Uighur camp detainees allege systematic rape

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55794071

by exolymph • 5 years ago

333 55 5 years ago

I've posted this a lot, but I think it's important for those who claim Uyghur camps are some sort of Western propaganda. This site documents primary source evidence of victims in Xinjiang. Testimonies from families and friends, court documents, photos, etc. Information on specific camps and seeing victims by city/village is newly available. What's happening there is horrible and consists of many human rights violations.

https://shahit.biz/eng/

MattGaiser2• 5 years ago

which China says exist for the "re-education" of the Uighurs and other minorities.

Even China does not deny the camps. The disagreement almost seems to depend on whether "re-education" is considered sinister. In the West? Obviously. In China? That is apparently a normal thing to admit to doing.

unityByFreedom5• 5 years ago

It's only normal in China because if you speak against it you and your family are disappeared. So, not really normal. The CCP can admit to a lot of bad things under these oppressive conditions.

anm894• 5 years ago

That's a weird word game to play. So you are pointing out that the government supports there own policy? In this potentially makes it not sinister?

Yes, the obviously make an attempt to normalize their policy, just like every government does with every policy. The problem is what they are doing is wrong.

naebother• 5 years ago

Even if it is western propaganda, doesn't mean it's false. Just like any Chinese/Russian/etc propaganda might highlight the abuses of the US state. As individuals, regardless of which country we happen to live in, we shouldn't immediately dismiss any country's propaganda (including our own) just because it's propaganda. Does each side have an incentive to exaggerate or lie about the other? Of course! But if abuses are really happening the opposing side would be dumb not to propagandize it.

stjohnswarts2• 5 years ago

Even if it's 1/10th the scale people are saying it is indeed still quite horrifying.

silexia• 5 years ago

What can actually be done against a dictator like Xi Jinping who has absolute power besides using military force? He doesn't care at all about the bad reputation or sanctions or anything else like that.

fsflover• 5 years ago

He doesn't care at all about the bad reputation or sanctions

Depends on which sanctions. Imagine everyone would stop producing electronics in China...

stanrivers• 5 years ago

Upvote this one people, the world deserves to know and the traffic HN brings is meaningful.

sbussard3• 5 years ago

This needs wider awareness. Communism is awful in every form. The Chinese government is not guiltless!

xnyan• 5 years ago

Communism is awful in every form

Does not follow. If I can give you several examples of capitalist neo-liberals doing terrible things, then by this line of reasoning capitalism is bad in every form, right?

What economic aspect of China is particularly communist anyway? They wave a red flag around and call their president/prime minister/tsar/whatever a general secretary, but they clearly are or soon will have the most successful capitalist economy in human history.

sbussard3• 5 years ago

Communism is the ideal that empowered the current government of China. Once the abusive tyrants gained power, the economic model became a secondary issue. It follows and there’s a causal relationship between communism and tyranny because they are one in the same. Socialism is merely the marketing campaign.

anm894• 5 years ago

I say this as potentially the world's biggest disliker of communism... this really has nothing to do with communism.

sbussard3• 5 years ago

Sure it does. Communism empowers tyrants who abuse the people. Every time.

mawaw• 5 years ago

hard to believe the police released them AND handed back their passports after all these horrible things

dijksterhuis2• 5 years ago

Do you mean it's hard to believe as in you don't think it's true or hard to belive as in jeez, the police really have some balls on them for doing that.

Koiwai4• 5 years ago

I like your way of thinking.

wruza3• 5 years ago

Wikipedia reports that Han and Uighur are mutual friends socially in their home region (around 70% and 80% reported some relationships), and also notes some historical issues, but nothing contemporary. Why does China govt hate them so much, uncut version?

CryptoPunk• 5 years ago

There were several terrorist attacks by Uighur separatist groups. The Chinese authorities use Western War on Terror rhetoric to justify the ethnic cleansing, warrantless mass-surveillance and censorship.

It's a shame Western states institute the repressive laws that they do, as for the most part, the Western states are vastly better than the CCP on civil liberties, and the few deviations from an otherwise strong commitment to liberal democratic principles prevents the West from having the kind of moral high ground it would otherwise have.

wruza3• 5 years ago

It doesn’t seem enough to blame the entire group. Terrorist attacks are often nation- or religion-related, but no one in the world takes course to destroy all the population, as the article states.

It would also be nice if other people who are annoyed by my genuine question answered it or explained what’s wrong with it.

cheph3• 5 years ago

Why does China govt hate them so much, uncut version?

Not sure anyone but Xi Jinping can answer that, but I think the main issue is that Islam is incompatible with the CCP. I think most belief systems which assert that morals are objective are similarly incompatible.

You cannot believe that the CCP is the final arbiter of moral good if you believe that god is the final arbiter of moral good. And the CCP cannot accept any other final arbiters of moral good than the CPP because then they can't run rough shot over their population.

Just to clarify, I'm not religious myself, but I do see morality as objective.

yorwba2• 5 years ago

Why does China govt hate them so much, uncut version?

They do not. Many of the men raping Uighur women are socially friends with Uighurs. Many of them are Uighurs themselves. Some of them are probably socially friends with the women they're raping.

They're not raping women because that's somehow part of the Chinese government's plan to assimilate Uighurs, rather, they're doing it because they want sex, they're in a position to get it, they're not going to take no for an answer, and they think they can get away with it.

wruza3• 5 years ago

That is well-known (gulag, etc). You give the green light to all sorts of scums and they do it without explicit directives. But it doesn’t explain why. CCP embraces very high risks with this route, while more ‘liberal’ routes exist. Even from a cynical point of view, today it feels more like an irrational hate rather than ideological issues.

elihu• 5 years ago

It seems like China ought to face economic consequences for this at least, assuming it's true (which I don't have any reason to doubt).

Hopefully Biden does something substantive, and ignores any consideration of the optics of being "tough on China" when that was Trump's thing. This and how he deals with the Myanmar coup are going to be big early tests of what his foreign policy is going to be like.

Social media companies probably have some influence one way or the other over how this plays out, but I don't have much confidence in them to consistently make good decisions absent significant social pressure. The Chinese market is big, and if access to that market depends on assisting government censorship, then they may see that as the cost of doing business.

What can individual people do? The obvious answers are to lobby their elected representatives, donate to good causes, and buy products preferentially from companies that are speaking out and not from companies that are complicit. Is there any other kind of non-obvious activism that can work?

edbob2• 5 years ago

Most of us can only do a bit, but acknowledging the truth helps. Refuse to fund companies like Disney and the NBA which bend over backward to defend and minimize the actions of the PRC. Support China's rivals. There are scores of great Taiwanese companies to buy from, not to mention South Korea and Japan.

bob_theslob646• 5 years ago

I don't understand how so many countries would not ban together to stand up to China. Why won't they do it? This literally seems like a modern day concentration camp without the death.

edbob2• 5 years ago

They figured out that they can get away with genocide as long as they do it in slow motion. The end result is the same, the disappearance of the Uyghurs as a people, but it takes decades instead of years. That's why they are sterilizing so many people, while keeping many imprisoned indefinitely with no opportunity to start a family. The torture and rape is just incidental to having a million or so non-persons imprisoned.

jhanschoo• 5 years ago

Considering that the international community doesn't / couldn't do anything substantial about NK and the Rohingya, beyond sharp words, well, it's not surprising. Of course, note that China had an interest in the status quo on those crises.

Koiwai4• 5 years ago

Business matters, you know, and CIA doing their work to get more bargaining chips.

chaostheory• 5 years ago

The Trans-Pacific Partnership TPP was a big attempt by the US political establishment to economically isolate China with most of Asia. Unfortunately, because it was also designed to bypass the US voter, it was not very popular.

stjohnswarts2• 5 years ago

Yeah I'm hoping the new administration will work towards rejoining, I got into lots of heated debates about it with friends when it was a part of Obama's administration.

dijksterhuis2• 5 years ago

This was genuinely horrifying to read.

Donation link for the Uigher Human Rights Project (mentioned in the article):

https://uhrp.org/support

baylearn• 5 years ago

140+ upvotes, but on the front page only for only an hour or so

must have been flagged by a few people

ricc• 5 years ago

One of those things that puts me closer and closer to the edge of misanthropy. I mean, Nazi Germany just happened not more than a hundred years ago. We, the different countries of the world, are supposed to already know how this kind of things unfold and that we should not just stand here watching!

Koiwai4• 5 years ago

In this regard, it's logical to conclude that all leaders of this world is helping China, such a strange world.

dirtyid• 5 years ago

New atrocity propaganda by Tursunay Ziyawudun

2019 “I was taken to a hospital to undergo a [sterilization] operation, but because I have always suffered from a gynaecological condition the doctor said I could suffer complications that include death, so they spared me,” she said.

2020 she was injected until she stopped having her period, and kicked repeatedly in the lower stomach during interrogations. She now can’t have children and often doubles over in pain, bleeding from her womb, she said.

2021 Mass rape somehow she left out previous 2 years.

2022 Guards eat babies.

Camps are as real, so are propaganda about them by the usual suspects.

Koiwai4• 5 years ago

I never realized those stories were told by the same person.

anm894• 5 years ago

It's interesting how common to see on somewhere like reddit "if Hitler was alive today I'd go shoot him/whatever/blah blah blah" but I think the general sentiment that people wouldn't stand for another holocaust today is pretty widely accepted.

And yet here we are with it happening in plain sight and it doesn't seem to bother too many people.

unityByFreedom5• 5 years ago

it doesn't seem to bother too many people.

Articles like this making the news says otherwise. It's hard to defend the CCP when they imprison people for no other reason than having a culture that's different from the CCP.

mercer• 5 years ago

It's good to see articles, but they don't amount to much if it doesn't actually change things. The impression I get is that China is important enough to the economic bottom-line that nobody, whether Apple or Hollywood, will go for a substantial response.

tim333• 5 years ago

It's not quite another holocaust. The closest we've had in recent times was the 'Genocide of Yazidis by ISIL' and while the world was a bit slow to react they did eventually go kill most of ISIL which is probably the appropriate response to that.

I'm not quite sure what's appropriate for China and the Uighurs - it's not quite bad enough to bomb China but some serious trade sanctions could be in order.

anm894• 5 years ago

I mean nothing will ever be exactly another holocaust. I think that's the point I'm making. There will never be another German guy with a funny mustache in a brown suit, gassing an ethnic group in showers.

But here we have

- concentration camps and large scale forced detention and labor - organized genocide (admittedly on a much smaller scale than the holocaust) - systematic rape and organ harvesting

I mean if you had to assign some negative utility score to both events I'm sure you could easily argue the Holocaust was worse, but I think that misses the point. Once you check all of those boxes, you are dealing with the same category of thing.

cheph3• 5 years ago

Germany is pathetic and spineless for letting the EU-China deal go through. Never again never meant shit, it was just virtue signaling, a lie, a fraud. Because it is happening again and Germany is using the same old spineless appeasement tactic that was taken with Nazi Germany.

If you are a German citizen you really need to ask yourself how you can change your voting behaviour to ensure that the people who made the EU-China deal happen never have political power again.

If good people stand by and do nothing while genocide is happening, they are not good people because good people don't tolerate genocide.

And the pipeline deals that Germany have with Russia is also messed up. Western Europe has to find a backbone and soon, and stand up to totalitarian regimes and dictators. If Europe fails to be a bulwark against this scourge then it will consume Europe also.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I don't suggest the west should invade china or it's proxies, or start wars, or start proxy wars. But is not making deals with a genocidal state that much to ask? Is maybe sanctions too much to ask for? Is clear an unequivocal support for Taiwan with mutual defence pacts too much to ask for?

NeliX4• 5 years ago

Trading stop with China would mean the US Phase 1 deal closing, which is far more advantageous to China than the EU deal.

Also Germany is not the whole EU, but yes Germany could have stopped this. Something only _Germany_ does is the gas pipe to Russia. Germany buys GAS from Russia with more than 20 nuclear reactors worth from the Mafia State.

On a positive side US is back to path for democracy. Go EU, go US!

cheph3• 5 years ago

I agree, US and the rest of Europe should be ashamed also for not doing more.

And the German Nord Stream 2 is entirely unconscionable, and the authoritarianism of Russia is already spreading westwards and will be at Germany's borders sooner rather than later if Germany does not take a harder stance against it.

gher-shyu3i• 5 years ago

Holocaust happening in front of us but we're not doing anything. Whatever happened to "never again"?

Uighur camp detainees allege systematic rape

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