The Bogus “Uyghur Tribunal”: Washington’s Buildup to call for a global boycott of the Beijing Olympics?

This 41 years ago: Coloradans in Denver pposing the U.S. led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Demonstrating with this group, members of the U.S. Olympic Volleyball team at the time who had trained in Colorado Springs. Might need to get out our marching shoes again against what is shaping up to U.S. calls to boycott the 2022 Beijing Olympics, using the bogus “Uyghur Tribunal” as its pretext. (Rob Prince photo – 1980)

During the height of the U.S. conducted Vietnam War, in 1966, an international informal tribunal – the Russell Tribunal – headed up by British philosopher, Bertrand Russell was set up and functioned in Stockholm. Among those leading figures who participated in its deliberations were French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre, along with Lelio Basso, Simone de Beauvoir, Vladimir Dedijer, Ralph Schoenman, Isaac Deutscher and several others. It’s revelations concerning U.S. war crimes in Vietnam – the use of chemical weapons (napalm, phospherous, Agent Orange) plus revelations of U.S. sponsored torture (Tiger cages, other obscene practices) came to light, damaging the U.S. image as some kind of benign exporter of “democracy” in the world, some say forever. All that is documented in Russell’s little volume, War Crimes in Vietnam, a volume which had considerable worldwide impact but which was largely ignored – for obvious reasons – in the USA.

The Swedish Prime Minister who supported holding these hearings in Sweden, Olaf Palme, was soon after assassinated twenty years later, in 1986, (a few weeks before out family arrived in nearby Helsinki for a five year stay). The assassins were never found – of course – although there was speculation that the Palme murder was revenge for the Vietnam hearings in specific and for Sweden’s then more independent foreign policy, independent from both Washington and Moscow at the time.  It certainly discouraged other western nations from holding hearings on U.S. war crimes afterwards.

It’s reputation might have been damaged, but it’s not true that Washington has not appreciated the power of such hearing and of using such a mechanism to turn public opinion against its adversaries.

So we shouldn’t be surprised, that now, a year before the 2022 Peking Olympics – that “an independent” tribunal – but with ample funding from Washington – should be set up, “the Ugyhur Tribunal.” Washington denies that the said tribunal is government funded, but as this article below details, these denials do not hold much water. Washington’s finger prints and government financing are all over it. Besides being used as a pretext to boycott the Peking Olympics, as Brian Berletic notes (see link below) it “may serve to help pressure nations around the globe to roll back ties with China and aid the US in imposing additional sanctions and boycotts.”

Nor should we be surprised that the Tribunal’s final “ruling” will be read in December 2021,a few months prior to the start of February, 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. Besides destabilizing the Olympics, the Biden Administration would like to limit the global exposure to the progress China has made in the past decade, having taken an independent development path unsettling to Washinton precisely because it has been so successful.

As the photo above indicates, there was a similar campaign back in 1980 for the United States to boycott the Moscow Olympics (as a result of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan). That one was largely successful but U.S. global prestige was more pronounced at the time. I am willing to bet that Washington’s current attempt to wreck the Beijing Olympics will be an all-round failure, a complete dud with only a few countries worried about the U.S. withdrawing funding getting onboard the boycott train, you know, the same ones who vote against Cuba and Palestine in the United Nations General Assembly.

Washington’s campaign against Chinese treatment of its largely Muslim Uyghur minority in strategically important Xinjiang Province of Western China is a part and parcel of the U.S. destablization campaign against China that has intensified over the past five years or so. An integral element of this campaign has been the U.S. support, financing – and more than likely creation of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM). Guerilla elements of this movement fought along side ISIS, al Nusra jihadist elements in Syria, several thousand of them actually. In the past few years, many of these fighters have been transferred from Syria’s Idlib Province where they have been holed up in a losing effort, to Afghanistan from whence they are launching raids into China. The exposure of the C.I.A. base/prison complex run by the C.I.A. exposed by the Taliban  in recent weeks turned out to be something of a “terrorist central”communications grand central station for distributing these terrorist operatives into different Central Asian countries and Western China. The American inelegant military withdrawal from Afghanistan has struck a blow to the ETIM’s jihadist infiltration activities into China.

There is little doubt that preventing the growing influence of the ETIM attacks on China from Afghanistan is one of Peking’s most fundamental tasks in strenghtening its ties with the Taliban.

Having lost a valuable listening station and conduit for Islamic jihadists that it runs either directly or through mercenary proxies, Washington has responded with an increased propaganda campaign against China, both to complicate its plans to extend the Belt and Road Initiative and to more generally, to engage in a more intensified version of the overall hybrid warfare that Washington is conducting against China – so far unsuccessfully. The “Uyghur Tribunal”giving public, media attention to what is little more than a band of rightwing religious fanatics whose funding – directly or indirectly – comes from Washington.

One of the main organizations behind the “Tribunal” is the World Uyghur Congress, As an excellent investigative report done by the Gray Zone notes:

While posing as a grassroots human rights organization, the World Uyghur Congress is a US-funded and directed sparatist network that has forged alliances with far-right ethno-nationalist groups. The goal spelled out by its founders is clear: the destablization of China and regime change in Beijing

The work that used to be done by the Central Intelligence Agency to set up bogus fronts, organizations has been “farmed out” to a considerable extent to supposed non-governmental organizations (but which receive large doses of government funding, notorious among them, the National Endowment for Democracy. Such foundations give Washington a layer of “plausible deniability”. It is worth quoting Berletic at length concering the National Endowment for Democracy’s  financial hand behind the Tribunal:

This includes the president of WUC himself, Dolkun Isa, who provided a statement on June 4, 2021. Other members of US NED-funded organizations participating in the so-called tribunal included Muetter Illiqud of the NED-funded Uyghur Transitional Justice Database (UTJD), Rushan Abbas and Julie Millsap of the NED-funded Campaign for Uyghurs, Bahram Sintash and Elise Anderson of the NED-funded Uyghur Human Rights Project and Laura Harth of Safeguard Defenders, formerly known as the NED-funded China Action organization.

WUC is listed by name along with the UHRP, Campaign for Uyghurs, and the Uyghur Refugee Relief Fund on the official US NED website under “Xinjiang/East Turkestan 2020.” On another NED page titled, “Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act Builds on Work of NED Grantees,” the Uyghur Transitional Justice Database Project is also listed as receiving money from the US funding arm.

Also participating in the supposed tribunal was Adrian Zenz of the US government-funded Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC), Shohret Hosur who works for the US State Department’s Radio Free Asia, Mihrigul Tursun who was awarded the NED-affiliated “Citizen Power Award in 2018, Sayragul Sauytbay who received the 2020 US State Department’s Women of Courage Award, and IPVM which is a video surveillance information service previously commissioned by the US government in regards to Chinese government surveillance programs in Xinjiang.

There was also Sean Robert who was a senior advisor to the USAID mission to Central Asia from 1998-2006  – the very region and time period Uyghur separatism was being organized from beyond China’s borders. Robert has been active in promoting US-funded propaganda regarding Xinjiang for years alongside other mainstays like Rushan Abbas and Louisa Greve.

Nearly every other “witness” brought before the so-called tribunal has a long-established history of participating in the US government-funded propaganda campaign aimed at China and its alleged abuses in Xinjiang. This includes Omir Bekali who was previously invited to testify in front of the US Congress in 2018, Asiye Abdulahed who claims to be the alleged source of the so-called “China Files,” Zumret Dawut whose allegations were used by former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in attacks aimed at China, and Tursunay Ziyawudun who spoke in front of Congress in 2021.

There were also Westerners representing corporate-funded think tanks long engaged in a propaganda war with China including Nathan Ruser of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), Darren Byler and Jessica Batke of “ChileFile” – a subsidiary of Asia Society funded by the Australian and Japanese governments as well as Open Society, and Charles Parton of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) funded by the US State Department, the EU, Canada, Qatar, the UK, Japan, Australia, as well as arms manufacturers like BAE, Airbus, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics.

Only a handful of participants appeared to be relatively new faces, perhaps drawn from lesser corners of the global Uyghur diaspora being cultivated by the US as a political weapon.

This leaves very little doubt that the Uyghur Tribunal is yet another Washington-based anti-Chinese propaganda effort, an absolutely classic aspect of Washington’s hybrid war policy against China. part and parcel of the new Cold War the United States has unleashed against China. Meanwhile the claims of Chinese policies of “genocide” against the Uyghurs gets thinner and thinner as the propaganda claims get louder and louder.

This is no Russell Tribunal-like effort in the making… just another orchestrated lie in Washington’s effort cling to its fading glory, and to throw a monkey wrench or two into China’s rise as a global power.

Uyghur Tribunal: U.S. Lawfare at its lowest by Brian Berletic

China – Xinjiang Province, home of the Uyghurs