The United States Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, on Monday stated reports of Uighur Muslims being forced to get sterilization, abortion, and coercive family planning by China’s ruling Communist Party, as “shocking” and “disturbing”.
Mike Pompeo made these comments by referring to reports made by German researcher Adrian Zenz, published by the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation think tank.
Pompeo said, “We call on the Chinese Communist Party to immediately end these horrific practices and ask all nations to join the United States in demanding an end to these dehumanizing abuses.”
As a persistent critic of the Chinese Communist Party, Pompeo called China’s practices against the minority Muslims as “an utter disregard for the sanctity of human life and basic human dignity.”
Adrian Zenz’s reports accumulated the strongest evidence yet that China’s policies in Xinjiang met one of the genocide criteria written in the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, specifically “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the [targeted] group.”
Zenz’s analysis of the Chinese government documents stated natural population growth rate in Xinjiang falling “dramatically”. The report showed growth rates, in the two largest Uighur Muslim prefectures, falling by 84% between the years 2015-2018 and further in 2019.
The report also revealed Chinese documents from 2019 stating plans for a campaign of mass female sterilization targeting 14% and 34% of all married women of childbearing age in two Uighur counties.
Zenz states China’s plans were to result in at least 80% of women of childbearing age in Xinjiang’s four southern minority prefectures to intrusive birth prevention surgeries – placement of intrauterine devices or sterilizations, by 2019.
Adrian Zenz said that while only 1.8% of the population lives in Xinjiang, in 2018 itself, 80% of all new IUD placements in China were performed in Xinjiang only.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington responded to these allegations by referring to a statement by Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, stating that “some institutions are bent on cooking up disinformation on Xinjiang-related issues. … Their allegations are simply groundless and false.”