The Vatican's Ally and Partner: the CCP
On the feast day of St. Josephine Bakhita, patron saint of victims of human trafficking, watch Bergoglio pray for “every enslaved person to return to being a free agent of his or her own life.”
Unfortunately, the Francis Vatican’s close global partner and collaborator, the CCP, finds itself on this momentous day at the lowest tier 3 on the U.S. State Department’s 2020 Trafficking in Persons Report. Certainly, Francis is not canceling his Vatican-China accord because his partner is one of the worst trafficking violators in the world. So much for Francis wrapping himself in the cause of human trafficking.
The papal silence is quite deafening over the detention, torture, and servitude for the Chinese Uighurs at the orders of President Xi Jinping and his henchmen. Here’s one of many descriptions in the State Department Report of the mind blowing human rights violations against the Uighurs in Xinjiang Province.
The government decreased efforts to prevent trafficking, including by expanding the implementation of discriminatory policies designed to subjugate and exploit minority populations in forced labor. State-sponsored forced labor continued under the government’s mass detention and political indoctrination campaign against more than one million Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, ethnic Kyrgyz, and members of other Muslim minority groups in Xinjiang. The government expanded this campaign through the transfer of more than 80,000 detainees into forced labor in as many as 19 other provinces during the reporting period, according to NGO estimates and media reports. Authorities continued to carry out discriminatory surveillance and ethno-racial profiling measures to illegally detain members of these communities in internment camps under the pretext of combating violent extremism. Many detained individuals approved to “graduate” from these facilities were sent to external manufacturing sites in close proximity to the camps or in other provinces and subjected to forced labor, while others were transferred and potentially subjected to forced labor within a separate formal prison system.
According to official PRC government documents, local governments at times arrested Muslims arbitrarily or based on spurious criminal charges and administrative violations, including violation of birth restrictions, in order to meet detention quotas established specifically for this internment system. Reports indicate authorities partially staffed internment camp facilities using forced labor, including among Mandarin language instructors. Authorities also used the threat of internment to coerce members of some Muslim communities directly into forced labor in manufacturing. The MFA confiscated, canceled, or refused to renew the passports of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims living abroad, including those with legal permanent resident status or citizenship in other countries, as a coercive measure to lure them back to Xinjiang and likely detain them within the camps. There were also reports that authorities threatened these individuals’ families in Xinjiang to force their return. The government also transferred thousands of these detainees, along with non-interned minority communities designated arbitrarily as “rural surplus labor,” to other areas within Xinjiang as part of a poverty alleviation program and exploited them in forced labor. Local governments and businesses received tax breaks and financial subsidies for establishing new manufacturing sites and accepting or transferring detainees for these purposes, and officials reportedly received promotions and other benefits for their role in the process.