trump to continue his efforts to hold Beijing accountable for abuses against its people, following up on his signing just last week of the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. The United States must send a clear message to Beijing that such atrocities cannot be allowed to continue with impunity. The international community must show the Chinese regime consequences for their fundamental and large-scale abuses of human rights.
We will continue to insist, as well, that both Congress and the President urgently pass and enact this legislation in a timely fashion so that it can live up to its promises and help bring an end to these atrocities.