By Zhong Cheng
Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who coined the word “genocide” and initiated the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the first human rights treaty adopted by the UN to prevent the recurrence of the atrocities of World War II, would turn in his grave to see “genocide” being bandied around so crassly to drum up Sinophobia.
Any misuse of the word “genocide” is an insult to the victims of atrocities like the Armenian massacres during World War I, the Holocaust during World War II, and the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. The U.S. use of “genocide” to describe the life of the Uygur people in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in China seems less motivated by compassion or concern for the protection of human rights than geopolitics.
Xinjiang has been the victim of lies, false rumors and poison spewed by a few politicians in the U.S. over the years, the so-called Xinjiang issue being a strategic conspiracy to disrupt China from within and contain it. Washington is alarmed by China’s potential to outcompete the U.S. and its true intention is to undermine China’s security and stability and stop it from growing stronger.
Strategic conspiracy
Right after the Cold War ended, the U.S. started to use Xinjiang as a leverage to contain China by supporting separatist and terrorist forces. The neoconservative forces in the U.S. pivoted from the Soviet Union to try to contain China’s influence in Central Asia. U.S. intelligence agencies supported Pan-Turkism, which seeks to unify all Turkic people and create a “Turkic belt” from the Mediterranean to Xinjiang. The U.S. agenda was to weaken Russia and China and maintain a unipolar world.
A number of anti-China institutions and extremist groups emerged over the years, including the separatist “World Uygur Congress” and the “East Turkistan Islamic Movement” (ETIM), a UN-listed terror group, seeking the creation of an “East Turkistan” state or “independence” of Xinjiang.
Since 2004, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a private organization funded largely by the U.S. Congress, has funneled $8.76 million to Uygur diaspora groups campaigning against government policies in Xinjiang. These have caused the rapid spread of radical ideas in the region with terrorists entering from other countries and terrorist organizations attacking Chinese nationals. Between 1997 and 2014, the ETIM frequently carried out terrorist attacks, killing more than 1,000 civilians.
In 2003, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) suggested that the U.S. Government should retain the option of using the “Uygur card” as a means of exerting pressure on China in case it found itself in a crisis or confrontation with China. Under this strategy, the U.S. and its allies, showing a Cold War mentality, have directed their intelligence establishments and anti-China scholars to mobilize Uygur diaspora groups to spin out misinformation about the so-called severe oppression of Uygurs in Xinjiang, which is then spread by the mainstream Western media. Some of them have been colluding with anti-China forces to pursue rumor-mongering and a smearing campaign against China with several objectives.
First, to create a false impression that Uygurs in Xinjiang support “independence.” This is done by instigating certain groups to carry out separatist activities to make the public believe that all the people in Xinjiang want an independent state.
Second, to create the illusion that the ETIM is for peace. The Western media and others say nothing about such groups’ close ties with Al Qaeda, and their violent and terrorist rhetoric. In November 2020, then U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo even removed the ETIM from the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations.
Third, to falsely claim human rights violations in Xinjiang. Some organizations, including Human Rights Watch, have fabricated reports on Xinjiang, their sources being a small group of extremely anti-China overseas Uygurs. The baseless accounts in these organizations’ reports were further hyped up and spread by institutions such as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
In a video interview in 2015, Sibel Edmonds, a former interpreter with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, talked about how the U.S. had planned and acted to destabilize Xinjiang. She said, “Xinjiang is the entry artery of energy. We want to gradually and internally play the gender card and the race card. For that part of the world, we want to play the minority without land. We say we are going to help them and they are being oppressed. Chinese are gunning them down and torturing them.”
–The Daily Mail-Beijing Review News Exchange Item
