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 Even before China and Russia publicly affirmed
their alignment against the West, just three weeks before Vladimir Putin ordered
his troops into Ukraine, Washington was stepping up its actions against
Beijing’s disregard for human rights and religious freedom.
Last week. a new U.S. law aimed at combating the Chinese Communist Party’s
enslavement of Uyghurs took effect, launching a vigorous effort to enforce a ban
on importing goods produced in any way by forced-labor camps in the Xinjiang
region.
U.S. and other Western journalists, human rights groups, and think tanks over
the last several years have helped expose China’s mass detention and placement
in re-education camps of more than a million Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim
minority living in Xinjiang, a territory in northwest China.
The Beijing Olympics brought more attention to the Uyghur cause when the U.S.,
Australia, Britain, Canada, and Japan joined Belgium, Germany, Denmark, and
Estonia in a decision not to send diplomats to China for the games in protest of
what many leading experts argue is a slow-motion genocide.
Key voices in Washington this week plan to spur more international condemnation
of China’s persecution of religious minorities during the International
Religious Freedom Summit, a three-day event beginning June 28, bringing together
a broad, bipartisan international coalition of leaders, groups, and businesses
that fight for faith-based freedom around the world.
Organizers say the summit will be the largest gathering of religious freedom
advocates in the world this year and will precede a government-sponsored
ministerial on religious freedom in London on July 5-6.
Participants and speakers span the ideological spectrum, from Speaker Nancy
Pelosi and Rashad Hussain, top advisor to President Biden on religious freedom,
to Florida GOP Sen. Marco Rubio and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, as
well as numerous ambassadors, rabbis, imams, Catholic bishops, and evangelical
leaders from around the world.
The final banquet, set for Thursday evening, will feature remarks by Enes Kanter
Freedom, a former professional basketball player. Freedom’s outspoken criticism
of the National Basketball Association’s close business ties to China despite
Beijing’s Uyghur persecution cost him a position with the Houston Rockets, after
the team acquired him from the Boston Celtics in February. His willingness to
sacrifice his basketball career to take such a stand has made him a human rights
celebrity among conservatives.
Nigerian Catholic Bishop Jude Ayodeji Arogundade of the Ondo Diocese also will
travel to Washington for the summit next week. In early June, at least 50
Catholic parishioners were killed in a mass shooting in Ondo by unknown gunmen,
marking another brutal chapter in the persecution of Christians in Nigeria.
Additionally, Moscow’s chief rabbi, Pinchas Goldschmidt, who left Russia earlier
this year after pressure to support its invasion of Ukraine, will be on hand to
speak about his experience and ongoing antisemitism in Europe.
While the summit will focus on religious persecution around the world,
condemnation of China’s record on human rights and religious freedom will be an
even greater focus of this year’s summit.
For the first time at such a prominent gathering of this kind, experts and
victims will lay out evidence that China for years has operated forced organ
harvesting of its political prisoners as a form of execution. Targeted groups
include Uyghurs and members of the Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline that
preaches the virtues of meditation and forbearance, banned by China in 1999.
Authors of a recent academic article claimed that the gruesome practice is
taking place on a much larger scale than Western leaders previously believed,
coming to light in part due to China’s partnership with the World Health
Organization.
An expert told a congressional panel in mid-May that there is widespread organ
harvesting within the Chinese government’s Xinjiang prison camps. Earlier this
month, the European Parliament passed a resolution condemning organ harvesting
in China and calling on the EU to act on the new findings.
“When I first heard about this [practice] 20 years ago, I thought it was
ghastly, but we just couldn’t really get a hold of the hard evidence,” said Sam
Brownback, former governor of Kansas, who also served as a senator and
ambassador for religious freedom in the Trump administration. “Now we’re
starting to get some people coming forward with family members that this
happened to, and then groups have examined the evidence to validate it, so we’ll
dig into that piece that the Chinese government is doing.”
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Katrina Lantos Swett, daughter of the late Rep. Tom Lantos, a human rights
champion and the only Holocaust survivor to have served in Congress, co-chairs
the International Religious Freedom Summit with Brownback. Swett tells
RealClearPolitics that the organ harvesting issue is personal for her, having
had two members of her extended family in the U.S. desperately waiting for
months for donor organs.
“You can get an organ dialed up to order within a couple of weeks in China, and
that’s impossible and unheard of anywhere else in the world that has a
legitimate organ donation system that is based on truly voluntary donations from
deceased individuals,” she said. “It’s a mind-bogglingly ghoulish crime that
brings to mind the abuses of Dr. Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi doctor that
conducted experiments on Jewish prisoners during the Holocaust.”
When it comes to Chinese persecution of Christians, religious freedom advocates
worldwide were alarmed by Beijing’s arrest in early May of Cardinal Joseph Zen,
a 90-year-old respected retired Catholic priest who helped organize
anti-government protesters. His arrest, along with those of several other
pastors and church administrators, is part of a larger crackdown on religious
minorities as Beijing tightens its grip over the once semi-autonomous city.
“This stately elderly man that you arrest, who has been a beacon of freedom his
entire life … I just don’t think there’s any boundary that the Communist Party
is unwilling to cross, and we will talk a lot about this at the summit,”
Brownback told RCP. “What China continues to stand for and execute on is the
most diabolical and horrific religious persecution we’re seeing worldwide.”
Because the world is starting to break into new Cold War alliances, Brownback
worries that other nations aligned against the U.S., Europe, and other
democracies will repeat the persecution of religious people they see in China.
“You’re starting to see some of that in Pakistan. You obviously see it in North
Korea, but you’re unfortunately going to see it in more places,” he predicted.
“Many governments don’t like religion because it’s the one institution with
enough loyalty and strength to stand up to government,” he continued. “And if
you’re a communist, you hate that because they’re an atheistic philosophy that
wants nothing more powerful than the state and nothing that can dethrone the
state.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s rise to power has shifted religious persecution
into a much more aggressive and higher gear, he added.
“After 70 years of power that the Chinese Communist Party has had, they think
they’re irreplaceable, and their dynasty is going to last forever, and they can
do anything they want,” Brownback said. “But they are not acting like an empire
that’s confident in their system – they’re acting like a bully, and that doesn’t
win you friends around the world, that doesn’t tell people you’ve got a good
system.”
But Brownback – who launched the first international religious ministerials with
Pompeo’s blessing during the Trump administration – and Katrina Lantos Swett
also see signs of progress as U.S. elected leaders recognize they need to build
up a self-sufficient supply chain for goods and services independent from China
and other repressive regimes.
“I think we’ve got a winning hand here – we’ve just got to keep building and
growing it out,” Brownback said. “The level and amount of religious persecution
and genocide are just so apparent right now – it’s getting hard to deny it.”
Swett concurred, arguing that governments that allow people to practice the
beliefs of their choice and develop pluralistic societies are ultimately
stronger. Religious freedom, she said, is not about pushing one’s own beliefs on
others but creating a civilized society in which people defend the rights of
everyone else to exist and practice their beliefs as they choose.
With the summit bringing so many people of diverse faiths to engage and
empathize with one another about the suffering their communities have endured,
Swett said the goal is not only to build “bridges of empathy, understanding and
support … It will also help communities recognize that their rights really do
depend on defending the rights of others – that you cannot operate effective
societies based on suppressing some and supporting others.
“I hope that we will effectively carry beyond the summit the message that
freedom of religion, conscience, and belief is something that is a fundamental
right and an enormous force for good economically, socially, culturally and
politically.”
Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics' White House/national
political correspondent.
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