China’s dictator Xi Jinping over the weekend appointed General Peng Jingtang to command the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in Hong Kong. Peng was head of the police force in Xinjiang, the autonomous region where Beijing launched a campaign of repression in the last decade under the guise of fighting terrorism.
In December, the Uighur Court, a people’s court set up in London by English lawyer Geoffrey Nice, found that China had committed torture, crimes against humanity and genocide against Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region.
The court noted that hundreds of thousands of Uighurs (with some estimates putting numbers in excess of 1 million) have been detained by Chinese authorities in recent years and reported situations such as deportation or forced transfer, torture, rape, sexual violence, forced sterilization, persecution and disappearance. forced, among others.
The court also concluded that genocide took place in Xinjiang, with policies such as imposing conditions to reduce the number of Uighur births (which consisted of orchestrating the immigration of Han people, the majority in China, and the emigration of Uighurs through incarceration, thus making it difficult to perpetuate this ethnic group, in addition to sterilizations and forced abortions) and forced transfer of children.
Hong Kong’s mini-constitution stipulates that the Basic Law, defense and foreign affairs are administered by Beijing, but the return of the territory to China in 1997 provided for autonomy and freedoms that other Chinese regions do not have. However, pro-democracy protests between 2019 and 2020 were heavily repressed, and a strict national security law was imposed.
The group Democracy Without Borders, a movement that fights for democracy in authoritarian countries, released a note this Monday (10) in which it warned that the designation to Hong Kong of “a general responsible for a genocide” is “a very dangerous message, as it (Beijing) is promoting someone who should be on trial for these crimes.”
“Once again the Chinese government demonstrates that it is not willing to respect human rights and freedoms, as it ‘promotes’ to Hong Kong a person with such a history, and in the face of all the demonstrations that are happening in the world about the Olympic Games in Winter, it is a total demonstration that Xi Jinping’s government will not promote any democratic gesture in the country,” the group said.
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