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The Trump administration is considering sanctions on Chinese officials and companies to punish the detention of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in large internment camps, according to current and former US officials.
Economic sanctions would be one of the first times that the Trump administration has taken action against China because of human rights violations. US authorities are also seeking to limit US sales of surveillance technologies that security agencies and Chinese companies use to monitor Uyghurs in northwestern China.
Discussions aimed at suppressing China's treatment of its Muslim minority have been ongoing for months among White House officials and Treasury and state departments. But they won in an emergency two weeks ago, after congressional members asked state secretary Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to impose sanctions on seven Chinese officials.
Until now, President Trump has largely resisted China's punishment for his record on human rights, or even the accusation of widespread violations. If approved, the sanctions would lead to an already bitter confrontation with Beijing over trade and pressure on the North Korean nuclear program.
Last month, a panel of the United Nations confronted Chinese diplomats in Geneva about detentions. The camps for Chinese Muslims have been the target of growing international criticism and investigative reporting, including by the New York Times.
Human rights defenders and jurists argue that mass detentions in northwestern Xinjiang are the worst collective human rights violations in China for decades. Since coming to power in 2012, President Xi Jinping has led China into a difficult authoritarian path, which includes a crackdown on major ethnic groups in western China, including Uighurs and Tibetans.
On Sunday, Human Rights Watch released a detailed report that concluded that the violations were "of scale and scope never seen in China since the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution." The report, based on interviews with 58 former residents of Xinjiang, recommended that other countries impose targeted sanctions on Chinese officials, deny visas, and control the export of technologies that can be used for abuse.
Any new US sanction would be announced by the Treasury Department after consultation with the government, including with Congress.
Chinese Muslims in the camps are forced to attend daily classes and denounce aspects of Islam, study traditional Chinese culture and promise loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party. Some detainees who have been released have describes acts of torture committed by security guards.
Chinese officials have described the process of "transformation through education" or "education against extremism". But they did not recognize that large groups of Muslims were being held.
The Trump administration has confronted China with economic problems – both countries are in the midst of a protracted trade war – but has little talked about the widespread abuse of its security forces.
"The scale of this project is huge," said Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio, speaking about Muslim detention centers in an interview. "It involves not only intimidating people about political discourse, but also undressing people about their identity – ethnic identity, religious identity – on a scale that I'm not sure I knew in modern times." .
The ethnic Uyghurs are a predominantly Muslim Turkic group Sunni. With a population of about 11 million, Uyghurs are the largest ethnic group in Xinjiang. Some of the desert oasis towns and villages they see as their country are emptying as security agents force many Uighurs to enter large detention centers for weeks or months.
Gulchehra Hoja, a Uighur-American journalist working for US-funded Radio Free Asia, said at a hearing in July that two dozen family members in Xinjiang were missing.
"I hope and pray that my family will be released and released," Hoja said. "But I know that even if that happens, they will always live under constant threat."
A Chinese law student in Canada, Shawn Zhang, has compiled satellite images that show the scale of at least 38 detention centers.
Last month, Mr. Rubio and other legislators urged state government and Treasury officials to impose sanctions on Chinese companies that benefited from the construction of the camps or the regional surveillance system, including the collection of biometric and DNA data. They chose Hikvision and Dahua Technology for surveillance.
Rubio said the China Congressional Executive Committee, of which he is president, will also ask the Commerce Department to prevent US companies from selling technologies to China that could contribute to monitoring and tracking.
For many years, Chinese officials have raised the need to suppress what they call terrorism, separatism and religious extremism in Xinjiang. In 2009, ethnic violence began to explode in the region. Security forces have carried out a mass crackdown in response, but large-scale construction of the camps, which currently numbers up to one million people, has only begun to occur. the arrival of Chen Quanguo, became leader of Xinjiang in August 2016 passage in the Tibet Autonomous Region.
The congressional request, described in a letter of August 28, highlights Mr. Chen among the seven Chinese officials who would be punished.
In Washington, authorities fighting the fate of Uyghurs and other Chinese Muslims are doing so in the shadow of the murders, rapes and forced relocations of Rohingya Muslims by Burmese military forces that began in Myanmar in August 2017. Over 700,000 Rohingya fled to neighboring Bangladesh and live in squalid camps.
Some US officials view the Chinese government's actions as another form of genocide in Myanmar, according to people familiar with the ongoing discussions, who requested anonymity for not being allowed to speak publicly about the issue. .
Sam Brownback, the State Department's ambassador for international religious liberty and former governor of Kansas, is in favor of adopting a hard line against the Chinese government over the Xinjiang issue.
In April, Laura Stone, Acting Assistant Deputy Secretary for East Asia and Pacific Affairs, told reporters during a visit to Beijing that the United States could impose sanctions on Chinese officials under the Magnitsky Global Law. The law allows the US government to impose sanctions on specific foreign officials who violate human rights.
That same month, Heather Nauert, chief spokesperson for the State Department, called on China to release all those "illegally detained" after meeting in Washington with Ms. Hoja and five other Uyghur journalists working in the United States for Radio Free Asia. Journalists shared details of mass detentions and harassment of their own family members in the area.
The issue of Uyghurs was raised in July at the first international forum of ministers on religious freedom in the world, chaired by Mr. Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence. Prior to this, Mr. Pompeo wrote an editorial listing Uighurs among several groups suffering from religious persecution. "These episodes and others like them are hateful," he wrote.
In a statement released last week, the State Department said the authorities "are deeply troubled by the growing crackdown by the Chinese government" against Muslims.
"Credible reports indicate that people sent by Chinese authorities to detention centers since April 2017 have at least hundreds of thousands, if not millions," the statement said.
The Trump administration used the Magnitsky law once to impose sanctions on a Chinese official. In December, the Treasury Department announced sanctions against Gao Yan, who was chief of district police in Beijing when a human rights defender died in custody.
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