Games in the wake of the carnage

Yves Boisworth
Tap

There is a name to describe what is happening with the Uyghurs in China: “genocide”. But this is a word that some governments dare to utter, because no one can stand up to punishment against China’s dictatorship.

Irwin Kotler is not a person who uses the term “carnage” lightly. Former McGill Law Professor, former Minister of Justice, Nelson Mandela, lawyer for Andrei Sakharov and many other political prisoners, was appointed Special Envoy by Justin to preserve the ‘Holocaust’ memory last fall.

“The Holocaust and all the carnage is unspeakable, not just the horror of what was done,” he told me; They are also preventable.

However, for some time now, the area has been completely closed and evidence is accumulating, despite retaliation against those who dare to speak out. Satellite images of large camps were broadcast. Several international media outlets have collected evidence of the victims. And many official reports record repression, which is on the rise.

Since capturing Xinjiang’s “autonomous” territory in the last century, Beijing has been trying to mobilize this Muslim minority of 12 million, whose first language is Uyghur, a Turkish language. On the pretext of some attacks on power, the Chinese regime pulled out the steamroller to fight “terrorism.”

For this, one of the central approaches is to control the birth rate through contraceptive injections or through complete sterilization operations. Restricting births to eradicate a racial group is one of five criteria that can lead to the existence of genocide – with murders, serious attacks on physical and mental integrity, displacement, and so on.

“A total of five criteria were met,” Kotler said.

Two million prisoners: Imagine Montreal Island as a labor camp …

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There is a word, but there is also a law. If the Trudeau government is ever too shy to call it a carnage, Irwin Kotler proposed this week on Twitter in reference to the Supreme Court. The Genocide Convention, adopted in 1948, ensures that the crime of genocide is enshrined in Canadian law. Asking for “opinion” from the highest court on earth formalizes carnage.

“It simply came to our notice then. There is an urgent need to deal with it. No need to go through campus. The Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Human Rights, which represents all parties in Ottawa, produced a unanimous report finding the genocide last summer. Opposition parties have stated they will not run in the by-elections.

“As we speak, abuse continues,” said the lawyer who founded the Raul Wallenberg Center. I know the government people are worried about China’s response. But if it is the will of Parliament, it is an expression of the will of the people, not the government. That is why Canada should not work alone. Secretary of State [Mike] Pompeii [sous l’administration Trump] The carnage is over, and the Biden administration agrees. The British Parliament has prepared a report. By standing with the European Union, there is a way to take action. ”

Comment?

First, by demanding that Xinjiang be investigated by an independent international commission. “China certainly will not allow this, but it will be exposed like this.”

By applying the “Magnitsky sanctions” (named after the murdered Russian dissident) that freeze the assets of foreign leaders. By imposing financial sanctions.

The Olympic Games?

“Because of the repression in Tibet, I said in 2001 that we should never grant the 2008 Games to Beijing, because it is the country that has arrested the most journalists and political dissidents for its crackdown on Falun Gang, because China is the biggest human rights violation in the world. We did some things with the 2008 Games. China says it knows its economic power will allow it to threaten Australia, Japan, Taiwan and Canada, so no country will act alone. ”

No country is completely irreversible, it is said and on that account, we can never hold games. I read the arguments of my colleague Philip Cantin yesterday, for whom the backlash of athletes takes place and has no real impact. It protects itself.

But the level of violations, the gravity of the actions, the evidence of the carnage… all put us in another moral category and force us to actually decide: Do we really want to bring together “all the youth of the world” before Xi Jinping to celebrate the sport when the country is muted genocide? To read sadly on the results of repression?

Under no circumstances can we say that we do not know: the objection is fully explained.