Canadian Parliament’s Recognition of the Uyghur Genocide should be an Example

(Uyghur Study Exclusive by Abdulhakim Idris)

Does Beijing’s money prevent the awakening of international public opinion against the Uyghur Genocide?

The Uyghur Genocide carried out by the Chinese Communist Party in East Turkistan was recognized by the Canadian Parliament. In Canada, the House of Commons has ruled that the Chinese government’s persecution policy against the Uyghurs is within the definitions of the United Nations (UN) Genocide Convention. After the United States State Department recognized the inhumane acts against Uyghurs in East Turkistan as genocide, the Canadian Parliament’s taking such a step is an important achievement for international universal values.

In East Turkistan, systematic assimilation and genocide have been implemented against Muslim Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other peoples for many years. In recent years, this systematic assimilation has increased in intensity. However, the international public is hesitant to even recognize the violation of human rights, let alone recognize these atrocities of China as a genocide. Undoubtedly, the Beijing government’s diploma system built on the basis of economic and political interests has a great impact on this. These ambivalent behaviors and attitudes cannot hide the truth about the Uyghur Genocide. When we look at the contents of the UN Genocide Convention, which the Canadian Parliament based their motion on, it becomes clear that the step in question should set an example for everyone in the international arena.

Three years after the end of the Second World War, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide on December 9, 1948, and it came into force in 1951. Article 2 of the Convention covers the articles that fall under the crime of genocide:

The murder of the members of a group, serious bodily or mental harm to the members of that group;

changing living conditions on the basis of the fact that the group will completely or partially destroy the existence of the group;

taking measures to prevent births and placing their children in other people; all fall under the scope of genocidal crimes.

Article 3 states that those who commit the genocide, cooperate, directly or publicly incite, attempt and participate will be punished. On the other hand, Article 4 clearly and clearly states that if any crime in Article 2 is committed, those who are within the scope of Article 3 should be punished by accepting that genocide has occurred there.

When we look at the events in East Turkistan within the framework of the issues clearly written in the Convention, we see that nearly all articles of the Genocide Convetion have been violated. “Causing serious bodily or mental harm to the members of a group” is covered by the Genocide Convention, which was reported by BBC in an article about women who left the concentration camps. Likewise, these tortures and rapes and the forced sterilization of women are included in the article “taking measures to prevent births”. While the employment of millions of people as slaves in concentration camps or factories is included in the scope of all substances, it is also specifically included in the subparagraph “changing living conditions”. If the mass rapes described by Tursunay Ziawudun, the forced sterilization operations described by Qelbinur Sidik, the detachment of hundreds of thousands of children from their families and sending them to orphanages, and thousands of more examples of this are not seen as the crime of genocide, humanity is making a great error. At the same time, the signatories of the UN Convention ignore international conventions that are supposed to supersede national laws. The executives who signed this contract continue to sleep with the tales of so-called training camps told by China. In other words, Beijing’s RMB (Chinese currency) is preventing  them from waking up.

This step taken by the Canadian Parliament is an encouraging step for both the Canadian Government and other governments to recognize the Uyghur Genocide, as stated by the Campaign for Uyghurs (CFU). In the statement, while it is expected that economic measures will be implemented against Beijing to stop the genocide in line with this decision, the importance of the call to hold the Winter Olympics in another country instead of China in the acceptance of the House of Commons in 2022 is emphasized. However, it is a complete disappointment, as the Uyghur Movement has expressed, that the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Cabinet abstained from this decision made by the House of Commons. The abstention of a government and its prime minister to subjecting the Uyghurs to the Genocide, which says it is an example to the international public in defending human rights, shows that these claims are in vain.

In terms of human history and the Islamic World, the current picture is a complete disappointment. The insensitivity to  the destruction of a Muslim people by an atheist regime in front of the prominent figures of the Islamic world, who said that the West is guilty of every evil until today, is a black stain on the leaves of history. Europe, on the other hand, has long forgotten its “never again” commitments after the Holocaust. However, just as when the Nazis are mentioned, those who support the genocide and genocide they did come to mind, the Uyghur Genocide and those who cooperated with this genocide will be remembered in the future.