More US subversive farce: Uighur Rights Act, Hong Kong and President Duterte
First of two parts
The farce of the United States human rights crusade cannot be seen in a clearer perspective than by its reaction to the International Criminal Court (ICC) indictment of US atrocities in Afghanistan, when US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo threatened the staff and even families of the staff of the ICC officials — hoodlumism” at its worst from a nuclear power state and so-called policeman of the world. It has prompted cartoons of the US knee-on-the-neck of the caricatures of Mr. World gasping out “I can’t breathe.”
In July 2019 in The Diplomat, the widely read online magazine covering geopolitics, Catherine Putz published a report titled, “Which Countries Are For or Against China’s Xinjiang Policies?” Twenty-two US-allied, mostly Western European countries (without a single Muslim-majority state) had filed a letter with the United Nations Human Rights Council and the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights demanding “China to end its massive detention program in Xinjiang.” A few days later, 37 countries (including many Muslim nations) filed a counter-position supporting China’s vocational, deradicalization and counter-terrorism programs, after ocular visits, witnessing the livelihood, reorientation programs as constructive initiatives that generate economic development, peace and prosperity for the region.
Western media calls these Uighur students learning Mandarin and vocational skills ‘detainees’ being ‘brainwashed’ by China.
The vote of the 37 countries, plus the reason for abstention and neutrality of dozens of other nations was a shock to the US-led minority’s criticism of China, but it has not stopped the US from continuing to use the concocted Xinjiang human rights issue as a big media and political stick to beat up China’s international reputation. The world, however, is not buying it and it just makes the US look foolish.
Don’t the numbers of the two camps with opposing views on China’s Xinjiang policies and the membership of the two blocs indicate which has a more legitimate and justifiable position?
This Xinjiang Rights Act is not different from repeated efforts of the US to browbeat China in Hong Kong, and President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines to conform with US preaching in politics and peace and order policies consistent with American desires for a weak and destabilized state. Last January 2020, US senators Edward Markey, Marco Rubio, Dick Durbin, Marsha Blackburn and Chris Coos in a joint statement castigated alleged human rights abuses of Duterte that certainly only added fuel to Duterte’s disdain for the US. They are deafeningly quiet on invasions and thousands killed by allies every year, or by dozens unjustifiably killed by US police each year.
There is clearly much greater support for China’s efforts to stabilize the Xinjiang situation for the already demonstrated benefit of the Xinjiang Uighurs themselves as well as for the greater welfare of China. There is certainly nothing wrong in that, and in fact it is the responsibility and duty of the Chinese state to do that, which allocated $17 billion to work toward that in 2016. Today, in just one prefecture, Hotan, for example, nearly 10,000 jobs have been created with agricultural projects initiated — compare this with the increasing poverty and frequent racist beat-ups and murders in the US, and the decay of what Trump called “shithole” US territories in Haiti and Puerto Rico, etc.
Second Part of Series: “More US subversive farce: Uighur Rights Act, Hong Kong and President Duterte”
Mario Ferdinand Pasion is a political analyst, director of economic alliance Phil-Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) Strategic Studies, and the chairman of Nat-Fil (Nationalist Filipinos Against Foreign Intervention).
Also published in Manila Times. We welcome logical feedback and possibly working together with compatible frameworks. (idsicenter@gmail.com)