A 7.8 magnitude earthquake rocked both countries last week, toppling buildings and killing tens of thousands.

Hearing the call, the pontifical foundation Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) will be providing at least NZ$800,000 of immediate aid to Christians in Syria.

After many years of war and the economic collapse of Syria, ACN had projects in place and partners on the ground in cities such as Aleppo and Lattakia. Both cities have considerable Christian communities. Both were badly affected by the quake.

ACN is concentrating its efforts on helping people get back to their homes as quickly as possible.

"It's a desperate humanitarian situation," says Chaldean Catholic Bishop Antoine Audo of Aleppo and former president of Caritas Syria.

Audo says even before the quake, the Aleppo two million people faced electricity and fuel shortages.

"There is no electricity, there is no fuel, the winter is very harsh, and it is cold inside and outside. There is so much poverty," Audo said.

"It's not easy. The situation is really terrible."

Many people say that even compared to the 12 years of war they have just endured, the earthquake was more terrifying.

Caritas Turkey is also working on the ground.

Besides distributing hot meals and clothes, it has opened a listening centre hotline to provide help to victims, in partnership with the local authorities.

Uyghurs also volunteering

A group of Uyghur volunteers in Istanbul were early responders to the unfolding humanitarian crisis. They drove for 24 hours to assist in relief efforts.

One of the 30-member team's key goals was to help Uyghurs living in Turkey affected by the disaster.

Many Uyghurs who have fled China's crackdown on them in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region - which Uyghurs prefer to call East Turkestan - have resettled in Turkey. There, linguistic, cultural and religious similarities make for an easier transition.

The team was sent "to show that the East Turkestan people and Turkish people are together in thick and thin," said Hidayettullah Oghuzhan, chairman of the Union of East Turkestan Organisations in Istanbul.

Counting the numbers in Turkey and Syria

Officials say over 8,000 people had died in Turkey alone; more than 22,000 are injured.

Around 8,000 have been rescued from the collapsed buildings.

A state of emergency has been declared for three months across ten cities.

Nearly 3,000 deaths were reported in both government and rebel-held areas in Syria - but confirming casualties in Syria is difficult.

Source

• Radio Free Asia
• UCA News
• Catholic News Agency

The potential links highlight the challenges in buying goods made in China, where the supply chains are often opaque, and come amid a broader effort to ensure New Zealand is not supporting modern slavery.

Chinese company CRRC is manufacturing buses and trains for New Zealand companies, despite alleged ties to forced labour, according to a news report published this week.

A total of 98 CRRC-made electric buses had already been ordered for Wellington, with the first one due to hit the streets in July, Greater Wellington Regional council transport committee chairman Roger Blakeley confirmed yesterday. Continue reading

Eugenics is the study of how to manage reproduction within a human population to increase desirable heritable characteristics.

Among the Chinese Communist Party's goals listed in its policy blueprint for the years 2021-2025 is to "optimize its birth policy" and "improve the quality of the population."

"I am actually very worried," Columbia professor Leta Hong Fincher told a panel of China experts in a virtual event hosted by the Center for International and Strategic Studies (CSIS) on Nov. 13.

"What caught my eye was that they actually use specific language saying that China needs to 'upgrade population quality,' " she said.

Fincher said that the Chinese government's plans to control reproduction were part of the regime's goals to maintain internal security. They would do this by encouraging growth of the Han Chinese, the dominant ethnic group in China.

At the same time, the government would systematically limit births of an ethnic minority, the Uyghur Muslims.

"We see it happening in Xinjiang with the forced sterilization of particularly Uyghur Muslim women. And the language in the plan suggests to me that the government is going to continue with that," she said.

"You have seen a huge reduction in birth rates in Xinjiang and, on the flip side, the government is also trying to coopt and persuade Han Chinese women who are college-educated into having more babies."

The government of China's Xinjiang autonomous region has acknowledged that birth rates fell by nearly a third in 2018. Much of the fall was attributed to "better implementation of family planning policy."

In Xinjiang, an estimated one million Uyghurs have been detained in re-education camps.

Inside the camps, they are reportedly subjected to forced labor, torture, and political indoctrination. Outside the camps, Uyghurs are monitored by pervasive police forces and facial recognition technology.

The final version of the latest Chinese five-year plan will not be passed until the National People's Congress meets in March 2021.

Sources

Angelus News

La Croix

The woman, who was not identified but was seen from behind on camera, told ITV that she was sharing her story in an effort to atone for her past.

"The clear intention was ethnic cleansing. We were asked to believe this was part of the Communist Party's population control plan," she said. "At the time, I thought it was my job."

At least 1 million Uyghur people are believed to be interned in concentration camps in China's Xinjiang Province. Human rights groups and international watchdogs have documented a "slow genocide" against the Uyghurs, including forced sterilizations and abortions, as well as forced organ harvesting, political indoctrination, and torture. Read more

Myanmar's Cardinal Charles Maung Bo, president of the Federation of Asian Bishops' Conferences, and Indonesia's Cardinal Ignatius Suharyo were among the senior figures calling for an investigation into grave human rights violations against the Uyghurs.

Other signatories included the former archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams; seven Anglican bishops; the Coptic-Orthodox archbishop of London, Archbishop Angaelos; the former master of the Dominicans, Father Timothy Radcliffe; some of Britain's most senior rabbis; Muslim faith leaders including the chief convenor of Myanmar's Islamic Centre, Al-Haj U Aye Lwin; the Dalai Lama's representative in Europe; a leading humanist; the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England; Wales' lead bishop on international affairs, Bishop Declan Lang of Clifton; and several Catholic priests.

While the Uyghurs have faced repression for many years, a campaign of persecution has intensified in the past few years, with evidence to suggest that the Chinese Communist Party regime is aiming to eradicate the Uyghur cultural and religious identity.

At least a million — perhaps as many as three million — Uyghurs are incarcerated in prison camps, where they face systematic and severe torture, sexual violence and slave labour.

Outside the camps, the Chinese regime has established an Orwellian surveillance state, with artificial intelligence, facial recognition technology, cameras on every block and Chinese agents living with Uyghur families to monitor them 24 hours a day.

In recent months, further evidence has emerged of the transfer of Uyghurs across China for slave labour and forced sterilization of Uyghur women.

As the faith leaders note in their statement, "recent research reveals a campaign of forced sterilization and birth prevention targeting at least 80 per cent of Uyghur women of child-bearing age in the four Uyghur-populated prefectures — an action which, according to the 1948 Genocide Convention, could elevate this to the level of genocide."

Religious practice has been a particular target, with the destruction of mosques and Muslim burial grounds. Men with beards of a certain length or women wearing headscarves can end up in a prison camp.

Religious acts such as fasting during Ramadan, or praying, are punished and there have been reports of Uyghurs being forced to eat pork and drink alcohol.

China's state media has declared that the aim in this crackdown on the Uyghurs is to "break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections and break their origins."

As The Washington Post put it in an editorial: "It's hard to read that as anything other than a declaration of genocidal intent." Leaked high-level Chinese government documents last year speak of "absolutely no mercy."

The 76 faith leaders' statement is not the first time that religious leaders have spoken out, but it is the first time so many have done so with such unity, urgency and in such numbers across faith communities.

"We have seen many persecutions and mass atrocities.

These need our attention.

But there is one that, if allowed to continue with impunity, calls into question most seriously the willingness of the international community to defend universal human rights for everyone — the plight of the Uyghurs," they write.

"After the Holocaust, the world said, ‘Never again.'

Today, we repeat those words ‘Never again' all over again. We make a simple call for justice, to investigate these crimes, hold those responsible to account and establish a path towards the restoration of human dignity."

Comparisons with the Holocaust

The statement follows a letter last month from the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Marie van der Zyl, to the Chinese ambassador in London, Liu Xiaoming, and a message from former chief rabbi Lord Sacks, both of whom took the rare step of making comparisons between the Holocaust and crimes committed against the Uyghurs.

According to van der Zyl, nobody could see the evidence and fail to note what she describes as "similarities between what is alleged to be happening in the People's Republic of China today and what happened in Nazi Germany 75 years ago: People being forcibly loaded on to trains; beards of religious men being trimmed; women being sterilized; and the grim specter of concentration camps."

Rabbi Lord Sacks wrote a Twitter thread saying: "As a Jew, knowing our history, the sight of people being shaven-headed, lined up, boarded onto trains and sent to concentration camps is particularly harrowing. That people in the 21st century are being murdered, terrorized, victimized, intimidated and robbed of their liberties because of the way they worship God is a moral outrage, a political scandal and a desecration of faith itself."

Maajid Nawaz, a prominent Muslim counter-extremism activist in the UK, went on hunger strike last month to mobilize support for a petition to secure a debate in the British parliament on the Uyghur crisis and a call for the imposition of targeted Magnitsky sanctions on the perpetrators of atrocities.

"Serious allegations of organ harvesting, half a million children missing, 13 tonnes of hair being found, and by the way, those 13 tonnes of hair being off another half a million Uighur human beings," he said.

"With all of this all out in the open and now known, the real question is people were scared to speak about it before, why?"

Genocide, he added, "leaves no room for neutrality … because genocide is fundamentally a war against humanity."

At the end of July, Anglican Bishop James Langstaff of Rochester appealed in the House of Lords for sanctions against China in response to "gross human rights abuses."

And Cardinal Bo wrote in a recent statement on freedom of religion or belief for all in the context of the controversy over Hagia Sophia in Turkey: "In China, the Uyghur Muslims are facing what amounts to some of the contemporary world's worst mass atrocities and I urge the international community to investigate."

There are, however, two major world faith leaders whose voices carry significant moral influence who have yet to speak: Pope Francis and Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby.

Perhaps they have had their reasons for biding their time until now. Yet now that so many of their own clergy are speaking out, the world will be looking to these two spiritual leaders for their response.

And their response does not have to be complicated. It does not have to be political. A simple expression of prayer and solidarity would suffice. But silence is no longer acceptable.

When it comes to genocide, crimes against humanity and mass atrocities, the world expects faith leaders to take a stand. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said: "Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act."

Holy Father and Archbishop Welby, the world is waiting to hear you.

• Benedict Rogers is East Asia team leader at international human rights organization CSW and a member of the Stop the Uyghur Genocide Campaign.
• First published in UCANews.com Republished with permission.