Photo courtesy of World Politics Review
In the Chinese province of Xinjiang, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is engaged in a complete erasure of the Uyghur ethnic group. Over one million members of the Muslim minority have been forced into thinly-veiled concentration camps to endure human rights atrocities. This may be the largest religion-based imprisonment since the Holocaust.
President Donald Trump P’00 has previously voiced support for China’s human rights abuses. As former National Security Adviser John Bolton wrote in The Washington Post in June, “Trump said that Xi [Jinping] should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do.”
Instead of focusing on a TikTok and WeChat ban, the leader of the free world should take a stand against the CCP’s brutal treatment of the Uyghur minority and break his trend of negligence surrounding human rights.
President Trump routinely disregards humanitarian crises, venerates dictators, and supports corrupt regimes. For instance, President Trump is an adamant supporter and ally of Saudi Arabia — a country notorious for its many human rights abuses. Even after the Saudi government called for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Saudi-U.S. relations remained intact.
What’s more, the Trump administration ignored a congressional resolution that imposed sanctions on Saudi Arabia for their civil rights violations. When Saudi Arabia launched a horrific military campaign in Yemen, President Trump vetoed a bipartisan resolution aimed at terminating U.S. military assistance to the Saudi government.
Continuing the trend, President Trump blocked a motion by the United Nations Security Council aimed at mitigating North Korea’s numerous human rights violations. Notwithstanding the president’s sympathies toward North Korea, no deal was struck, and relations with the country worsened. The United States should be fighting to end human rights abuses, not blocking resolutions that try to stop them. President Trump’s continued refusal to fight these crimes against humanity further proves his disregard for the ideals on which this nation was founded.
President Trump even seems to actively support the suppression of human rights in his own country. People in U.S. immigrant-detention facilities have virtually no access to medical treatment and are separated from their families. Recently, accusations have surfaced that women in these centers undergo forced sterilizations.
If President Trump supports the abuse of human rights in his own country, then it is no wonder that he disregards similar atrocities abroad and, in the case of the Uyghur concentration camps, supports them.
Earlier this summer, in an attempt to spur the president into action, Congress passed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, which requires the U.S. government to report incidences of human rights abuse towards Uyghurs by the CCP. Although President Trump has the power to levy sanctions on China, he has abstained from doing so. When asked why, President Trump told Axios, “Well, we were in the middle of a major trade deal.”
Similar to the situation with North Korea, the president willingly ignores appalling human rights violations simply “for the deal.” Ultimately, President Trump should use his powers to levy sanctions on China and finally make a public statement denouncing the CCP’s ethnic cleansing of the Uyghur population through concentration camps.
