When Everyone You Love Disappears
They are the vanishing. Brothers, husbands, grandparents, who never come home. For Rozinisa Memet Tohti, the day came when her family just suddenly stopped returning her calls.
They are the vanishing. Brothers, husbands, grandparents, who never come home. For Rozinisa Memet Tohti, the day came when her family just suddenly stopped returning her calls. Miles away from China in Istanbul, she’d heard the rumors of round-ups, the nightmarish stories hidden deep in Xinjiang’s camps. Three years went by without a single word. Until one day, recently, when she got her hands on a set of leaked documents, listing the targeted Uyghurs. There, on the spreadsheet’s row 358, she saw her sister’s name. “Re-education camp #4, March 7, 2018.”
Tears streaming down her face, she told reporters, this was the news she’d dreaded most. But Rozinisa was wrong. The worst part, she was about to learn, is that her move to Turkey may be what put her there. The Chinese, it turns out, have been surgical and calculating in their crackdown. With a chilling level of detail, they describe the shockingly routine “crimes” that put people behind bars: growing a beard, applying for a passport, clicking on a foreign website, celebrating a holiday, plans to travel, going to a funeral, relatives abroad — any number of minor things most people around the world do without thinking.
The Uyghurs on this spreadsheet had been so closely monitored that government officials even knew when they prayed. There was information on the victims’ neighbors, their extended family, disturbing notes about children and whether they showed signs of “wayward thinking.” Anyone who wasn’t in a camp was catalogued, down to their daily movements. “This document," Adrian Zenz says, "is by far the most detailed that we have.” Zenz, who was one of the first analysts to confirm the existence of these camps a few years ago, thinks it’s an important clue in understanding the “witch-hunt mindset of the government” and how China “criminalizes everything.”
The personal entries are frighteningly specific. “Entry No. 114, describing a 37-year-old man, reads: ‘Five family members applied for a passport; had expectations to travel.’ It also says the man ‘bears a grudge over his older brother’s paralysis and wants to take revenge on society. Strong religious atmosphere in the family.’ …Recommend further training.‘” Another entry noted that a man “wore a beard from March 2011 to July 2014.” People were marked as "trustworthy" or “not trustworthy,” their attitudes “ordinary” or “good.”
Although this spreadsheet — all 137 pages of it — was focused on a small region called Karakax County, there’s plenty of reason to believe that a sinister government like China’s is this exhaustive with everyone. With at least a million minorities in exile, and more disappearing by the minute, Elise Anderson of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, says this information is crucial. “What China says is, 'Oh, we are rooting out religious extremism, and we’re stopping people from being terrorists — and whatever else they want to say [that draws on] Islamophobic sentiment. But what this document actually tells us is that very few of the reasons that people have been sent away to internment have anything to do with religion whatsoever. The thing really that everyone shares in common is that [on this list] is that they’re Uyghur.”
Tuesday, on “Washington Watch,” she explained how intently people are being watched. And the blast zone, Elise explains, for a single Uyghur is mammoth. “They record details about three generations of family, and then they talk about people’s friends and neighbors. Who are they? What is their ID number? Where do they live? Is that person in good standing? Is that person [okay] behaviorally?” At one point, it was so disturbing that guest host Sarah Perry said the hair was standing up on her arms. “It is really an unbelievable form of totalitarianism that is striking to someone who has always lived in the United States, who has no experience with this kind of ethnic cleansing.”
And it’s not just the Uyghurs who are being abducted, tortured, and locked away. It’s other minority Muslims and Christians. They’ve been persecuted and sent to camps too. It’s a massive crisis for the entire world. But what can we do about it?
Elise says one thing that would have a huge impact is to contact your senators and ask them to support the bipartisan Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act (S. 178). “The House version of that bill passed 406 votes [to] one. It has now gone to the Senate for reconsideration. We feel very confident that it’s going to pass. This is one of the truly bipartisan issues in Washington right now — but we need it actually to go back up for consideration in the Senate. So get in touch with your senators. That’s one great way to effect change… Use our report at UHRP.org called 'What You Can Do.' Learn what you can. And then, maybe you can turn around and host an event of some sort or simply share those reports with other people.”
There are companies you can contact, places you can donate, testimonies you can send to people in your church. Above all, pray. Pray for the oppression to end, for the hurting people in these camps to find God, for leaders in the United States and other places of influence to act. “Continue to remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.” — Hebrews 13:3
Originally published here.
'I Felt the Baby Kick… No One Believed Me’
Her abortion was supposed to be “100-percent effective.” That’s what doctors told Sofia Khan when she found out her unborn son had spina bifida. “We were heartbroken," she told the U.K.‘s Sun, "but we made the decision to terminate. We felt it was best for the baby, but even so, I had moments of doubt and guilt.” But that doubt and guilt gave way to horror the day her procedure came — and her baby was born alive.
The lethal injection to her womb was supposed to still the baby’s heart, but hours after the procedure she panicked. She could feel her son “wiggling around” — something the midwife called “impossible.” The doctors did two scans and insisted there was no heartbeat. “It was a relief to know his suffering was over but heartbreaking that he was gone,” Sofia admitted. She was transferred to the hospital, where she started to have a strange feeling. “I felt the baby kick,” she insisted to the staff. “I asked her to put the monitor on to be sure, but she said there was no need.”
Ten hours later, instead of giving birth to a dead baby, she heard crying. “The midwife went into shock. She was screaming for help, [running] with the baby into the corridor. They brought him back and said: 'What do you want us to do?’ and I didn’t know what they meant. I held him and cuddled him and told him how much I loved him.” He lived for more than an hour, but with no effort to save his life, their baby died.
A year and a half later, Sofia still hasn’t recovered. “[H]is birth and death were so much more traumatic, because I just wasn’t prepared for it — nobody was. Nobody had listened to me when I said I felt him kicking. Nobody believed me.” The shock and loss she feels now are so powerful, Sofia tells people. “I don’t think that will ever leave me. I think about my little boy every day.”
During an official inquiry, doctors insisted that the procedure had gone according to plan. “The hospital… offered their condolences to me, but it doesn’t feel to me like they have actually apologized… I have been told it was very, very unfortunate and very rare, and that, in the future, women will be told that the procedure is not 100-percent effective. But I don’t know why it happened to me. I do feel angry with the hospital. I feel angry that I wasn’t listened to.”
Sofia’s story is harrowing and tragic — but it is not, as doctors told her, rare. Here in America, we’ve heard that argument so often from Democrats that it’s nauseating. These are men and women in Congress or applying for the job of president who either won’t admit infanticide happens — or worse, justify it when it does.
Nurse Jill Stanek, who witnessed so many heartbreaking instances of infanticide that she went public, insists it’s still going on. On “Washington Watch,” she stunned people with the frequency she’s seen these babies born alive and then abandoned.
“Anybody who’s worked at a hospital that commits induced labor abortion has probably seen it. The doctors induce labor on a baby. They think it’s very premature and will not survive — or [they think it will] die soon after the birth process. And sometimes doctors will kill the babies ahead of time by injecting the baby’s heart through the mom’s abdomen with [drugs]… that causes instant cardiac arrest. And sometimes they will not. In the event of Christ Hospital, the spokesperson at the time that I went public admitted to the Chicago Sun-Times that between 10 and 20 percent survive there for a short period. So that’s between one in 10 and one in 5. And my experience was the number was much higher…”
What Governor Ralph Northam (D-Va.) was describing about “keeping babies comfortable” until they died, Jill said, “was exactly what I experienced at Christ Hospital. "I submitted photos that I took of the comfort room with my [Senate] testimony [last week] and concluded by saying, ‘How far will doctors go to make themselves comfortable with aborting babies alive and letting them die? And the answer is, it’s pretty clear they’ll go far.”
There is absolutely no good argument for intentionally destroying a newborn life. Democrats can claim it’s rare, but they can never say it’s right. Join us in asking the U.S. Senate to pass the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act when it comes up for a vote next week. Every infant deserves the same chance at life.
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.
