The plight of Uighur Muslims has made headlines in the past few years, each time the light is shed on one aspect of the story. The reports, images or documents are not easily found in a community where the people are scared to use their real names fearing detention because of their religious beliefs. Constant government surveillance of the people and every corner of their private life have left no activity, phone call, family meetings or very personal issues go unchecked and detention is impending for men and women of all ages for a variety of reasons.
 
No one could imagine that the surveillance and detention might also include the to-be-mothers and their unborn children. Chinese government has made decision for life and death of Uighur children and statistics show that it has opted for the latter. Analyzing the local and national budgets in China’s Xinjiang province, Germany-based Xinjiang expert, Adrian Zenz has found a 20 billion Yuan increase in security-related facilities in 2017. His 2019-2020 research, however, has revealed shocking facts on the demographic and cultural genocide of the minority Muslims in the northwestern Chinese province.
 
Increasing surveillance on religious and cultural activities, private life of the minority Uighurs in Xinjinag besides the large-scale government-backed migration of Han Chinese have all played a role in the tensions sparked in the region since long.

The timeline suggests the hacking campaign was an early cornerstone in China’s expanding surveillance efforts. On Xinjinag streets the surveillance cameras are constantly monitoring the faces of people. Wearing veils or long beards might end in detention camps. No matter how loud the US officials might voice opposition against the plight of minority group in Xinjiang, Chinese authorities turned to an enormous system of surveillance and control built by a Massachusetts company and a prominent Yale researcher.

Finger printing, DNA tests, blood samples are only some of the methods for Beijing to control the minority group of Muslims. Eaves dropping system easily keeps track of the people even inside the house.
 
Since 2012-13 the geopolitical significance of the region has increased and in 2017 Chinese government set up vocational camps, as the euphemism for detention centers, Uighur men and women were forcibly taken to as part of a campaign which meant to vanish the Muslim voice in the communist nation. According to Chinese language documents, more than 1.8 million people have been put into these camps.

Outside access to these camps is forbidden; hence, what happened in the detention centers is mainly based on interviews with those released or the few who have fled the communist system and taken refuge in other countries.

What has recently turned out to be more shocking is the result of studies by Adrian Zenz, leading German anthropologist senior fellow in China studies, carrying out another research into plight of the Uighur minority Muslims though this time the female Uighurs in fertility age are the main targets.

In his studies of some government documents Zenz found considerable drop of birth rate among Uighurs revealing shocking campaign for birth control of the minority group.
 
Chinese government has launched a massive campaign for forcible sterilization of Uighur women in a bid to imbalance the demographic combination of the Xinjiang region in favor of the Han Chinese.

Mass pregnancy checks, mass forced sterilization of females, forced pregnancy prevention shots were some of the methods he found Muslim women in fertility age face.

Chinese government has also forced the Muslim Uighur women for mass insertion of intrauterine contraceptive devices or forcible surgeries to prevent pregnancy and eventually birth control of the Uighur population.

This has been slammed by Uighur women mourning the loss of a part of body and also their feminine identity. Those women denying birth control policies or have three children are fined, threatened and sometimes sent to detention camps.

There they were forced to attend lectures on how many children they should have. some of them have shared stories of sexual abuse. Some released detainees contemplated suicide or witnessed others kill themselves.
 
According to Zenz 80 per cent of Uighur women at productive age have been forced to use a sterilization method. More brutal behavior has been shown to some pregnant women who were kicked in the lower abdomen. That is, according to Zenz, the minimum goal for 2019. The actual figure was closer probably to 90%.
 
All efforts aim for both demographic and cultural genocide of the minority Muslim population in Xinjiang. Since the birth control campaign, the proportion of Chinese inhabitants in Xinjiang has rose from 6% in 1949 to 40% in 2000. The population increase is partly due to the migration but mainly the birth rate control structure which has been imposed on Uighur families, targeting the women in fertility age in major.

A new report in Foreign Policy says that China's suppression of Uighurs, Kazakhs and other chiefly Muslim ethnic minorities in northwest China now meets the United Nations definition of genocide, mass sterilization, forced abortions and mandatory birth control part of a campaign that has swept up more than 1.5 million people and what researcher Adrian Zenz calls probably the largest incarceration of an ethnoreligious minority.

The reason why now this has changed - we do need to probably call it a genocide - is quite simply because the evidence now, for the first time, very specifically meets one of the five criteria set forth by the United Nations Convention for the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide from 1948, which specifically says the suppression of birth.
 
Human rights organizations, UN officials, and many foreign governments are urging China to stop the crackdown. But Chinese officials maintain that what they call vocational training centers do not infringe on Uighurs’ human rights. Then the question emerges why they have refused to share information about the detention centers, and prevented journalists and foreign investigators from examining them!

The tight security measures, surveillance policy, various birth control methods and all happened to those in detention centers set by President Xi Jinping himself, aimed for ethnic cleansing of both Islamic identity and Muslim population growth in Xinjiang as well as training the Uighurs to become loyal supporters of the communist regime. This is the suppression of those who live under the present system and unfortunately for those who are not born yet.

H. Kiadarbandsari