How Washington makes up a fake genocide but enables a real one
- United Nations report warns US unilateral actions are hurting the very people they were supposed to be defending in China’s Xinjiang region
Do American leaders really care so much about the Uygurs but nothing about the Palestinians? After all, Washington has made a concerted global effort to rally allies and Western NGOs to manufacture a case of genocide against China.
By contrast, it has gone to extraordinary lengths, risking global isolation and compromising its own national interests, to defend and enable Israel’s merciless war in Gaza and extreme repression in the West Bank.
How does that compute? An aerial survey of Urumqi and Gaza today will make anyone question Washington’s most peculiar judgments about where a real genocide is taking place.
By contrast, Israel has banned the UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese from entering the country or Palestinian territories. It has also conducted, with help of a network of pro-Israeli lobby groups, a global propaganda campaign against Albanese and made unfounded allegations of antisemitism against her.
Her crime? She has concluded that Israel’s conduct in Gaza has reached the threshold as defined in the Genocide Convention.
Back to the UN’s Douhan. Since 2017, the US has imposed a long series of sanctions over alleged human rights violations and genocide, against Chinese state agencies, individual officials, and against companies and executives.
The sanctions also target entire industries such as those in cotton and other agricultural products, and tech fields such as polycrystalline silicon and other materials for photovoltaic batteries, solar panels and electric cars. The sanctions hurt Chinese businesses in the region, as intended. And, predictably, they started laying off workers, many of them local.
The UN report said: “I received information about enterprises employing thousands of people, which were forced to undergo in short period of time significant cuts in their workforce, in some cases of more than 50 per cent, or small and medium enterprises getting bankrupt.
“Those most likely to be affected are persons in vulnerable situations, including those in informal employment, older workers with less skills and productive capacity, as well as women employed in certain sectors of the economy.”
US and some allies’ unilateral sanctions, supposedly imposed to protect human rights, actually violate them. The report said: “Unilateral targeted sanctions as a punitive action violate, at the very least, obligations arising from universal and regional human rights instruments …
“Any unilateral sanctions taken without or beyond authorisation of the UN Security Council … in accordance with law of international responsibility, are illegal.”
How very paradoxical that such unilateral sanctions are hurting the very people they were supposed to defend.
Here’s the punchline: “[The unilateral sanctions regime] raises unemployment, undermines development, raises risks of poverty, in particular in less developed areas of China, and in areas with dominant presence of minorities, such as in specific parts of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.”
Such sanctions and their enforcement “have negative humanitarian impact [on] their right to decent life and freedom from poverty, as well as right to education, right to benefit from the outcomes of academic research, prohibition of discrimination on the grounds of nationality or ethnic origin, and access to justice”.
But the Uygurs are lucky, unlike Iraq under Saddam Hussein or Afghanistan today, whose economy is being strangled by US sanctions.
There has been an “absence of a devastating humanitarian impact”, as the report puts it, because of China’s “strong and diverse economy and its growing global economic outreach, with a nominal GDP of over US$18 trillion”.
