Rights vs Wrongs — Who is Right? or Wrong?

Whose Human Rights are Actually Wrongs?

At the recent 47th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva, Switzerland, Canada read a Joint Statement on behalf of 44 countries (including herself) on the human rights situation in China’s Xinjiang Province. Interestingly, neither China nor her domestic Xinjiang matters were on the official agenda of the meeting.

The Canadian Statement alleged, without providing factual details and supporting documents that “credible reports” of widespread “human rights violations” including genocide against China’s Muslims population, and also expressed “concerns” on her domestic issues of Hong Kong and Tibet.

The 44 signatories are: Albania, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Belize, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, France, Finland, Germany, Haiti, Honduras, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Marshall Islands, Monaco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Palau, Poland, Portugal, Romania, San Marino, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom (UK), Ukraine and [United States (US) (as Observer)].

No African or Muslim nation was among the signatories. The 6 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, all Muslim countries, have sent the UNHRC letters to support China’s position, and more than 20 countries also disagreed with the Joint Statement through separate speeches.

Belarus responded on behalf of 65 countries urging caution against human rights double standards and opposed politically motivated false information as well as inference in domestic national matters under the pretext of human rights.

More than 90 countries at the 47th UNHRC session disagreed with the Joint Statement by the 44 countries led by US-Canada-UK.

Know also that at the 46th UNHRC session in 2019, Cuba represented 64 countries to support China’s position on her Xinjiang issues and opposed double standards on human rights issues.

THE BIG LIE ON MUSLIMS PERSECUTION AND GENOCIDE IN CHINA

There are about 39,000 mosques for about 25 million Muslims in China. Of the 55 ethnic minorities groups, 10 are predominantly Muslim. They make up about 20% of the total ethnic minorities in China.

The Hui people are the largest Muslim group in China, followed by the Uyghurs. The Hui and the Uygur ethnic groups make up about 90% of the total Muslim population in China. About 50% in Xinjiang Province are Muslims, the Province with the largest Muslim population in China. The Xinjiang region has also been haunted by pro-Islamic terrorism and extremism.

Muslims in China are mostly concentrated in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Qinghai Province, Gansu Province, Yunnan Province; with other Muslims in Tianjin Municipality, Beijing Municipality, Henan Province, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, and Hebei Province. Muslims however can be found almost everywhere in every Chinese city.

There has been no instance of arbitrary arrests or persecution of Muslims in China. The Hui as the largest Muslim group remained undisturbed and live as free as other Muslims and Chinese people, notwithstanding the unfounded allegations of Muslim persecution by the Chinese authorities. I have also frequented Muslim “halal” eating places in the Capital City Beijing and Loyang City in Henan Province with non-Muslim friends.

As for the purported “genocide” of the Uygur minority group, know that its population grew at twice the rate (25%) of the overall Xinjiang population and way higher than the 2% growth rate of the majority Han group. The Uygur population in Xinjiang increased by more than 2.5 million over 8 years from 2010–2018. This is the Big Lie of Uygur genocide in Xinjiang, as repeated by Canada, US, UK and the other 42 countries at the 47th UNHRC session.

GENOCIDES AND HUMAN WRONGS IN CANADA, US AND UK

Canada, the leader of the anti-genocide charge against China, is laughably incredulous given her own record on genocides. Canada is very familiar as a serial genocide murderer.

This week, at least 600 bodies are found at hundreds of unmarked graves at the former Marieval Indian Residential School, which operated from 1899 to 1997 where the Cowessess First Nation is now located, about 85 miles (135 kilometers) east of Regina, the capital of Saskatchewan.

This follows last month’s discovery of 215 children remains, from as young as 3 years old, found buried on the site of what was once Canada’s largest Indigenous residential school near Kamloops, British Columbia.

The UNHRC should look into this Canada’s crime against humanity on her indigenous First Nation natives. More graves are expected to be found across Canada on similar residential school grounds.

Canada’s historical genocide against her native people is well-documented. Her atrocities in killing the indigenous people so as to eradicate their culture is well-known to Canadians. So far, no one or organisation has been held accountable and charged in court.

From the 19th century until as recent as the 1970s, Indigenous children were forced to attend state-funded Christian schools, mostly run by Roman Catholic missionary congregations, in a genocidal campaign to assimilate them into Canadian society. Physical and sexual abuse was rampant in the schools, with students beaten for speaking their native languages.

Over 150,000 indigenous children in Canada were forcibly taken away from their parents and sent to boarding schools, where at least 4,000 children died of unnatural causes. Until today, people of Asian and African descent in Canada are still suffering from systemic racial discrimination, and rights of migrants are wantonly offended.

The illustration below outlines some of Canada’s Human Wrongs record:

Liu Dan, a research fellow with the Center for Canadian Studies at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, believes that racial discrimination is a deep-rooted problem in Canada. A submission to the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief on 30 November 2020 said that 52% of Canadians feel that Muslims can only be trusted “a little” or “not at all”, while 42% of Canadians think discrimination against Muslims is “mainly their (Muslims) fault.”

It would seem than Canadian concerns over the welfare of Muslims in China as well as ethnic genocides are insincere and disingenuous, until she shows the world the depth and intensity, as well as remorse, of her own racism and genocidal intransigence.

The US’ Record of her Human Wrongs is as Olympian as Canada, if not exceeded her. More than 400 persons have been arrested for the purported “insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 Jan 2021. Today, only one has been charged for an obscure crime unrelated to the incident. The known policeman who shot dead an unarmed demonstrator remained protected by anonymity and not charged in Court for criminality determination.

It did not bother US leaders, civic activists and US judges that the vast majority of the unarmed protestors against a rigged 2020 Presidential Election, who have no plans for an alternative government would be accused of “insurrection” without a shred of evidence, denied bail and legal representation. They are now incarcerated, denied their Constitutional rights to freedom and legal counsel.

Historically, long before forcing African blacks to slavery, indigenous American Indians were systematically violated. Early American settlers carried out genocide and systematic ethnic cleansing against the American Indian populations, among other acts of unspeakable genocidal crimes against other minorities in the country. Today, American Indians still live like second-class citizens with their rights trampled upon, and confined to fractional reserves of their own ancestral lands which were stolen from them by early American settlers.

A 2020 FBI report showed that 57.6% of the 8,302 single-bias hate crime offenses reported by law enforcement agencies in 2019 were motivated by race, ethnicity or ancestry. Of these offenses, 48.4% stemmed from anti-white bias; 14.1% were classified as anti-Hispanic or anti-Latino bias, and 4.3% resulted from anti-Asian bias. Among the 4,930 victims of racial hate crimes, as many as 2,391 (48%) were of African American blacks.

A 2017 Southern Poverty Law Center Report said that there has been a 300% increase in the number of anti-Muslim hate groups in America since 2015.

A 2017 Pew Research survey showed 74% of Muslim respondents said there is a lot of discrimination against Muslims in the US. The 5 August 2020 Report by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the implications to human rights of the environmentally sound management and disposal of hazardous substances and wastes condemned the situation of the indigenous Indian peoples in the US. The Report said that they are regularly exposed to toxic pollutants, including nuclear waste, released or produced by extractive industries, agriculture, and manufacturing. Soil and lead dust pollution from mining waste poses a more significant health threat for indigenous populations in the US far more than other groups. According to Mapping Police Violence, the US police shot and killed a total of 1,127 people in 2020, according to Mapping Police Violence.

African Americans accounted for 28% of people killed by Police even though they make up only 13% of the US population. Black African Americans are approximately three times more likely than white people to be killed by police. From 2013 to 2020, about 98% of police officers involved in shooting cases were not charged with a crime, and convictions even lower, as reported by US media VOX.

The illustration below outlines some of the US’s Human Wrongs record:

The British Guardian Newspaper reported that from 2018 to 2019, 14.4 million UK people were living below the poverty line, 4.5 million among them being children, an increase of 100,000 from the previous year; 7% of the population lives in extreme poverty and 11% of the population lives in persistent poverty.

China, on the other hand, has lifted 860 million Chinese people out of extreme poverty.

The UK-based Clear View Research showed that the majority of black people in the UK don’t think their rights are equally protected as those of the white people.

A 2019 Research Study by the Center for Media Monitoring of the Muslim Council of Britain showed that, among over 10,000 articles and clips referring to Muslims and Islam in the period of 4th quarter of 2018, 59% of all articles associated Muslims with negative behavior. About 37% of articles in right-leaning and religious publications were categorized with the most negative rating of “very biased,” and over one-third of all articles misrepresented or made generalizations about Muslims. It concluded that Islamophobia is also on the rise in the UK.

On modern slavery, a March 2020 Report by the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS), “there were 5,144 modern slavery offences recorded by the Police in England and Wales in the year ending March 2019, an increase of 51% from the previous year.” The number of potential victims increased by 36% to 10,627 in the year ending December 2018 compared with the previous year. The ONS analysis concluded that the actual number of victims of modern slavery in Britain may be as high as 136,000. The top three nationalities of victims were British, Albanian and Vietnamese.

On war crimes against Muslims-majority population, a large amount of evidence shows that in 2003, the British army captured and tortured thousands of Iraqi (Muslim) civilians in Iraq’s southern city of Basra, killing many innocent civilians. During its stay in Afghanistan, the UK Special Air Service (SAS) repeatedly attacked villages and massacred villagers under the cover of darkness in the name of anti-terrorism and made it a “anti-terrorism success.” There were in fact more than 3,400 charges of war crimes, 90 percent of which were not investigated. In three months in 2011 alone, 33 civilians were suspected of being killed in 11 separate night attacks, the Times newspaper reported.

The illustration below outlines some of the UK’s Human Wrongs record:

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