Press Release – For immediate release
29 June 2020
Contact: World Uyghur Congress www.uyghurcongress.org
+49 89 5432 1999 or [email protected]

A recent academic report from prominent scholar Adrian Zenz has provided concrete evidence of the CCP’s attempts to deprive the Uyghur people of a future through policies of mass sterilization and population control.

These horrific findings confirm witness testimony from camp survivors and previously unconfirmed rumors from Uyghurs in East Turkistan. The report demonstrates that these policies of population control targeted at the Uyghur people were issued directly from the Chinese government. It reveals a genocidal element of the CCP’s policies towards the Uyghur people as it tries to stop the continued existence of the Uyghur people. 

Drawing from Chinese language and official CCP documents, the report provides compelling evidence that the Chinese government is using sterilization and mandatory birth control to control the birth rates of the Uyghur people, in order to change the demographics in East Turkistan, assimilate the Uyghur people and erode the Uyghur ethnicity entirely. Official CCP documents ‘bluntly mandate that birth control violations are punishable by extrajudicial internment in “training” camps, confirming evidence from the leaked “Karakax List” document’. Further documents from 2019 reveal plans for a campaign of mass female sterilization in rural Uyghur regions, targeting between 14 (in Guma County) and 34 percent (in Hotan City) of all women of childbearing age, with sufficient funding to perform hundreds of thousands of ‘tubal litigation sterilization procedures’ in 2019 and 2020. 

It further states that by 2019, Chinese authorities palled to subject at least 80% of women of childbearing age in southern East Turkistan to birth prevention surgeries. In 2018, 80% of all new IUD (a contraceptive device) placements in China were performed in East Turkistan, despite the fact that it makes up only 1.8% of China’s population. The report states that the project was implemented in all of southern Xinjiang, where most of the Uyghur population resides, and continued in 2020 with increased funding.

Sadly, these inhuman policies appear to be having a substantial effect on Uyghur birth rates in the region. The report found that population growth rates in the two largest Uyghur prefectures in East Turkistan fell by 84% from 2015-2018, and fell even further in 2019. The report details that in 2020, Chinese authorities set an unprecedented near-zero growth target in one Uyghur region.

The findings of the report reinforce what survivors of the camps and witnesses to the atrocities in East Turkistan have been saying. Nearly every female camp survivor has testified that they were forced to ingest pills and a white liquid while in detention which made them disorientated and stopped their periods. One camp survivor, Zumrat Dawut was coerced into being sterilized under threat of being returned to the internment camps. Other survivors were found to have contraceptive devices in their bodies, which were inserted during a mandatory medical procedure while in the internment camps.

These abhorrent policies to stop the growth of the Uyghur population are being reinforced by the Chinese government’s policy of sending large numbers of Han Chinese settlers to East Turkistan, to change the demographics. Since the occupation of East Turkistan, the Chinese government has been sending millions of Han Chinese settlers to the Uyghur homeland in a concerted colonial effort. This too has increased in recent years as the report documents that up to 2 million new residents were sent to East Turkistan. 

This new evidence of the mass sterilization of Uyghur women and attempts to control and diminish the Uyghur population, in addition to the CCP’s other gross and systematic human rights violations against the Uyghur people, meet the criteria for genocide as defined by the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and in article (6) of the Statute of Rome. The Chinese government’s actions clearly violate a number of other UN treaties to which it is a signatory, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women. These revelations come after around 50 UN experts called on the UN and international community to take urgent and concrete action to address the human rights situation in China, especially in East Turkistan, Tibet, and Hong Kong.

“The findings of this report confirm what many Uyghurs have dreaded for the past three years: the Chinese government is trying to erase us,” said WUC President Dolkun Isa. “Not just our language, history, culture, religion, and ethnic identity, but for us as people. We have to be direct and honest about what we are experiencing. This is genocide.”

“We grieve for all the Uyghur women who can no longer have children because the tyrannical and genocidal Chinese government cannot tolerate our existence,” Dolkun Isa continued. “We mourn for all the Uyghur children who will no longer be born because the Chinese government considers our lives worthless compared with their national and geopolitical ambitions.”

While the Chinese government has been lying to the world about the camps and its persecution of Uyghurs, it has covertly been sterilizing Uyghur women to eradicate the next generation of Uyghurs. The Chinese government had already been taking Uyghur children from their parents and indoctrinating them in “orphanages”. Uyghur children were not allowed to speak the Uyghur language in schools, learn about religion, or even enter a mosque. China has been targeting Uyghur children and Uyghur women to destroy the future of the Uyghur people. 

In a press statement, the members of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China urged the international community to take action, particularly through a resolution at the United Nations General Assembly. The WUC is grateful for the IPAC and its commitment to protecting the basic human rights of the Uyghur population and stopping the ongoing atrocities committed in East Turkistan.

The international community has failed to act in a meaningful way while Uyghurs while millions of innocent Uyghurs were detained in internment camps, while we denied our most basic rights and freedoms and while hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs were sent to toil in forced labour facilities. If the international community continues to fail to confront China, the Uyghur people could disappear entirely. We cannot let this happen. After every atrocity, the international community comes together to say “never again”, but when will they actually mean it?