![A Muslim woman holds her baby at a market in Hotan, in China's western Xinjiang region. [Greg Baker/AFP]](/cnmi_st/images/2021/05/14/29856-000_hkg10181623-739_416.webp)
BEIJING -- A recent investigation has revealed the grim details of China's targeting of Muslim women in a campaign of forced contraception and sterilisation as part of ongoing efforts to suppress births in the Xinjiang region.
Interviews with Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim women and men from Xinjiang, and a review of government statistics and local media, reveal a "coercive effort" by the Chinese regime to control the community's reproductive rights, The New York Times reported May 10.
One ethnic Uzbek woman described how she pleaded to be exempted when the Chinese government ordered women in Xinjiang to be fitted with intrauterine contraceptive devices (IUDs) in 2017.
Qelbinur Sedik, then nearly 50, said she had obeyed the government's birth limits and had only one child.
![Members of the Uighur minority on February 22 in Istanbul near the Chinese consulate hold placards as they demonstrate to demand news of their relatives imprisoned in 're-education camps'. [Ozan Kose/AFP]](/cnmi_st/images/2021/05/14/29857-xinj2-739_416.webp)
Members of the Uighur minority on February 22 in Istanbul near the Chinese consulate hold placards as they demonstrate to demand news of their relatives imprisoned in 're-education camps'. [Ozan Kose/AFP]
But it was no use. Workers threatened to take her to the police if she refused to comply.
"I felt like I was no longer a normal woman," Sedik said, describing how she wept as a government doctor, using a metal speculum, inserted an IUD to prevent pregnancy.
The IUD caused pain and heavy bleeding, and in 2019 she decided to be sterilised.
"The government had become so strict, and I could no longer take the IUD," she said from the Netherlands, where she settled after fleeing China in 2019. "I lost all hope in myself."
Other women have described being forced to abort pregnancies, to pay steep fines if they had too many children or refused contraceptive procedures, and to take drugs that stopped their menstrual cycles.
Last year, a community worker in Urumqi, the regional capital, ordered all women between 18 and 59 to submit to pregnancy and birth control inspections.
"If you fight with us at the door and if you refuse to co-operate with us, you will be taken to the police station," the worker wrote, according to screenshots of the WeChat messages that Sedik shared with The New York Times.
"Do not gamble with your life," one message read, "don't even try."
Beijing has imprisoned more than one million Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims in as many as 400 facilities that include "political education" camps, pretrial detention centres and prisons.
Millions more live under a harsh system of surveillance and controls.
Torture, gang-rape, beatings
Sterilisation rates in Xinjiang surged by almost sixfold from 2015 to 2018, to more than 60,000 procedures, even as they plummeted around the rest of China, according to German researcher Adrian Zenz.
"The women of Xinjiang are in danger," Gulnar Omirzakh told The New York Times in a telephone interview from Kazakhstan, where she fled after authorities threatened her and her two daughters with detention.
In 2015, when she had her third child, officials in her northern village recorded the birth. Three years later they fined her the equivalent of $2,700 for the violating birth limit.
She borrowed the money from relatives and then fled the country.
"The government wants to replace our people," she said.
The threat of detention is real.
A government notice from a county in Ili Prefecture, Xinjiang, advised that women who refused to terminate illegal pregnancies or pay fines would be referred to the internment camps, Zenz's research revealed.
"Horrific and systematic abuses" occur in the camps, and life becomes unbearable for some, according to first-hand and witness testimonies.
Former detainees and a guard earlier this year told the BBC that Muslim women in the camps suffer systematic rape, torture and sexual abuse.
They described torture by electric shock, including rape by guards using electrified sticks, food deprivation, beatings, gang rape and forced sterilisation.
"You become their toy," said Tursunay Ziawudun, who spent 10 months in a camp in Ili Prefecture for traveling to Kazakhstan.
On three occasions, she was taken to a dark cell where two or three masked men raped her and used electric batons to forcibly penetrate her, she told The New York Times in a telephone interview from the United States where she now lives.
"You just want to die at the time, but unfortunately you don't," she said.
The Chinese government has denied all allegations of abuse in the facilities, which Beijing defends as "vocational training centres" aimed at stamping out terrorism and improving employment opportunities.
"The sexual assault and torture cannot exist," Xu Guixiang, a Xinjiang government spokesman, said at a news briefing in February.
At the UN in February, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi called China's treatment of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang a "shining example" of the country's human rights progress.
Calls on China to end 'genocide'
Officials from the United States, Britain and Germany in a video conference Wednesday (May 12) called on China to end its repression of the Uighur minority.
"In Xinjiang, people are being tortured. Women are being forcibly sterilised," US Ambassador to the United Nations (UN) Linda Thomas-Greenfield said during the conference, which was co-sponsored with Human Rights Watch and featured testimony from Uighurs.
"We will keep standing up and speaking out until China's government stops its crimes against humanity and the genocide of Uighurs and other minorities in Xinjiang," she said.
UK Ambassador Barbara Woodward called on China to allow the UN high commissioner for human rights [HCHR] "immediate, meaningful and unfettered access" to Xinjiang.
"There is evidence of mass arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances and incidences of torture," she said. "There are further reports of widespread forced labour and sterilisation."
"Over a million Muslims have been held in extrajudicial detention in internment camps since late 2017," she said in video remarks posted on Twitter.
"We appeal on China to respect the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and tear down the detention camps," German Ambassador Christoph Heusgen added.
"If you have nothing to hide, why don't you finally grant unimpeded access to the HCHR?" he asked of China.
"The current situation in Xinjiang is at its best in history," the Chinese delegation insisted in a statement.
Believe me, because of the cruelties committed by the Chinese government; now I feel hatred toward all of the Chinese people. For God's sake, why this much cruelty? Why this much mercilessness? Why this kind of uncivilized treatment? Are Chinese humans or donkeys? Even a donkey will not do so; a dog will not do so; dirty pork will not do the way they do. Curse on China and curse on Pakistan and the Pakistani army as they have provided the dictator Chinese government the opportunity to work in their country.
Reply10 Comment
When the Chinese army visits Muslims’ homes, they also spend the night with them to see what they do all day and what problems they have. In the past, no one paid attention to this issue. These officers often go to the Muslims’ homes in couples and are bound to spend the night with them three times a month. They usually go to their houses in couples: a man and a woman. The man then sleeps in the room with the father of the house and the woman sleeps beside the mother of the house. There is a lot of atrocity committed against the Muslims in China. May God destroy the dirty Chinese.
Reply10 Comment
Parents are no longer allowed to put Islamic names on their children. In order to control and monitor the Uighurs more, a compulsory baptismal parental system is also common in Xinjiang. Baptismal fathers and mothers are often formal government officials who enter the families in order to see if the families speak Chinese. Atrocity is to the detriment of the statesmen, the government and the Chinese nation. Nations that oppresses others are hated by the world. The Chinese government and nation should not treat the Muslims in a way that every Muslim should hate the Chinese people whenever they see them in their country. The Chinese government must end the atrocity against the Muslims in that country.
Reply10 Comment
The tongue cannot express the atrocities committed by the Chinese government against the Muslims in that country and released in the media outlets. In China, they separate children from their parents and educate them in special camps in order to prevent them from their religious beliefs and to change their culture and language. Where in the world is such atrocity committed against nations?! Why do they separate women from men and torture them in special camps and abuse them?! Is this atrocity and torture committed because of religion, ethnicity, language and tendency to Islam? For what sin are these people being killed and tortured?!
Reply10 Comment
What is the response of the Chinese authorities towards the tyranny which is committed against these people? Where are the human rights? Human beings, both Muslims and non-Muslims, have the rights that should be considered? For us defending of the oppressed people is important, and oppression which is committed by anyone and at any part of the world is rejected and condemned? We should not be silent against the tyranny, but we should raise our voice against it.
Reply10 Comment
The oppressive Chinese government must realize through its political representatives in the Islamic world that Muslims’ anger and hatred sparked against China, and they want an end to this oppression as soon as possible. The Chinese government may have been deceived by the silence of the traitorous Muslim rulers, and it is not surprising, because Muslim rulers have sold themselves to China’s promises of investment and business transactions. They have quit their main responsibility of Allah (SWT), which is to help Muslims, and neglected their situation. However, they are not the real Muslim nation’s rulers, nor is Muslim nation deceived by their false promises. The dictator state of China must consider the awakening of Muslims from Indonesia to Morocco, who want unity and implementation of Islam, and must realize that the returning of the caliphate is a necessity of time.
Reply10 Comment
The tyrannical country of China has built big detention sites under the name of “reeducation camps” where millions of Muslims from scientists, thinkers, scholars and professors of the universities are living in a deplorable and pitiful condition forced to abandon their Islamic beliefs. Doesn't all this show narrow-mindedness of the Chinese government which started hostility against the Muslims of East Turkestan and Islam? Isn't it scared of the vast and widespread reaction of the Muslim Ummah (nation)? They should know that persecution of a Muslim in one part of the world is considered an attack on all Muslims.
Reply10 Comment
Death to the communist government of China; death to the antichrist government of Iran which is the slave of China. Long live Afghanistan
Reply10 Comment
The brutal government of China, by using various forms of brutal torture, intimidation, sterilization and even murder, forces Muslims to abandon their Islamic beliefs and adopt corrupt Chinese beliefs. The tyrannical government of China prevents our brothers and sisters from performing their prayers in mosques by closing the doors of mosques. The Chinese authorities are not even satisfied with this; they also stop the Muslims from keeping fast during the holy month of Ramadan. In fact, the Chinese government wants to close all worshipping ceremonies of the Muslims. It assigned a Chinese infidel to the house of every Muslim for spying, without regard to his or her privacy, in order to prevent women from wearing hijabs and men from growing beards, as well as prevent them from greeting one another and eating halal food. At the same time, it forces Muslims not to bury their dead bodies, and instead they must burn them.
Reply10 Comment
The indifference of Islamic countries towards the oppression that was committed against the Muslims of Myanmar has been the cause of the killing of hundreds of Muslims in China, Palestine and India, while Muslims must defend one another as much as they can. Discord among Muslims has caused the ongoing bloodshed. If Muslim countries raised their voices against the killing of Muslims in Myanmar, a great numbers of Muslims in China, Palestine, India and other countries would not have been killed.
Reply10 Comment