China’s crackdown on the Uighurs, the Muslim minority in Xinjiang province, in the northwest of the country, must be classified as genocide. This was considered this Thursday by the majority of the Netherlands Congress in its last session before the general elections, scheduled for March 17. It is the first time that a European Chamber has described as genocidal the oppression exerted by Beijing against the members of this Muslim minority, which has been denounced by the NGOs and the exiles of this community. The Dutch deputies consider that China violates the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948), and they have gone beyond the official position of the center-right government in office. He prefers to speak of a violation of human rights and leave it to the UN, or the International Criminal Court, to consider genocide.
About 12 million Uyghurs live in China, the majority in Xinjiang. More than a million are locked up in internment camps, where they are deprived of their rights and even suffer forced sterilizations, according to human rights organizations. Earlier this month, the BBC published a report on the systematic rape of women from this community in the same centers. In 2019, an international investigation titled China’s secret cables, revealed the Chinese government’s formulas of repression against the minority.
The motion presented in the Dutch Congress had the majority support of the deputies to endorse the classification of genocide, including three of the four parties of the center-right coalition in power. They were against the right-wing liberals, the majority group, to which Prime Minister Mark Rutte belongs. The Dutch Executive, which has been in office since its resignation en bloc last January due to a scandal of family allowances, does not deny the accusations of forced labor and sterilizations, rapes, sexual abuse, torture and other forms of aggression against Uighurs.
However, the Executive considers that to speak of genocide it is necessary to demonstrate “the intention to destroy, totally or partially, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” A task that, according to Stef Blok, Foreign Minister, is not the responsibility of Dutch politicians. Blok has admitted that the situation in China is “alarming, very worrying, without a doubt, but the Government of the Netherlands already calls attention at European level to put an end to the violation of human rights”, he said.
The Canadian Parliament approved on Monday a non-binding motion that describes the situation of the Uighurs in China as genocide, a measure that provoked the protest of the Chinese Embassy, which issued a statement in which it was pointed out the “hypocrisy of using human rights to interfere in the internal affairs of the country ”. In January of this year, Mike Pompeo, the outgoing US Secretary of State, made a similar genocide accusation against the Uighurs shortly before leaving office, ushering in the new Democratic Administration of President Joe Biden.
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