Gulnar
Omirzakh is the impoverished wife of a detained vegetable
trader. After the birth of their third child, the Chinese government
ordered her to get an IUD. She complied. Nevertheless, two years
later, four military officials came to her door and gave her three days
to pay a fine of $2,685 for having more than two children. If she could
not pay, she would join her husband and a million others, locked in
internment camps for having “too many children.”
“God
bequeaths children on you. To prevent people from having children is
wrong,” said Omirzakh, an ethnic minority Kazakh. “They [the Chinese
Communist government] want to destroy us as a people,” she stated,
according to a compelling, investigative report by the Associated Press.
The
Chinese Communist Party regards Omirzakh and people who share her views
as religious extremists. CCP-backed scholars have identified “as a key
obstacle [to the CCP’s goals in Xinjiang] the religious belief that
‘the fetus is a gift from God,’” according to the AP Report. The CCP
locks up these religious believers, mostly Muslim, in internment camps,
where they will receive political and religious re-education, in an
attempt “to purge them of their faith.”
“The
state [Chinese government] regularly subjects minority women to
pregnancy checks, and forced intrauterine devices, sterilization and
even abortion on hundreds of thousands,” the AP Report continues.
"Hundreds
of thousands might be an understatement, because there are 15 million
Turkic minorities in Xinjiang," said German researcher Adrian Zenz,
according to an ABC News analysis. Zenz released his own, heavily documented investigative report this week, published by the Jamestown Foundation think tank.
At
the same time as it is forcibly aborting, sterilizing and detaining the
Uyghur and Kazakh population, the CCP is encouraging births among the
Han Chinese, including Han Chinese who have settled in Xinjiang. This
practice may amount to “Han settler colonialism” or even cultural and
ethnic genocide.
According to some of the ex-detainees interviewed by the AP:
- Women were given repeated health examinations in the internment camps. If they were found pregnant, they were forced to abort.
- Pregnant woman disappeared from the camp.
- Two others, terrified of the consequences of being pregnant in the camp, “got rid of their children on their own.”
- Another witness saw “a new mother, still leaking breast milk, who did not know what had happened to her infant.”
Forced sterilizations are also common:
Another
former detainee said she was injected until she stopped having her
period, and kicked repeatedly in the lower stomach during
interrogations. She now can’t have children and often doubles over in
pain, bleeding from her womb.
Those
who have too many children are not only interned in camps, but their
children can be taken away and placed in an orphanage.
