Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) today addressed the International Religious Freedom Summit, where he called attention to the urgent need to hold the Chinese Communist Party to account for its crime of genocide, persecution against religious believers and other ongoing egregious human rights violations.

Click on the arrow below to view Smith’s remarks.

Transcript:

            When the term genocide was created in 1944 to describe the systematic destruction of a people, its author Raphael Lemkin explained the term by saying, ‘‘it was the sort of thing Hitler did to the Jews and the Turks did to the Armenians.’’

            On ordering the invasion of Poland in 1939, Adolf Hitler said: “[w]ho, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

            “Never again”—the hope and dream and demand that the abject cruelty of the Holocaust and the systematic destruction of the Jews by the Nazis, never be allowed against anyone, anytime or anywhere, inspired the UN Genocide Convention.

            Article II of the UN Genocide Convention states:

            “…genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: 

            (a) Killing members of the group;

            (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

            (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

            (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

            (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

            Article III says that even an attempt to commit genocide or direct and public incitement to or complicity in genocide shall be punished.

            Communist dictatorships in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Cuba, Cambodia, and Ethiopia among others, have slaughtered a hundred million innocent people.  From Sudan to the Balkans to Ethiopia to Burma to radical groups like Boko Haram—man’s inhumanity knows no bounds.

            Then there are heroes like Chaldean Archbishop Bashar Matti Warda of Erbil, a leader who courageously led a remnant of believers to safety and resilience both during and after the ISIS genocide.  

            China has been designated an egregious violator of religious freedom—called a  Country of Particular Concern (CPC)—since implementation began more than two decades ago on Congressman Frank Wolf’s historic, comprehensive and landmark law—the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998.

             Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party have exponentially increased persecution against religious believers—including Christians, Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists and Falun Gong practitioners—in ways not seen since the cultural revolution.

            Now Xi, apparently fearing the power of independent religious belief as a challenge to the Communist Party’s dominance, is trying to destroy or radically transform religion into the party’s slave, employing a draconian policy known as sinicization.

            Under sinicization, all religions and believers must comport with and aggressively promote communist ideology — or else.

            To drive home the point, religious believers of every persuasion are harassed, arrested, jailed or tortured. Only the compliant are left relatively unscathed.

            Shockingly, as it prepares to host the 2022 Winter Olympic games, China’s leader Xi Jinping is committing genocide against the Uyghur Muslims and other minorities in Xinjiang.

            Xi Jinping’s genocide includes the forced disappearances of millions of Uyghurs into concentration camps, the forced sterilization of Uyghur women, forced abortion of their babies, and state abduction of Uyghur children into orphanages far from home to be reared with non-Uyghur upbringing. 

            The Chinese Communist Party is today systematically erasing Islam in western China—bulldozing mosques and shrines, severely throttling all religious practice, and forcing camp detainees to renounce their faith. 

            Leaked documents published by the New York Times quotes Xi Jinping shamelessly pushing his genocide saying, “show no mercy.”

            I chaired a congressional hearing on the Beijing Genocide Olympics on May 18^th—and argued that it’s time to move the games to another city and country or boycott.

            Yesterday I chaired another congressional hearing, and one witness Gulzira Auyelkhan, a Kazakh Muslim woman who spent over a year in the concentration camps gave  compelling eyewitness testimony on the use of “tiger chairs”—horrific instruments of torture—against Uyghur and Kazakh detainees, as well as the systematic rape of Uyghur women by Chinese authorities. 

            In light of what is now known—and in solidarity with the oppressed and not the oppressor, in solidarity with the victims and not the victimizer—any and all legal and ethical means of “punishing” the Chinese Communist Party for the crime of genocide needs to be pursued.

Excerpts of remarks by Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) 
International Religious Freedom Summit
Omni Shoreham Hotel, Washington DC—July 14, 2021

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