Canada's parliament votes to label China's persecution of Uighurs as genocide
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
>"Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and almost all of his cabinet colleagues were absent for the vote. Foreign Affairs Minister Marc Garneau was the only cabinet minister present. When it was his turn, he said he abstained "on behalf of the Government of Canada." "
1. The Liberals hold a minority government, and whipping the entire party rank and file into voting against the motion would not prevent it from passing.
2. The cabinet doesn't want to piss China off, and doesn't want to give their opponents ammunition (by voting against the motion), so it didn't show up to the vote.
3. This provides the cabinet with freedom of action, to quietly apologize to China in private, while not looking bad domestically. Or, alternatively, if world sentiment supports this position, and other parliaments and governments follow suit, this gives them the option to come out in support of this condemnation.
4. This will make a few rounds in the news cycle, maybe result in a small adjustment in foreign policy, but will not result in a major political shift in Canada.
tl;dr - the opposition is hammering the Liberal Cabinet on the morality of this issue, the rank-and-file Liberals go along with it, because they either have a conscience, or don't want to lose elections, while the Cabinet is playing Realpolitik.
For Americans, you can think of the Cabinet as the executive branch of government - closer in powers to the President, and their subordinate agencies. But unlike a President, the Cabinet, and the Prime Minister [1] can be removed by a 50/50 vote in Parliament.
[1] The Prime Minister in particular can also be removed by a 50/50 vote of their own party.
Sometimes you can't have both principles and profit at the same time.
Canada is part of the core UN group about to present a resolution in the UNHCR on human rights violations in Sri Lanka soon and I hope the government shows more spine.
It's obvious realpolitik, the actual hard decisions that have to be made in politics.
The Trudeau family has always supported dictatorships, such as the Castro regime in Cuba. The son even went as far as calling Fidel "larger than life leader who served his people" [0]
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2016/11/27/world/justin-trudeau-castro-e...
https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2016/09/16/trudeaus-in-ti...
Perhaps this type of rhetoric should stay on Reddit and Facebook.
As a Canadian it always felt a little questionable. Cuba was always a major vacation spot for Canadians and the foreign currency they brought it certainly helped prop up the regimen.
Under this treaty, if the Canadian government takes actions that damage or undermine Chinese investment in Canada, then Chinese companies can sue Canada in a tribunal that is separate from both Canadian and Chinese court systems; these tribunals have broad authority to mark the findings as confidential, keeping the rulings and outcomes, including financial penalties secret. The duration of the trade agreement is 31 years.
If Trudeau and his Cabinet had endorsed this motion, it would have been a tacit attack on China, and grounds for Canada to be sued under this treaty, with virtually no defense.
Naturally, Erin O'Toole (the current leader of the opposition party in Canada) is aware of this, and the easy political points he can score by attacking Trudeau for failing to support this policy, since he had a direct hand in promoting and passing the legislation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada-China_Promotion_and_Rec...
It's easily the worst trade agreement we've signed in generations. Harper _really_ screwed us over.
I think it’s more likely just straight politics as usual. Trudeau might very well have done the same thing without the restrictions of the treaty.
There is no doubt that there is a political motivation for doing this, but in particular this treaty presents a specific extra-judicial legal jeopardy for any government at any level in Canada for taking action against China.
[1] https://nationalpost.com/news/as-geopolitical-tensions-rise-...
"Corporations from either country can sue if the country in which they have their operations has public policies even those intended on protecting the environment, health, or safety that the corporation says "interferes with the corporation’s profitability".[10]:23[5] Canada's risk of such lawsuits is much greater than China's, since "China's foreign direct investment in Canada is much higher than Canada's in China."[5] By 2015, Chinese foreign direct investment in Canada in 2015 was roughly three times the amount of Canadian investment in China."
Is there a page on the canadian government website that details this agreement with china?
> Nothing in this Agreement shall be construed [...] to prevent a Contracting Party from taking action in pursuance of its obligations under the United Nations Charter for the maintenance of international peace and security.
Labeling an act as genocide and taking measures against China as a result of it would fall under that clause, so any Chinese investors who would sue would be out of luck.
> Where, after consulting with a disputing investor, a disputing Contracting Party determines that it is in the public interest to do so and notifies the Tribunal of that determination, hearings held under this Part shall be open to the public.
In other words, the tribunals are really no less secret than any other regular court case.
> Any Tribunal award under this Part shall be publicly available, subject to the redaction of confidential information.
> To the extent necessary to ensure the protection of confidential information, including business confidential information, the Tribunal may hold portions of hearings in camera.
> To the extent that a Tribunal’s confidentiality order designates information as confidential and a Contracting Party’s law on access to information requires public access to that information, the Contracting Party’s law on access to information shall prevail. However, a Contracting Party should endeavour to apply its law on access to information so as to protect information designated confidential by the Tribunal.
Article 33 states:
> Nothing in this Agreement shall be construed to require a Contracting Party to furnish or allow access to information the disclosure of which would impede law enforcement or would be contrary to the Contracting Party’s law protecting Cabinet confidences, personal privacy or the confidentiality of the financial affairs and accounts of individual customers of financial institutions.
That's more than enough rope to hang public access.
IE:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/commons-law-clerk-we-charit...
Also, back-bench MPs speak on behalf of their constituencies more than on behalf of the government.
He's the party leader. He can force his will.
And you can be booted from the party for not voting party lines.
This isn't true.
> Voting party lines is much more of a thing in parliamentary systems.
People choosing to vote party lines, yes.
They can boot you out of the party, but they still can't require you to vote a certain way. People choose to vote party lines, but they're not forced to. If you don't vote how your party wants the worst they can do is not let you be in their party any more.
I mean, if you want to leave you house but I threaten to beat you if you do - does that mean I can’t really stop you from leaving? Seems like I just did.
Obviously there is no legal requirement for MPs to vote a certain way, but in practice the party leader, and the whip will force votes it deems important from party members . And yes, getting kicked out of the party or losing cabinet or committee assignments is normal punishment for insubordination. The end result is that MPs are much more disciplined around voting along party lines than, for example, House members are under the American system. In fact, the American Congress is a wild-west compared to the strict discipline you find in the Canadian Parliamentary system. You would never see a Joe Manchin-type of behaviour when a party member breaks ranks to vote against a candidate pushed by the party leader (or whatever the equivalent would be in the Canadian system). That never happens.
I suspect that Trudeau in this case wanted to have his cake and eat it to. He allowed a free vote for Liberal MPs while he and leadership abstained. This way he isn't on record one way or the other and therefore limits how pissed China would be, and at the same time limit the amount of criticism he would get from opposition had he forced a particular vote on his MPs.
And people still think they live in democracies.
Also I think there is too much us vs China going around - another war would be terrible, and even without a war, negative consequences could arise.
One world should be the dream we aspire for.
Desperation leads people to do strange things.
China really is a sort of "early 1900s Germany" stage, which is rather frightening.
A majority in an agitated state that is being repressed or prodded (realistically or not) by other power blocs is what is worrying.
Even ideological extremism most just happens locally. Like the Russian socialist Revolutions and countless jihads.
Great news and I hope more countries follow the lead.
> By the common understanding of the word, it is not. Just as “homicide” means killing a person and “suicide” means killing yourself, “genocide” means killing a people. China’s persecution of the Uyghurs is horrific: it has locked up perhaps 1m of them in prison camps, which it naturally mislabels “vocational training centres”. It has forcibly sterilised some Uyghur women. But it is not slaughtering them.
[...]
> By accusing it of genocide instead, in the absence of mass murder, America is diminishing the unique stigma of the term. Genocide should put a government beyond the pale; yet American officials will keep doing business with the regime they have branded genocidal. Future genocidaires will take comfort
In the larger picture I agree with you however. If you give someone that label there is only one stance that would be acceptable and it would have to be a strong one, otherwise you are diminishing the importance of the word.
I think the Economist is being pedantic. The above, applied broadly, would "kill a people" within one generation.
Forced sterilisation is a form of genocide [0]
[0] https://asp.icc-cpi.int/iccdocs/asp_docs/Publications/Compen...
Forced sterilization with the intent of destroying a people, in whole or in part is a form of genocide, but that second part is required.
Killing a people doesn't necessarily mean killing individual people. Sterilization is killing a people.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_North_Ame...
Part of making amends must be ensuring that vigilance is taken to prevent it from happening again.
It turns out that when a country is built on genocide and disenfranchisement it's kind of hard to stop.
EDIT: You can downvote all you want, it won't change what happened.
It is a difficult topic to discuss without aquiring a label, and obviously very few are willing to wade in to those treacherous waters.
It's explicitly important that genocide can't only be focused on murdering living people, because for the most part, you don't wipe out a race or group of people just by killing them.
Trying to scope genocide down to the simple act of murdering people is a bloody-minded case of exceptionalism that overlooks the ongoing attempts to commit genocide around the world by actively destroying cultures, their history, and severing the ties that future generations have to both of those.
It's also very easy to understand why folks have a hard time closing the gap; virtually every country in the world has some history of tribalism and violence that falls into the broad strokes of genocide, and several countries are still actively engaged in it; it's worth noting that taken in the context of Central and South American immigrants to the United States, a case could be made that the child separation policy is a genocidal act.
There is a reason why the definition of genocide in legal terms steps away from the dictionary definition of the word, and it's documented here -> https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml
I would suggest that anyone that doesn't find each of the items of the formal definition of genocide from the U.N. listed below as horrifying as the first line, it's probably worthwhile to spend some time evaluating and learning about the impact policies and governments that have done this in recent history (post World War II) to understand why the scope of genocide can't be limited to murder.
Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
...
-Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
...> But if conventions are worded with unusual broadness, they must also be used with special care. Until now, America’s State Department had applied the “genocide” label only to mass slaughter, and even then it often hesitated, for fear that uttering the term would create an expectation that it would intervene. It did not call Rwanda’s genocide a genocide until it was practically over.
- The number of executions is treated as a state secret, but most likely a lot of people are killed every year, including for political "crimes".
- Chinese prisons used to be labor camps by default and many continue to operate as such, including torture and rape by prison guards.
- The one-child policy was all about preventing births and involved sterilizing more than half of all women.
Which makes me wonder why the Canadian declaration is limited to Uighurs instead of also applying to persecuted Han Chinese or members of the fifty-odd other recognized ethnic groups in China. Is it just because Uighurs have gotten comparatively more attention recently?
The dilemma faced by China and the West, regarding their ways of life, is that they are operating on 2 systems that are different down to a very fundamental level.
In short, China and the West have different values.
The sad thing is that outside of China and the West, there are actually more people being entirely left out of the discussion. And neither have the universal systems and resources to bring these people out of their suffering.
Til this day, China's treatment on Uighurs are still highly secretive. That leads to the claim of internment of 1 million Uighurs become a superficial paly thing by both sides:
* China certainly are very content that no domestic instability because that 1 million figure is obviously not trustworthy to Chinese people. (Note that there is no way to verify the truth, as that's CCP's tactic all along; there is always the national security card prevent any forceful international investigation).
* The West are also very comfortable because they can outrageously condemn CCP for various political objectives. Do they really care about the 1 Million Uighurs? Obviously yes, but probably is behind a long list other concerns.
This dilemma (or pleasant situation if we think about it as a whole) is a reflection of the incompatibility of 2 systems. It is a clash of civilizations. And that clash is not movable by the seemingly good will of the people: if you ask the people in China and the West they would universally say that they like the people from the other side, and they just dont like their government. But they are merely unconscious of the fact that the clash is happening not because of the government, but really was by the people's will, through the thousands of channels of influences that the puny Human brain will never fully grasp.
The idea that Chinese people and "Western" people are fundamentally different seems to deny the fact that humans as whole share common needs and common motivations. If China and the West have incompatible values, where does that leave other countries of the East? Does India count as the West? What about Japan or South Korea or Taiwan? What about countries in the Global South, are their values incompatible with both the West and China? Plenty of those countries have ratified ICCPR[2].
[0] http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2021-02/22/c_139758736.htm
[1] https://thediplomat.com/2021/02/can-china-change-the-definit...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Covenant_on_Civi...
This is not true.
This was even rejected by Mr. Xi himself, quote [1]:
""" The world must "oppose politicization and stigmatization" over Covid-19, Xi said in the pre-recorded address, urging world leaders to embrace the "concept of a big family... and avoid falling into the trap of a clash of civilizations." """
One could interpret this as Xi actually agree with this view point, and simply try to avoid fall into the trap. Then we can reasonably conclude that Xi and CCP do not want to follow this line of thinking. Here I am assuming Xi is so powerful that he can largely shape CCP thought, which was widely agreed upon as a truthful statement.
> deny the fact that humans as whole share common needs and common motivations
This is quite a bland statement. And itself bears little factual support.
Political values, as we are here discussing, seldom agree. CCP in its face adopts socialism and intends to move towards communism. That's 180 degree opposite of US domestic political theoretic.
The so-called common value is quickly turning into a lie when it goes beyond typical bodily needs. Even that is a problem, like many Western media would state Chinese need to consume less pork, because of the climate change concerns. Since when the West believe one should be subject to the whole's needs?
[1] https://news.abs-cbn.com/overseas/09/23/20/xi-defends-chinas...
I really think it's disingenuous to imply that in a country of over a billion people, with countless regional traditions, where many different languages are spoken, there is a singular unified set of values that is somehow unique to within the political borders, as compared to people who live just across the mountain, just across the river, or just across the strait.
It is a misunderstanding of American politics to imply that adopting socialism and intending to move toward communism is 180 degrees to their opposite. There are plenty of American politicians who admire socialism, and who call themselves socialists, and who would like to implement socialist policies - if not taking it all the way to communism. There are lots of grassroots communist publications in the US. Communism is discussed in school and universities, and it has champions in members of the public.
In any case, your claim was that the West as a whole had different values to China, not just the US. There is explicit Communist Party representation in the EU and other Western governments, so even if it were true that all Chinese have exactly the same political values as defined by the CCP, it is not true that no people in the West share those.
To get back on the actual topic, which is human rights, the UN has discussed human rights since the very beginning, and plenty of people from all around the world have agreed on some basic fundamentals, such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion and so on. Personally, I find it hard to believe that one country's citizens are so unique that a definition of human rights coincidentally matching their current authoritarian government's ideology is merely a difference of opinion that should be immune to foreign criticism.
But also, personally, I do not think there is enough evidence to definitively call what is happening in Xinjiang "genocide". However, I also think that the words do not matter so much. The basic point is that it seems to be a universal human rights violation to imprison people solely because of their religious or cultural beliefs.
The post-Maoist CCP has very different ideology from Western Communist parties (heck, even the original Maoist CCP had a distinct ideology from the contemporary Stalinist Soviet Communist Party.)
But even if ignoring that, it's the fallacy of composition to conflate “some people in the West have the same ideology as the dominant ideology of the PRC” with a contradiction to “the West as a whole has a different ideology than the PRC”.
Are you OK with that?
You did not seem to get the idea of clash of civilizations. That framing is about the civilization as a whole. In that scale, you cannot apply your concept of people individuals etc.
When people have no power, it does not really matter whether they object or not. This is why you see Canadian politicians making bold statements about "genocide", but the vast majority of Canadians you meet on the street do not even know what a Uighur is, and even if they condemn the idea of internment of suspected terrorists in theory, they do not feel the need to make some statement on the record about the livelihood of people imprisoned 10,000km away. Many do not even care about people imprisoned in their own country.
This, in fact, is very similar to how most people in China view things, and most people in the US, and many other countries too. Their immediate personal and household concerns outweigh their greater ideological beliefs. This is why I think it is misleading to imply that "China" and "the West" have diametrically opposed value systems.
What might be true is that the political party currently governing China has a different ideology to many of the political parties currently governing other countries around the world. But that's just politics. The special situation in China is "party, government, military, civilian, and academic, north, south, east, west, and center, the party leads everything". So, in China, the average citizen will never have any power, not unless they filter through the party framework. This makes the party ideology a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In my opinion this is why people both inside China and outside China get the impression that there is such a thing as "Chinese values". In reality, I think ordinary people in China have just as much diversity of opinion and diversity of values as any other country, they just have less power to express it politically, so it seems more like a monolithic culture than it actually is. Of course, in any case, many people do not much care about political ideology anyway.
https://www.ibanet.org/Article/NewDetail.aspx?ArticleUid=0D8...
https://www.businessinsider.com/china-harvesting-organs-of-u...
Genocide implies the intent of erasing a people from existence. Simply detaining them and subjecting them to torture -- however horrible that may be -- is insufficient to meet the definition. A better argument would be that of forced sterilization, but then you'd have to show that this is both systematic and done with the intent of erasing an ethnic group.
To be clear: we must take a stand against China's behavior, but we should also label it correctly.
The reality is that child separation, sterilization, and the acts taken by the Chinese government to destroy Uigher connections to their cultural history meet the definition. Genocide isn't just about killing people, it's about obliterating a people and their culture, and you can't stop the definition at mass murder.
>In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: [...]
(Emphasis mine)
The Chinese government is doing all of these things to the Uigher people, and I am not going to replicate the exhaustively cited information that is summarized in the article[1] below to support each individual claim. I recognize that Wikipedia articles may have bias, but the bulk of the citations in that article are from recognized news sources.
This is begging the question -- what are those things that reveal the intent to eradicate?
We both agree that Uighur's are being specifically targeted, of course, but the Wikipedia article is weaseling in the "cultural" qualifier, i.e. "cultural genocidie". That's a comparison to genocide. I still don't see clear and compelling evidence of intent to eradicate.
Evidence of intent to torture? Yes.
Evidence of intent to marginalize? Yes.
Evidence of intent to harvest organs for the benefit of others? Yes.
Evidence that Chinese policy wishes to remove the people from existence? I could be convinced, and it wouldn't surprise me very much, but the evidence is unclear.
What am I overlooking?
It's the same reason why Pompeo pressed for genocide on his way out, despite his own state department finding there's insufficient evidence for such determination, compared to more appropriate "crimes against humanity" or "cultural genocide". Bluntly because the latter two have no formal conventions, i.e. there is no obligation to punish. The semantic game is significant and self-serving. If punishment for "crimes against humanity" were ever formalized, it would open up US actions to similar scrutiny (i.e. war crimes). Similarly for Canada, labelling XJ "cultural genocide" and setting norms to punish it would open Canada to punishment. Hence elaborate propaganda, exaggerated word games and non-binding resolutions. To be clear, XJ is absolutely "cultural genocide" / "crimes against humanity" - but it's not genocide. If the US state department, under lying Pompeo can't comfortably rationalize the determination, it's because the accusation is flawed. Rather these efforts are specifically designed to target only Chinese human rights violations while insulate against western ones.
A serious campaign actually sympathetic to human rights will attempt to prosecute XJ as "crimes against humanity", for which there is a feasible avenue for prosecution, and start a formalize process for punishing this and future events. But Canada doesn't want to do that, because they will suffer from the fallout. The US doesn't want to do that... because lol, the Hague Invasion Act exists specifically so US can get away with "crimes against humanity". Realistically no country wants to go down that route, not just because no hands are clean, but because no one wants to be punished the next time their hands get dirty. Finally, there's no compelling reason to insist on "genocide" label outside of domestic politics, which will never stick internationally, least of all because China still has plurality international support, from Islamic nations no less, for XJ being a counter insurgency response. TL;DR: it's theatre.
If you label it genocide, and continue doing business as usual apart from some strongly worded letters, you are in effect saying that "genocide" is not a big deal.
Just calling it genocide and not doing anything about it really weakens what the term means.
Are they also going to stop exporting agricultural products to China?
Talk is cheap.
because I've been studying Chinese and speaking with Chinese people online for the last few years, I've also met quite a few Uighurs who were studying English. They are fluent in Chinese plus a couple of other languages, and as best as I can tell, I have been reintroduced as they say. This is not a topic I was able to discuss with them, but they seems like nice people that were living a decent life.
Now what happened in the past and maybe what still continues to happen in these camps is surely something that will be discussed for years, and China will have a better reputation. I just study what's happening and I'm hoping that there will be some good that comes out of it too.
When I posted about two countries pressuring tech companies into silencing oppressed communities (including one country credibly accused of genocide) [1] it was flagged for being “political”.
But China bad. Whatever fits your agenda I guess. Goodbye.
> Tursun said she was forcibly sterilized in 2019 through a surgical procedure, along with hundreds of other Uighur women.
(2019) "Kalbinur Tursun, 36, entrusted five of her children to relatives when she left Xinjiang to give birth in Istanbul but has been unable to contact them for several years" - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/28/world/asia/china-xinjiang...
But happy for a logical explanation, since we are talking genocide after all.
Kalbinur Tursun might be a made up name being used for Uyghurs being interviewed. It's probably two people.
I see now the Chinese government have stated the original Kalbinur Tursun was a pseudonym - http://jeddah.china-consulate.org/eng/zt/xjfk/t1767403.htm
I don't agree with that viewpoint at all. Both forms are vehemently barbarous, and the world has enough problems with genocide denialism that engaging in technical arguments over the definition is only going to give more cover to denialists.
My original thought: Wow... Biden's stance is essentially it's a cultural difference.
I think I may have misinterpreted.
I didn't originally catch "and so the idea I’m not going"
Edited for correctness. Thanks for others who posted the full quote. I couldn't pull it well from quickly listening to the vid.
This is a prime example of how taking specific cuts of quotes can lead to wildly misleading conclusions.
This is what he actually said:
"I point out to him no American president can be sustained as a president if he doesn’t reflect the values of the United States, and so the idea I’m not going to speak out against what he’s doing in Hong Kong, what he’s doing with the Uighurs in western mountains of China, and Taiwan, trying to end the One China policy by making it forceful … I said, and, by the, he said, he – he gets it. Culturally there are different norms that each country and their leaders are expected to follow."
And as you can see, he's saying that as POTUS, he must speak out against it because he is POTUS; that the US has different cultural norms than China and that we don't condone these things.
But what is he saying about China's cultural norms? Your statement doesn't contradict this statement:
> Wow... Biden's stance is essentially it's a cultural difference.
They are focusing on what Biden thinks are Chinese cultural norms, and you are focusing on what Biden thinks are American cultural norms. The two statements aren't contradictory but also aren't complete.
Ultimately the press should ask for clarification and Biden should clarify. We shouldn't have to interpret like this. To my knowledge that hasn't happened.
That statement is claiming that Biden says we shouldn't say anything because their treatment is just a "cultural difference".
Biden's whole statement literally says the opposite.
No, what is he is doing is reassuring Xi that while he may have to speak out publicly about how many US Citizens will disagree culturally with china, rest assured that while He is president there will be no action.
If you want to point out the fact that I called him high I guess you have somewhat of a leg to stand on for personal attacks. The other two things you listed as "flame war" material are literally no different than his comment defending Biden.
Biden talking about conversation with Xi
On the face of it, this is shocking, disturbing, and disgusting. But I'm not prepared to pass judgment. Did he simply misspeak? Was there any clarification after the fact? Has the press followed up on this?
"Different cultural norms." Nothing to see here, please move along.
But we never declared it a genocide. Isn't a big difference, otherwise why would this even be news worthy.
Specifically, they allege:
> the use of arbitrary detention, political re-education, forced labour, torture and forced sterilization
The traditional, dictionary definition of genocide is "the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group".
To use genocide in this other sense seems to me disingenous; it's an attempt to invoke the strong emotional reaction we have to mass-killings when that is not what is alleged to be ocurring.
It is, in a sense, fake news: many people will see just the headlines, and assume that China is in fact carrying out vast, demographically targeted killings.
They are using genocide as a generally accepted legal term, and not a dictionary definition, or an interpretation of the root words that make up the word. Read the definition of genocide as it pertains to international law by reviewing the UN page on the topic[1].
There is a specific meaning, and it relates to the intention of destroying the Uigher people as a cultural identity through a campaign of imprisonment, physical harm, forced sterilization and family separations. Each of those are detailed in well respected publications around the world, and links to the articles backing that can be found by reviewing the citations on the Wikipedia article on the Uigher Genocide[2].
[1]https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide
Fair enough.
(It's too late to edit my comment, but I would strike out the disingenuous claim if I could.)
> Article 2 of the convention defines genocide as
> any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
> (a) Killing members of the group;
> (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
> (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
> (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
> (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
This is from Encyclopaedia Britannica 2010
Canada is embroiled in a political issue with China right now. They're holding a Huawei exec named Meng Wanzhou at the request of the US, who are investigating Huawei for violating sanctions against China[1].
China retaliated by arresting two Canadians without apparent cause[2]. They're been in jail for two years.
The Conservative party put forth this motion for a vote as a move to put Trudeau's Liberal government in an awkward place: they would either condemn China's treatment of the Uighurs and make the Michaels/Meng Wanzhou situation more painful, or they wouldn't and would appear to condone genocide.
FWIW I suspect Trudeau and the Liberal party do believe Uighur treatment to be genocide (I do). But stating it publicly would make life even more difficult for them.
1- https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46462858
2- https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/two-michaels-mark-two-jailed-y...
OIC notwithstanding, I guess. ;)
not surprising. Voting nay would be political suicide.
I think the reality is that it's not really genocide. It's not a holocaust in that sense. Rather than genocide, the reality is that it's Gulags. Communism basically can't function without some sort of forced labour. Vietnam has their "Rehab concentration camps", USSR had the gulags, North Korea has their concentration camps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pukchang_concentration_camp
It's not genocide exactly. The problem is that China can't give up their concentration camps.
It would call it forced cultural assimilation by taking away their religion , language and culture and making them conform to the dominant Han culture.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/93wj78/canada-is-torturing-i...
We can agree that solitary confinement is also bad, and still think that China's treatment of Uighurs is much, much worse.
Your whatabboutism is not helpful. Nor is it original, deep or interesting, to be frank.
I am not sure what point you are trying to make?