CTA President calls the US sanctions on top Chinese officials ‘a right and a timely message to China’/File image
Dharamshala: The United States on Thursday slapped sanctions on three senior officials of the Chinese Communist Party, including Chen Quanguo, party secretary of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region and member of Politburo, for involvement in “gross human rights violations” against Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang, also known as East Turkestan.
Just a day earlier, the US Department of State had announced visa bans against Chinese government officials deemed responsible for barring foreigners’ access to Tibet.
In a statement welcoming the US’ timely intervention, President Dr Lobsang Sangay called the sanction a ‘right action and message’ to China by the US Government saying ‘it cannot continue to act with impunity against Uyghurs, Tibetans and Mongolians.”
With Chen Quanguo, former Party Secretary of the so-call TAR, amongst the targeted officials, Dr Sangay expressed that ‘China’s unchecked human rights violations in Tibet has emboldened it to carry out similar violations in Xinjiang’ and that Tibet was a trial run for the Chinese government’s brutal campaign of oppression playing out in Xinjiang.
The statement acknowledged and appreciated the timely intervention by the US government and continued global leadership in safeguarding human rights and religious freedom around the world, especially in China.
Among those sanctioned was the architect of the grid-style surveillance and detention camps, Chen Quanguo. Chen developed the grid system of mass physical and technological surveillance when he was party secretary of the Tibet Autonomous Region from 2011 to 2016. He later replicated the same tactics over an amplified scale in the Uighurs and other Muslim minority groups in Xinjiang.
In Thursday statement, Secretary Mike Pompeo said Chen and two other Xinjiang officials—Zhu Hailun, Party Secretary of the Xinjiang Political and Legal Committee (XPLC) and Wang Mingshan, the current Party Secretary of the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau (XPSB)—were now ineligible for entry into the United States. Their immediate families are barred as well.
“The United States will not stand idly by as the CCP carries out human rights abuses targeting Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and members of other minority groups in Xinjiang, to include forced labor, arbitrary mass detention, and forced population control, and attempts to erase their culture and Muslim faith,” Secretary Pompeo said.
In a coordinated statement, the US Treasury Department said it was building upon the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act in sanctioning the senior Chinese leaders, Chen Quanguo and Zhu Hailun, party secretary of the Xinjiang political and legal committee.
“The entity and officials are being designated for their connection to serious human rights abuse against ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, which reportedly include mass arbitrary detention and severe physical abuse, among other serious abuses targeting Uyghurs, a Turkic Muslim population indigenous to Xinjiang, and other ethnic minorities in the region,” it said.
Also designated are the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau (XPSB), as well as the current Director and Communist Party Secretary of the XPSB, Wang Mingshan, and the former Party Secretary of the XPSB, Huo Liujun.
