Last week, U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., wrote a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urging the State Department to shine a light on the severity of Communist China’s oppression and atrocities against the Uyghurs, a religious and ethnic minority living in the northwestern province of Xinjiang, and classify the actions as genocide.
Scott’s letter is below.
Dear Secretary Pompeo:
As you know, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has established hundreds of concentration camps in order to imprison, torture and enslave Uyghurs living in Xinjiang. Blindfolded Uyghurs are being loaded onto trains and transported to internment camps simply because of their religion.
Uyghur children are separated from parents and taken to orphanages where Han Chinese and CCP officials pressure them to renounce their Uyghur heritage. Through torture, the CCP threatens Uyghurs to forsake their language, their faith and their culture. Uyghur women are forcibly sterilized and have intrauterine devices placed inside them to prevent more births of Uyghurs. Some have abortions forcibly performed on them. Those who are not being tortured inside the camps work as slave laborers in factories.
In November of 2018, Vice President Pence wrote that a key part of the United States’ Indo-Pacific strategy is to “support transparent and responsive government, the rule of law and the protection of individual rights, including religious freedom.” As it stands, these deliberate attacks by the CCP against ethnic and religious minorities undermine our strategy and represent some of the most vicious ethnically and religiously-motivated human rights abuses in the world.
The United States is the greatest supporter of freedom and democracy in the world. I applaud the administration for taking decisive steps to stand up for freedom and against murderous dictators around the world. Now, the State Department has the chance to shine a light on the severity of these abuses, and I urge you to classify the atrocities against the Uyghurs as a genocide.
Thank you for consideration on this important matter as we continue to work to end human rights abuses around the world.
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