SURGICAL sterilisations, abortions and other birth control measures are being forced upon Muslim women in China to make minorities “disappear”, says a horrifying report.
“It’s genocide… slow, painful, creeping genocide,” said Uighurs expert Joanne Smith Finley, of Newcastle University.
The Chinese government is taking draconian measures to slash birth rates among Uighurs and other minorities, reports the Associated Press.
The totalitarian regime is trying to slash its Muslim population, while encouraging some of the country’s Han majority to have more kids, the agency adds.
Its investigative report on the brutal treatment of women of child-bearing age has been released alongside disturbing new research by China scholar Adrian Zenz.
He has warned “the situation in Xinjiang has become especially severe following a policy of mass internment initiated in early 2017 by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
“By 2019, Xinjiang planned to subject at least 80 per cent of women of childbearing age to intrusive birth prevention surgeries – IUDs or sterilisations.
“Draconian measures that impose surgical birth control methods enable the state to increase or decrease minority population growth at will, akin to opening or closing a faucet.”
Plus, “regional authorities actively encourage inter-ethnic marriages to dilute Uighur cultural identity and promote assimilation into the ‘Chinese Nation-Race’,” Zenz found.
The Chinese government has long struggled with its 11-million-strong Uighur population, an ethnic Turkic minority native to the northwestern region of Xinjiang.
In recent years the regime has detained more than one million Uighurs and other minorities in its so-called “re-education” camps.
Government documents bluntly mandate that birth control violations are punishable by extrajudicial internment in “training” camps.
One former detainee, Tursunay Ziyawudun, said she was injected until she stopped having her period, and kicked repeatedly in the lower stomach during interrogations.
Ziyawudun now can’t have children and often doubles over in pain, bleeding from her womb, she said.
Another woman, Gulbakhar Jalilova, confirmed that detainees in her camp were forced to abort their babies.
She also saw a new mum, still leaking breast milk, who did not know what had happened to her infant.
Chinese officials maintain that what they call vocational training centres do not infringe on Uighurs’ human rights.
They have refused to share information about the detention compounds, and prevented journalists and foreign investigators from examining them.
But, AP says, its interviews and data shows that Xinjiang regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks.
And its officials enforce the implantation of intrauterine devices, mass sterilisation and even hundreds of thousands of women to undergo abortions.
Having too many children is a major reason people are sent to detention camps, with the parents of three or more ripped away from their families unless they can pay huge fines.
Cops raid homes, terrifying parents as they search for hidden kids.
Across the Xinjiang region, birth rates continue to plummet, falling nearly 24 per cent last year alone — compared to just 4.2 per cent nationwide, statistics show.
In 2014, just over 200,000 IUDs were inserted in Xinjiang. By 2018, that jumped more than 60 percent to nearly 330,000 IUDs.
In some areas, women are ordered to take gynaecology exams after weekly flag-raising ceremonies that minorities must attend.
A former teacher drafted to work as an instructor at a detention camp described her experience with IUDs to the AP.
She said Uighur residents had to chant: “If we have too many children, we’re religious extremists.”
Officials in the teacher’s compound were told to install IUDs on all women of childbearing age.
She protested, saying she was nearly 50 with just one child and no plans to have more.
Officials threatened to drag the ex-teacher to a police station and strap her to an iron chair for interrogation.
She was forced into a bus with four armed officers and taken to a hospital where hundreds of Uighur women lined up in silence, waiting for IUDs to be inserted.
Another subjected to vile treatment was Gulnar Omirzakh, a Chinese-born Kazakh.
After she had her third child, the government ordered her to get an IUD inserted.
Two years later, in January 2018, four officials in military camouflage pounded on her door to order the penniless wife of a detained vegetable trader three days to pay a $2,685 fine for having more than two kids.
If she didn’t, they warned, she would join her husband and a million other ethnic minorities locked up in internment camps – often for having too many children.
A teary Omirzakh said: “They want to destroy us as a people.”
The campaign over the past four years in the far west region of Xinjiang is leading to what some experts are calling a form of “demographic genocide.”
Adrian Zenz said the findings “provide the strongest evidence yet that Beijing’s policies in Xinjiang meet one of the UN’s genocide criteria”.
That is by “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the [targeted] group”.
Darren Byler, an expert on Uighurs at the University of Colorado, told AP: “The intention may not be to fully eliminate the Uighur population, but it will sharply diminish their vitality.
“It will make them easier to assimilate into the mainstream Chinese population.”
Joanne Smith Finley, an expert on Uighurs at Newcastle University, said bluntly: “It’s genocide, full stop.
“It’s not immediate, shocking, mass-killing on the spot type genocide, but it’s slow, painful, creeping genocide.
“These are direct means of genetically reducing the Uighur population.”
In practice Han Chinese are largely spared the abortions, sterilisations, IUD insertions and detentions for having too many children that are forced on Xinjiang’s other ethnicities, interviews and data show.
