Washington Post-Fred Hiatt: “ China’s Communist leaders, innovative in so many ways, appear to be perfecting a 21st-century approach to genocide… We have learned to think of genocide as industrial-scale slaughter: gas chambers, killing fields, mass graves. A report published last week by the U.S. Holocaust Museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide, “To Make Us Slowly Disappear,” suggests that China may have found a different way, more insidious if no less monstrous. The campaign against the Uyghur population of western China, a Muslim minority of about 12 million people inside a nation of more than 1 billion, began with conventional discrimination, escalated to intense surveillance and mass detentions, and now includes forcible sterilization and insertion of IUDs; separation of men and women through incarceration, forced migration and coerced marriages of Uyghur women to men from the ethnic Han majority; and mass kidnapping of Uyghur children, taken from their parents and placed in state `boarding schools.’ The campaign is not without terrible violence, torture and killing, as survivor accounts make clear. But, the report says, it hinges on something else: `coercive interventions of the Chinese government to prevent sizable numbers of Uyghurs from coming into being.’ This suggests that the deliberate goal is `to biologically destroy the group, in whole or in substantial part.’ One of the missions of the Holocaust Museum is `to do for victims of genocide today what was not done for the Jews of Europe.’ The seriousness with which it accepts this responsibility is reflected in the meticulous caution of the well-documented report: Although both the Trump and Biden administrations have declared that China is committing genocide against the Uyghurs, the museum says it is `gravely concerned that the Chinese government may be committing genocide.’ Uncertainty is what China wants; it has constructed a formidable information blockade. Uyghur scholars were among the first targets of the mass detention campaign. Foreign scholars, correspondents and think-tank experts are kept out of the Xinjiang region where the crimes are being committed — and increasingly out of China altogether. And China attempts to silence even Uyghurs living abroad by locking up and abusing the relatives back home of anyone who dares speak out. No one has been more victimized by this barbarity than the reporters of Radio Free Asia, who have done more than anyone in the past five years to reveal the truth. `The Chinese government are very professional on how to hide their crimes,’ one of those reporters, Gulchehra Hoja, said at a forum organized by the museum last week. Hoja, about whom I’ve written before, knows this all too well: Trying to silence her, the Chinese government locked up, as usual without charge or trial, her brother, her mother, her cousins, their spouses — nearly two dozen relatives in all. The report says between 1 million and 3 million people are detained; Hoja says she believes the higher number, but it can’t be proven. The report refers to more than 880,000 Uyghur children being put in boarding facilities — often after their parents are illegally detained — but that was only through 2019…— but then China hides more data, so reports are dated, fragmentary and, almost certainly, far less terrible than the truth.”
