Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

On 9 December last, the Uyghur Tribunal, which was a voluntary tribunal established of experts in London which made it its business to amass evidence from around the world, particularly from members of the Turkic indigenous population of Xinjiang province, most of whom are called Uyghurs, published a report which was damning of the People's Republic of China and its policy of cultural and popular genocide which it has been perpetrating in Xinjiang province since 2014.

I circulated a copy of the report. I had it printed and circulated to every Member of the Oireachtas, both in the Dáil and here. One of the reasons I did that was that I was conscious of the letter that some of us had received from the Ceann Comhairle regarding Irish-Chinese relations describing the Chinese Government as our friends and advising Members of this House to have little or nothing to do with the Taiwan Government and its representatives in Ireland. I wanted to impress upon everybody precisely why it is that the people of Taiwan are so justified in refusing to be incorporated into a cruel, despotic and totalitarian regime.

I should start, perhaps, by saying that Xinjiang province is one of the most north-westerly provinces of the People's Republic of China, as it is now constituted. It was, until approximately 20 years ago, in the majority inhabited by Turkic people who were Muslims. They are ethnically and visually distinct from the Han Chinese. They have different customs, different language, different religion and a different culture in its entirety.

That province, what used to be called East Turkestan in some people's vocabulary, was designated an autonomous region of the Chinese republic in deference, when the Chinese people's republic was established, to the proposition that it was different from the rest of the People's Republic of China for the reasons that I have mentioned, and for other reasons.

Mr. Xi, now President of the People's Republic of China, from approximately 2012 onwards, initiated a campaign of repression and dissolution of the Uyghur culture in that region in Xinjiang province.I do not want to be too lurid in my detail of the kind of evidence that has been given to the tribunal, but it is about time it was put on the public record of these Houses, precisely how disgusting and obnoxious what has been done to the Uyghur people actually is. Huge camps have been established in which between 1 million and 2 million people have been incarcerated for re-education. They are taken away from their homes. They are frequently shackled. They are forced to live together in dormitories. They are abused by their guards. They are subject to indoctrination. They have to sing pro-Beijing songs and they are beaten when they fail to show enthusiasm. They are required to learn and to become expert in Han Chinese, the majority language of the People's Republic of China. They spend hours and hours being indoctrinated as to the merits of the People's Republic of China, Mao Tse-tung's regime and the present regime in Beijing. At the same time, they are asked to confess the error of their ways in adhering to their previous cultural norms and values. A network of cameras has been established in the streets of most cities, which engage in visual recognition of people and make them all subject to constant surveillance. Some 800,000 children have been taken away from their parents and sent to Chinese state-run boarding schools.

Uyghur men are not permitted to wear moustaches or beards of any kind. Uyghur women are not permitted to adopt traditional Muslim or Turkic dress. Their language is effectively being run out of existence. Their religion has been crushed by the systematic demolition of mosques right across Xinjiang province. Their entire culture is being swept away as part of a process of assimilation into what the Beijing regime hopes will be a complete assimilation of the Uyghur population - what is left of it - as a homogenous population in the People's Republic of China.

Far more scandalous and revolting than all of that is the detail of what happens to those people who are incarcerated. According to testimony received by the tribunal, women are frequently stripped and gang raped. If they are pregnant they are compulsorily subjected to abortion. One person I was reading about was subject to an abortion six and a half months into her pregnancy. First of all, they have their hair shaved and the like and, routinely, the women are effectively chemically sterilised by having injections of anti-fertility drugs administered to them in these places. The situation for men is also pretty horrific. They are shackled, put into prison dress, brought to classes and made to chant and if they show any degree of resistance, they are severely punished and beaten. Some of them have been gang raped as well.

Worse than that, photographic evidence has emerged not merely of the scale of these camps, which is huge. They are purpose built. These are not just temporary structures or internment camps with barbed wire. These are massive structures that are visible from space. Worse still, hundreds and thousands of Uyghur men have been deprived of their liberty and sent in shackles, blindfolds and jumpsuits to factory locations right across China. This is happening in our time.

The other point that has to be made is that many people have simply disappeared. People do not know what happened to their relatives. They go into these camps and they never see them again. They do not have gas chambers but, short of that, this is on a par with the Holocaust as to the scale, deliberation and planning that lies behind it.