Chen Quanguo, the man behind China’s Uighur “reeducation centers,” is the perfect candidate for Global Magnitsky sanctions, argues Jonathan Schanzer, a former terrorism finance analyst at the Treasury Department, and senior vice president for research at Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
According to a profile that appeared last year by Bloomberg News, Chen was appointed as the Chinese Communist Party’s top official in Tibet, which was then experiencing unrest, he writes for The Washington Post:
He reportedly deployed CCP loyalists to villages, Buddhist temples and monasteries. By 2015, Bloomberg News reported, Chen had deployed an estimated 100,000 cadres to Tibetan villages, and Beijing deployed more than 12,000 police.
Change.org
Chen’s success in Tibet prompted Xi to deploy him to Xinjiang, where Beijing has struggled to quell the population of Turkic-speaking Chinese Muslims. ….. Xi ordered Chen to get the entire region under control.
Chen once again sent party officials and loyal Han Chinese to live in Uighur areas (described to me by Chinese officials during my 2016 visit as “harmonization”). The number of police in Xinjiang has skyrocketed, according to a Jamestown Foundation report, with some 7,500 “convenience police stations” popping up across the regime. Chen also built a network of checkpoints and facial-recognition cameras.
Much more is known about what is happening to the Uighurs today than the world knew during the Holocaust, notes Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy.
This is not a “terrible secret,” the title of Walter Laqueur’s account of how little the world knew about the Final Solution when it occurred, he wrote recently for The Washington Post. Today the world knows about what is happening in the Uighur homeland. If the “Never Again!” pledge is to have any meaning, it should be a rallying cry to save the Uighur people.
Thousands of mosques in the Uyghur homeland have been bulldozed since 2016. Satellite photos and witness testimony paint a devastating picture of the Chinese government’s assault on Uyghur places of worship in East Turkestan. Please join the Uyghur Human Rights Project for a presentation of stark evidence of the Chinese government’s systematic campaign to wipe out not only Uyghur religious devotion, Uyghur religious teaching and education but also Uyghur community life and Uyghur identity itself.
The Mass Destruction and Desecration of Uyghur Mosques in China
Opening Remarks: Prof. Tenzin Dorjee, Chair, U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom
Speakers: Bahram Sintash, Founder, Uyghurism.com; Omer Kanat, Director, Uyghur Human Rights Project; Benedict Rogers, East Asia Team Leader, CSW
Co-moderators: Louisa Greve, Director of External Affairs, Uyghur Human Rights Project; Fernando Burges, U.S. Representative, UNPO.
Tuesday, July 16, 2019 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM EDT
Second Stage, Marvin Center, George Washington University, 800 21st Street, NW, Washington, DC 20052. RSVP
