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WASHINGTON – Lawmakers in Washington are trying to force the Trump government to crack down on the Chinese authorities for their massive crackdown on the Uighurs and other Muslims in China.
Lawmakers presented complementary House bills to the House and Senate on Wednesday after months of talks on how to punish China for its treatment of Uighurs, including punishing specific government officials and restricting the sale of goods. US companies to some Chinese state agencies. This surge comes as China's treatment of Uyghurs is being increasingly scrutinized by Western media outlets and international agencies.
The bills would put more pressure on the Trump administration to act in line with what international officials and academics see as the worst collective human rights violation committed by China in decades. In Washington, government officials are already starting to take a much tougher stance towards China, particularly with respect to trade, human rights and military reinforcement in the Pacific.
Senior US officials, including US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, said the Chinese authorities held hundreds of thousands – and perhaps more than a million – of Uyghurs, ethnicities Kazakhs and other Turkic-speaking Muslims in internment camps in the border area of Xinjiang, northwestern Central Asia. There are reports of torture, starvation and death in the camps, officials forcing detainees to give up traditional Islamic practices and swear loyalty to the Communist Party.
In addition, the Chinese authorities are effectively holding hostage relatives of Uyghurs who are abroad to force them to return to China to be arrested or to silence them about human rights violations.
But some Uyghurs, including those from the United States, talked about the crisis. Uighurs from the Washington area with detained family members, including Rushan Abbas, a business consultant and former Defense Department interpreter, have met with officials and lawmakers and urged the United States to act.
Bills introduced in Congress propose a wide range of measures and benefit from bipartite support, which increases the likelihood that a law will be passed.
The legislation introduced on Wednesday calls on the state secretary to consider invoking Magnitsky's global law to impose economic sanctions on Chinese officials, including Chen Quanguo, the party leader in Xinjiang, involved in this abuse. Officials from the White House and state and treasury departments have already discussed this punishment.
The bills also ask the Secretary of Commerce to consider banning the sale or supply of US-made goods or services to Xinjiang state agencies. This measure is intended to prevent the sale of technologies that could potentially be used in the surveillance system or in the camps.
The bills would require the director of national intelligence services to report on the threat to regional security resulting from the crackdown and to indicate whether nations of Central Asia and South-East Asia were Turkish – speaking Muslim refugees and asylum seekers in China. And he asks F.B.I. report the harassment of the Chinese state against U.S. citizens, permanent residents and Uyghur ethnicities or other Chinese nationals studying or working in the United States.
"The president must have a clear and consistent approach to China and not turn a blind eye when a million Muslims are unjustly imprisoned and forced into forced labor camps by an autocratic regime" said Sen. Bob Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey and ranking at the top. member of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee.
In the Senate, Menendez presented the bill to Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican who chairs the bipartisan-congressional Commission on China. Fifteen senators signed the bill – seven Republicans, seven Democrats and one independent. The representative of the Republic of New Jersey, Chris Smith, and chair of the commission, introduced the bill in the House.
Mr. Rubio was the most outspoken legislator on the Uyghur question. In July, the commission heard testimony about the crackdown and heard Gulchehra Hoja, a Uighur American journalist for Radio Free Asia, who said that two dozen family members in Xinjiang had disappeared. Ms. Abbas and other Uyghurs also spoke to assistants or members of the commission.
Chinese authorities have stated that internment camps are set up for vocational training or the eradication of Islamic extremism. On Monday, United Nations human rights officials sent a letter to China condemning recent regulations justifying the creation of camps, claiming that they constituted a violation of international law.
Last Friday, Mr. Pompeo said that he had raised the issue of religious repression – including mass detention of Muslims – with senior Chinese officials at a meeting in Washington.
