Uyghur Tribunal delivers its verdict

Submitted by AWL on 14 December, 2021 - 9:07 Author: Ben Tausz
Uyghur people

On 9 December, the Uyghur Tribunal delivered a judgement that the Chinese state has committed torture, crimes against humanity, and genocide in its assault on the Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Turkic Muslim groups in East Turkestan (“Xinjiang” province).

This was an unofficial “people’s tribunal”. A civil society panel of lawyers and human rights experts assessed evidence against international law and the threshold of proof was “beyond reasonable doubt”.

It concluded that the Chinese state — under policies directed by leaders including Xi Jinping — had committed crimes against humanity including: arbitrary mass imprisonment; forced labour; torture; sexual violence; separating children from families to break their cultural identity; and deliberate suppression of Uyghur birth rates by forcible contraception, abortion, sterilisation, and family separation.

Though Uyghurs have been killed, the Tribunal concluded that there is not evidence of mass killings, and rightly warned against exaggerated comparisons to the Holocaust (a point Solidarity has also made). It noted reason to be sceptical about the political motives behind some governments’ and parliaments’ charges and condemnations. Nevertheless, it found that deliberate suppression of Uyghur birth rates met the UN Genocide Convention criteria.

It is right to approach this critically, especially given the context of superpower rivalry. However, the judgement is based on the extensive accumulated evidence, including the Chinese government’s own documents.

So we should indeed call this genocide. The judgement also highlighted the words of Raphael Lemkin who coined the term “to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups”. Socialists should understand the struggle of the Uyghur people both as a simple humanitarian question, and in terms of the democratic principle of national self-determination.

We must be wary of calls for US and other state action against China. We should keep demanding constructive measures like regulations to crack down on corporations linked to forced labour, surveillance and detention. But socialists also have a responsibility to warn against reliance on our ruling classes and their states and inter-state institutions. We must oppose the burgeoning arms race and sabre-rattling between China and NATO states.

Liberation will not be brought to the Uyghurs by rival capitalist states. Fundamental transformation in China, like any country, can only be led from below: via the organisation and self-activity of its working class and oppressed peoples, the Uyghurs included. Our job is still to build an internationalist labour movement, convinced and capable of connecting to those social forces and supporting their struggles.

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