Genocide By Any Other Name

The United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council uncovered China’s widespread harvesting of human organs from persecuted religious and ethnic minorities within its territory, particularly the Uyghur Muslims, on Tuesday, September 24. The China Tribunal, an independent panel set up to examine the issue, presented its findings at a meeting with the Council, sharing that the Chinese government was taking hearts, kidneys, lungs, and skin from the inhabitants of Xinjiang, one of China’s inland provinces. The report also featured several secretly-taken photographs depicting government officials removing organs from Uyghurs while they were still alive.

China’s cruel engagement with the Uyghur Muslims is not a new occurrence. The country’s long history with the Uyghurs began in the 18th century. Violent clashes between Muslims and the government erupted soon after the state attempted to exert greater control over territories with mostly Muslim populations, a policy meant to insulate the Chinese government against any possible ethnic violence or revolts. To avoid such restrictions, Uyghurs migrated to other parts of China, where they were faced with revolts. The population was then divided into 56 ethnic groups, further isolating Uyghurs. The groups were ranked, and the Uyghurs, to no surprise, were placed in the lowest-rated group.

Fast forward to the Cultural Revolution; a time of great social upheaval in China, this period also featured rising persecution of Uyghur Muslim minority populations throughout the country. Mosques were defaced, copies of the Quran were destroyed, Muslims were not allowed to go on hajj—a holy religious pilgrimage required by the Islamic faith—and their religious expression was banned by the Communist Red Guards. The persecution abated somewhat after 1976, but the events of 9/11 gave the Chinese government all the more reason to continue targeting the Uyghurs. Ethnic riots escalated the tension, making the atmosphere just right for another calculated campaign to persecute the Uyghur Muslims.

Earlier this year, rumors of Chinese concentration camps in Xinjiang spread through the press and social media. The Chinese government countered the statements by referring to the camps as “re-education centers,” officially known as Vocational Education and Training Centers. They were first implemented in 2014, disguised as centers meant to teach Chinese culture and tradition to Uyghur Muslims. But the camps, which now contain over one million Uyghur Muslims from Xinjiang, have become the clearest examples of Chinese government brutality.

Mihrigul Tursun, a Uyghur refugee, recounted her story of detention and torture in the so-called re-education centers. It had only been eight weeks after she had triplets when Chinese officials detained her and separated her from her children. She was desperate to see them and was soon informed that one of her triplets, Mohaned, had died from various complications. However, the triplets had unusual matching marks on their necks, suggesting that government officials took part in harm against the babies. Tursun was detained again and remained in an overcrowded cell, where she claims to have seen nine of the detainees die due to hostile conditions. Women as young as 17 and as old as 62 filled the cells, staying for months without bare necessities. Many were charged with the incomprehensible crimes of praying regularly, reading the Quran, or fasting during Ramadan. Tursun’s eyewitness accounts are far from the utopian image of Xinjiang’s camps the government is trying to create.

While adolescents and adults are kept in atrocious camps, Uyghur children are placed into state-run orphanages across the western Xinjiang region, regardless of whether they are orphans or not. Orphanages teach traditional Han Chinese customs, steering children away from their rightfully inherited Muslim cultural and traditions. Xinjiang authorities also push Uyghur women to marry Han Chinese men. The “Uyghur-Han Marriage and Family Incentive Strategy,” started by the local government in a Xinjiang county, promises to give 10,000 yuan to couples who intermarried. The money is a way for Uyghur women to leave their old lives of poverty, but in the process also leave behind their Muslim traditions and Uyghur culture. In this way, the Chinese government allows its officials to take part in cultural suppression—itself a watered-down form of ethnic cleansing without explicitly calling it so.

Given the long history of Uyghur Muslims in China, organ harvesting does not seem far out of the Chinese government’s capacity. Though China insisted that it “stopped using organs from executed prisoners in 2015,” its branding of fully-fledged concentration camps as “re-education centers” proves that lies are inherent in the Chinese administration. While Uyghurs have been part of China for centuries, actions taken against them certainly depicts them as China’s enemies. It is impossible to precisely determine to what extent the organ harvesting operation in Xinjiang has grown, but the oddly short waiting time for organ transplants in China gives analysts a reasonable enough starting point. Anastasia Lin, ambassador for China policy at the Macdonald Laurier ­Institute, states that organ transplant surgeries can be scheduled well in advance, suggesting that government-run hospitals know when donors are going to die. To continue the hidden operation, Beijing deletes all traces of evidence online, making it more difficult for researchers to expose the government for organ harvesting. What started out as a property dispute in the 1700s escalated to what may be called mass murder and cultural genocide.

Today, the most important step toward changing the Uyghur situation in China is an obvious one: recognition. For far too long, the world watched while China imposed crueler and harsher restrictions on one of its largest minority populations. The China Tribunal’s report to the UN now makes it impossible for the matter to go unnoticed. Hamid Sabi, a lawyer in contact with the China Tribunal, says that the members of the UN now have a “legal obligation” to act against the Chinese government. When dealing with the issue, the UN cannot simply consider it to be just another problem, for calling it a human rights violation would be ignoring the sheer magnitude of the matter. The Uyghur Muslims in China are facing what can only be called the greatest humanitarian crisis of the century. A strong stance against it from liberal democracies around the world would serve not only as a challenge to the Chinese government but also as a chance to reaffirm the world’s common humanity.