The Forced Sterilization of Uyghur Women in China’s Concentration Camps: Another Arm of the Regime’s Genocide Campaign Against the Muslims of East Turkestan

Press Release

In recent weeks, mainstream media outlets, such as the UK’s The Independent Newspaper, have published reports from Uyghur women, formerly detained in China’s notorious concentration camps in East Turkestan, of Uyghur Muslim women being subjected to forced sterilization during detention. The detainees describe being regularly injected with unknown drugs, after which their menstrual periods stopped. They also described being ordered to strip by prison officers and enduring torture and other forms of abuse. This was alongside being crammed into small overcrowded cells holding around 50 other women, in a space measuring only 20 feet by 10 feet. Previously, there have been numerous reports of Chinese authorities in East Turkestan forcing Uyghur Muslim women to undergo forced abortions, even in their third trimester of pregnancy. The Population Research Institute, which advocates for a ban on inhumane population control programs, accused China of forced sterilization on a large scale, stating, “The current Uyghur population is less than 1 percent of China’s total population. To restrict and control the natural growth of a population of this size in any country is to totally annihilate and genocide them. Therefore, the Chinese birth control policy of forced abortion and sterilization of Uyghurs is not a policy of ensuring the overall quality of the Uyghur population. On the contrary, it is to gradually exterminate them by imposing all the political, economic, and social means and restrictions.” All this is in addition to the Chinese regime’s program of providing financial incentives to Han Chinese non-Muslim men to marry Muslim Uyghur women in order to produce children of mixed Han-Uyghur descent to ‘outbreed’ the Muslim population in East Turkestan. It is a practice known as ‘gene washing’: a reproductive policy aimed at ethnic cleansing of the Uyghur Muslims.

The ruthless Chinese regime continues to employ the most horrendous social engineering tactics to try and wipe out the Uyghur Muslim population in East Turkestan and their Islamic identity. Meanwhile, the spineless regimes of the Muslim world, hoping to protect and expand their financial interests with Beijing, continue to warmly embrace this dystopian anti-Muslim, anti-Islam state which incarcerates over 1 million Muslims in its internment camps as part of its brutal campaign of cultural genocide aimed at erasing all traces of Islam from East Turkestan. This July, several Muslim regimes, including the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Oman, Egypt, Pakistan and Sudan, signed an open letter in support of, what they preposterously termed as, China’s “remarkable achievement in the field of human rights,” essentially defending China’s mass incarceration and communist atheist indoctrination of innocent Muslim men, women, and children. The Pakistan leadership, also shamefully praised China at the UN Human Rights Council for “providing care to its Muslim citizens” while also classifying the ethnic cleansing against the Uyghur Muslims as China’s ‘domestic affair’. There are also recent reports that Turkey is deporting Uyghur Muslims, including women, who have sought sanctuary in the country, back into the hands of the brutal Chinese state, to face possible detention in their Gulags. No doubt, the prospect of securing multibillion-dollar deals, as well as the transfer this June of $1 billion by China’s Central Bank to boost Turkey’s foreign exchange reserve (as reported by Bloomberg) has a part to play in Erdogan’s further betrayal of the Uyghur Muslims. Clearly, the “systematic campaign of social engineering and cultural genocide” being waged by the Chinese regime to wipe out the future generation of Muslims in East Turkestan, means nothing to these shameless cowardly Muslim regimes who have sold their soul to the dollar. Surely, this cultural annihilation of the Islamic identity of our Uyghur brothers and sisters cannot be allowed to continue! Surely, we must respond to the command of our Rabb (swt) when He says,

(وَإِنِ اسْتَنصَرُوكُمْ فِي الدِّينِ فَعَلَيْكُمُ النَّصْرُ)

“And if they seek help of you for the religion, then you must help.” [8:72]. But the only way to truly fulfil our duty to the Muslims of East Turkestan, is to urgently establish the Khilafah (Caliphate) based upon the method of the Prophethood – for it is this true Islamic leadership alone which has the political will to stand against any state which persecutes the Muslims, and which will never be bought off by the lure of wealth! Rather it will use every arsenal in its power to strike fear into the hearts of the enemies of Islam and rescue every oppressed Muslim from the clutches of criminals.

Dr. Nazreen Nawaz
Director of the Women’s Section in The Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir