“The Government in China has been particularly pernicious toward religion and religious believers during the last 20 years—and increasingly so in recent years, including in 2018.”
Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo released (on 21 June) the 2018 annual report of the US Commission on international religious freedom. Set up under the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) on October 27, 2018, the Commission focuses on protecting the fundamental freedom of thought, conscience, and religion as prescribed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
“The enduring story of the last 20 years is not about IRFA or USCIRF. Rather, it is the story of people who wish to live their lives as their conscience leads, who dream of raising their children so that they can make their own choice about what to believe or not believe freely and openly,” says the intro to the report.
Releasing the report, Pompeo said: “…..the Trump Administration has promoted religious freedom like never before in our foreign policy agenda. Given our own great freedoms, it’s a distinctly American responsibility to stand up for faith in every nation’s public square.” He described th USCIRF effort as a report card and said it tracks countries to see how well they’ve respected this fundamental human right.
Excerpts on China
…In China the government has been particularly pernicious toward religion and religious believers during the last 20 years—and increasingly so in recent years, including in 2018.
As a Tibetan, you may be forced to study Buddhism in a language that is not Tibetan, your native tongue, or detained for possessing a photo of your spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.
As a Christian, your Bible may have been rewritten by the Chinese government, your church shuttered or demolished, and your pastor imprisoned.
As a Falun Gong practitioner, you may end up at a detention center where you are attacked with electric batons and forced to undergo medical and psychological experimentation.
As a human rights defender who works to protect people targeted for their faith, you may be arrested, or worse, disappeared.
And as a Muslim—particularly an ethnic Uighur Muslim—you may be forcibly sent to a concentration camp where you are held against your will and subjected to unspeakable acts of abuse and alleged torture, all while authorities pressure you to abandon your fate.
The cover of USCIRF’s 2019 Annual Report tells the story of abuses against Uighur Muslims in China, a tragedy that Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo in March 2019 called “abhorrent.”
Sadly, the atrocities predate USCIRF. Twenty years ago—in June 1999—USCIRF selected three countries as the primary focus of the Commission’s first-ever annual Report, released in 2000: Russia, Sudan, and China. In that first report, USCIRF found that Uighur Muslims: “faced heightened repression of their religious and other human rights;” were subject to arbitrary arrests, torture, and extrajudicial executions; and were “imprisoned for their religious belief, association or practice.”
Ten years later, USCIRF’s 2010 Annual Report—which covered events in 2009 and early 2010—featured on its cover a photograph of a Uighur Muslim woman facing down armed Chinese security forces, with a defiant fist raised in protest to Chinese government repression. She was responding to authorities’ dis-proportionate response to peaceful demonstrations in 2009 in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region where at least 10 million Uighur Muslims reside. The ensuing violence left an estimated 200 Uighur Muslims dead and more than 1,600 injured. Moreover, Chinese authorities carried out enforced disappearances of Uighur men and teenage boys and sentenced others to death.
Nearly 20 years later, Uighur Muslims are constantly surveyed, their phones confiscated and scanned, their skin pricked for blood samples to collect their DNA, their children prohibited from attending mosque. Even worse, the Chinese government has ripped entire families apart, detaining between 800,000 and two million adults in concentration camps and relegating some of their children to orphanages. Families cannot contact one another due to fear of government monitoring; thus, countless Uighur Muslims have no idea where their loved ones are or if they are even alive.
Although a handful of foreign governments—including the United States, Britain, and Turkey—have harshly condemned the Chinese government for these egregious abuses, China has faced few, if any, consequences. Despite years of escalating abuses, the wider international community has tragically missed the opportunity to prevent what is now happening to Uighur and other Muslims in China. Policy and practice now must focus on holding the responsible parties accountable, ceasing China’s myriad abuses against all faith communities, and documenting the evidence of the atrocities that have occurred.
The U.S. government—and the international community—must swiftly and resolutely sanction Chinese officials and agencies that have perpetrated or tolerated severe religious freedom violations, including Chen Quanguo, Communist Party Secretary in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region and Politburo Member, among others. The U.S. and other governments must press the Chinese government to immediately and unconditionally set Uighur and other Muslims free and also release prisoners of conscience like Uighur Muslims Gulmira Imin and Ilham Tohti, Tibetan Buddhists like the Panchen Lama and Tashi Wangchuk, Christians like Pastor Wang Yi and Hu Shigen, and human rights defenders like Gao Zhisheng. Also they must urge the Chinese government to cease detaining, arresting, and imprisoning believers and human rights defenders for their peaceful activities and stop interfering in the practice, instruction, and observance of their beliefs.
In 2018, both state and non-state actors increasingly used religion as a tool of exclusion to isolate, marginalize, and punish the “other” through discrimination and violence. For example, blasphemy and related laws in countries like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia—and also in countries with comparatively lesser challenges such as Indonesia and Egypt—were typically enforced against individuals belonging to a minority faith, following a faith not recognized by the state, or holding no faith at all. At times, when a government or non-state actor deems actions and expressions blasphemous or insulting to religion, it is that declaration—and not the underlying alleged defamation—that incites hatred and violence.
As USCIRF’s 2019 Annual Report concludes, despite two decades of tireless work to bring an end to religious-based discrimination, violence, and persecution, innumerable believers and nonbelievers across the globe continued in 2018 to experience manifold suffering due to their beliefs.
On the one hand, it is the responsibility of governments to protect and uphold freedom of religion or belief and the related freedoms of expression, assembly, association, and press. No non-state or state actor—not the Chinese government nor any other government—has the authority to command a person’s soul and beliefs. On the other, the international community is increasingly responsible for allowing the Chinese government and other governments to get away with systematic, ongoing, egregious violations of religious freedom without con-sequence or accountability. Across the globe, the collective voices of those fighting for freedom of religion or belief must consistently sound the alarm against state and nonstate actors who perpetrate and tolerate such abuses.
These violators must be held accountable. The impunity must end now.
– Excerpts from USCIRF’s 2019 Annual Report