Eyewitnesses tell BBC: Women are being systematically raped in China's concentration camps for Uighurs

You’ll be shocked watching this but you won’t be surprised. China practices genocide, after all. It kills, tortures, and dehumanizes as a means of control.

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Why would a system of dehumanization draw a moral line at rape?

The BBC published a story last night as a companion to the video that’s worth your time. One detail that recurs among witnesses — one of whom claims to have endured it herself — is electrocution as part of the sexual torture.

The women’s camp was “tightly controlled”, Sedik told the BBC. But she heard stories, she said – signs and rumours of rape. One day, Sedik cautiously approached a Chinese camp policewoman she knew…

She said, ‘Yes, the rape has become a culture. It is gang rape and the Chinese police not only rape them but also electrocute them. They are subject to horrific torture.'”…

There were “four kinds of electric shock”, Sedik said – “the chair, the glove, the helmet, and anal rape with a stick”.

“The screams echoed throughout the building,” she said. “I could hear them during lunch and sometimes when I was in class.”

Another source described personally witnessing Chinese police drag a woman in her early 20s into a courtyard to deliver a forced confession in front of around 100 other inmates — whereupon she was gang-raped in front of them. Any inmate who evinced discomfort at watching the spectacle was punished. “Every bit of evidence coming out of the Chinese concentration camps for Uighurs makes me even more outraged that the U.K. and other Western governments are hesitating on Magnitsky sanctions,” tweeted Bill Browder, who’s become famous for his efforts to get laws passed in western countries punishing human-rights violators with sanctions. “After the Holocaust we said never again and here we are.”

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Charles Parton writes at the Spectator that it’s obvious whom sanctions should target. Xi Jinping may not know about every rape that’s happening in the camps but there’s no doubt who’s responsible for the genocidal framework in which those rapes are occurring:

It is quite impossible in the CCP system that a policy of this importance was not decided at the highest level, in the seven-man Politburo Standing Committee. That means that ultimately Xi is responsible.

If you want evidence of a Wannsee Conference ‘with Chinese characteristics’, to use a description beloved of the party, look at last September’s Central Xinjiang Work Conference. All seven members of the Politburo Standing Committee attended and 19 of 25 Politburo members. You don’t get this level of attendance if it is not for a policy commissioned, considered and authorized by the top — the very top.

It’s remarkable that the last two U.S. secretaries of state, one Republican and one Democrat, have agreed publicly that China is practicing genocide against the Uighurs and yet there’s no meaningful effort to deter U.S. companies en masse from doing business there. There’s some pressure not to do business in Xinjiang specifically, where the Uighurs are being interned and where their slave labor is concentrated, but even that’s met with resistance from American firms. There’s too much blood money at stake to leave it all on the table — ask Daryl Morey — and the Uighurs are too obscure a group for the average westerner to strongly identify with them. And, if we’re being honest, all but a very few countries in the world could risk making an enemy of China and not need to worry about Chinese camps like the ones in Xinjiang cropping up on their own territory in some distant but not too distant future. They’re going to get away with it.

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Ed Morrissey 10:00 PM | November 21, 2024
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