Peking

Following the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Russian dictator Vladimir Putin (70), Uyghur activists are calling for investigations to be carried out into China’s ruler Xi Jinping (69).

The reason: the crimes of the regime in the Xinjiang region. Here Beijing locks millions of people in camps, uses perfidious surveillance methods and kidnaps hundreds of thousands of children – the same facts.

“Putin was wanted by the ICC (International Criminal Court, ed.) for kidnapping thousands of Ukrainian children. Then why not issue an arrest warrant for Xi Jinping as well?” asks Uyghur activist Rushan Abbas. Because the Chinese regime is kidnapping the children of Uyghur families in Xinjiang and putting them in re-education camps.

“The authorities are targeting children of kindergarten age, and they usually take away children aged four, five or six from their families,” Abbas told BILD. “The children are taken to re-education camps, their parents do not know where they are being taken, and all communication with the families is cut off.”

Abbas says it is almost impossible for Uyghur families to hide their children from the Chinese regime’s henchmen. “Xinjian is a huge surveillance institution, full of surveillance technology, from cameras to mandatory DNA tests to spy software on every smartphone.” Chinese officials quartered by law, they then live there with the families.”

Abbas estimates that more than a million children have now been abducted. The regime itself does not deny the practice of re-education camps, but embellishes them as “educational institutions.”

In these schools, the children are indoctrinated in the spirit of the Chinese Communist Party’s ideology, says Abbas. “They are supposed to forget their own language and have to learn Mandarin instead.” The facilities themselves are guarded and the children are not supposed to have any contact with the outside world. “They are also forced to wear traditional Chinese clothing there, although this has not been common for a long time, even among the Han Chinese.” There would only be an exit if the children were used for forced labour. “Especially in agriculture, they are used as cheap slave labor when harvesting cotton or tomatoes.”

After re-education, some of the children were abducted to other regions of China and given to adoptive families there – a practice similar to that in Russia. In addition to Putin, an arrest warrant was also issued against the Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Marija Lwova-Belowa – she had not only supported the “adoptions”, but also proudly declared that she herself had claimed a kidnapped Ukrainian child as her own.

“These crimes have been committed against Uyghur children on an even greater scale for several years,” says Rushan Abbas. “If the international community was able to issue an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin, then Xi Jinping must also be held accountable for his crimes.”

Abbas, who is currently holding talks with governments in several European countries, is confident. “There is a greater awareness of the Chinese regime’s crimes, which particularly target women and children. The German government should finally choose the right side of history.”

Bad crimes against Uyghurs

Last year, a UN investigative report denounced crimes against humanity, and similarly, several human rights organizations had previously reported on the mass mistreatment, including forced marriages of Uyghur women, forced sterilizations and forced abortions, many of them even in the ninth month.

“The bodies of Uyghur women are the battlefield on which this genocide is being committed,” says Abbas – and holds German companies to account in addition to Western governments. “Forced labor is also forbidden under German law, but companies like Volkswagen are still in Xinjiang and are thus supporting the slave labor of millions of Uyghurs,” says Abbas.

Rushan Abbas criticizes: “Volkswagen in particular, which benefited from forced labor during the Nazi era, actually has a special responsibility never to support something like this again. But out of consideration for the Chinese sales market, the company is blind and deaf to human rights.”