China appoints Hong Kong general who led repression in Xinjiang

Vista aérea de Urumqi, capital da região autônoma de Xinjiang

Aerial view of Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang Autonomous Region

| Photo: EFE/EPA/WU HONG

The Dictator of China President 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, an autonomous region where Beijing launched a campaign of repression in the last decade under the pretext of fighting terrorism.

In December, the Uighur Court, a people’s court created in London by English lawyer Geoffrey Nice, concluded that China had committed torture, crimes against humanity and genocide against the Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region.

The court found that hundreds of thousands of Uighurs (with some estimates pointing to numbers exceeding 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 forced disappearance, among others.

The court also concluded that genocide took place in Xinjiang, with policies such as imposing conditions to reduce the number of births Uighur movements (which consisted of orchestrating the immigration of people of the Han ethnicity, the majority in China, and the emigration of Uighurs through incarceration, thus hindering the perpetuation of 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 countries are administered by Beijing, but the return of the territory to China, in 960, provided for autonomy and freedoms that other Chinese regions do not have. . However, pro-democracy protests between 2019 and 10214704 were heavily repressed, and a severe 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 he warned that the designation to Hong Kong of “a general responsible for a genocide” is “a very dangerous message as (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, because ‘promoting’ 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 Winter Olympic Games, is a total demonstration that the government of Xi Jinping will not promote any democratic gesture in the country”, pointed out the group.