A group of 130 British politicians have compared the Chinese Communist Party’s persecution and systematic “ethnic cleansing” of the Uyghur Muslim population in Xinjiang to “Nazi Germany”.
On Tuesday, a cross-party group of MPs and peers sent a joint letter to the Chinese Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Liu Xiaoming, to condemn the “truly chilling” oppression being carried out by the communist regime in Beijing.
The letter, which was coordinated by Labour MP Siobhain McDonagh, pointed to drone footage apparently showing shaven Uyghurs being loaded onto trains in Xinjiang, saying: “The similarities between this video and historical footage of Nazi Germany concentration camps is truly chilling.”
“The Chinese Government’s actions must be stated for what they are: a systematic and calculated programme of ethnic cleansing against the Uighur people. When the world is presented with such overwhelming evidence of gross human rights abuses, nobody can turn a blind eye,” the letter added.
The letter was also signed by Tory Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Tom Tugendhat, and the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey.
In July, when Mr Liu was shown the footage on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, the ambassador first denied the veracity of the film, claiming that it might be a fabrication of Western intelligence agencies, before extolling the natural beauty of Xinjiang.
“People in Xinjiang enjoy a happy life,” he claimed, adding: “Every ethnic group in China is treated equal. That’s the success story of Chinese national policy.”
“They say one million Uyghur has been persecuted — you know how big, how many populations Xinjiang has? Forty years ago it’s just four, five million, now it’s 11 million people, and people say, you know, we impose, we have a ethnic cleansing — but the population has doubled in 40 years,” Mr Liu claimed. He added that “there’s no such concentration camp in Xinjiang”.
Contrary to Mr Liu’s claims, however, an independent analysis carried out by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation revealed that population growth in the two largest population centres of Uyghur Muslims in the region fell by over 80 per cent between 2013 and 2018.
The research backs up numerous claims from escaped Uyghurs, who have alleged to have witnessed widespread sterilisation of women. Those who have survived the concentration camps in Xinjiang have also revealed they were subjected to torture, rape, and organ harvesting committed by the communist state.
In 2019 one Uyghur woman, Zumuret Dawut, described her experiences of being forcefully sterilised by the CCP, recounting: “The family planning office gave me a letter and said: ‘Come back on the date stated in the letter and we will offer you a free operation to stop you from becoming pregnant.'”
“On hearing this my husband pleaded, ‘Does she have to undergo this procedure?’… They said, ‘If you don’t comply it will effect your entry back into the country in the future, also your children’s schooling,'” she said.
Mrs Dawut said that she was given an “infusion” in an operating room and that when she awoke after her operation she heard “other women moaning from pain” and reported that she felt a “sharp pain” in her lower abdomen.
It has been estimated that the Chinese Communist Party has interned between one and three million Uyghur Muslim people in concentration camps in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang, alongside other ethnic minorities including Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and even some Christians.
The organiser of the group of British MPs, Siobhain McDonagh, said: “When the world is presented with such overwhelming evidence of gross human rights abuses, nobody can turn a blind eye. Because this time no one can say they didn’t know.”
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