UNITED STATE'S new National Security advisor, Robert O'Brien expressed his regret about the world's silence on the Uighur mistreatment and believed it has a lot to do with China's influence on the international community.
“Where is the world? We have over a million people in concentration camps. I’ve been to the genocide museum in Rwanda. You hear, ‘never again, never again is this going to happen,’ and yet there are re-education camps with over a million people in them,” said O'Brien as reported by the Star and Stripes portal.
O’Brien said the lack of criticism over the Muslims in re-education camps is especially surprising from Islamic nations and linked the lack of a global outcry to China’s economic clout.
He also questioned whether leaders will protest if Beijing carries out a Tiananmen Square-style crackdown on the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.
O’Brien met with journalists and was interviewed by a moderator at the Halifax International Security Forum.
China has reportedly detained the minority Muslims Uighurs in prison-like detention centres who were also slapped with harsh travel restrictions and a massive state surveillance network equipped with facial recognition technology.
However, China denied committing abuses in the centres and described them as 'schools' aimed at providing employable skills and combating extremism.
Dolkun Isa, President of the World Uyghur Congress, said Trump himself has not addressed the camps issue publicly. Isa's mother recently died in one of the camps.
O’Brien argued that the administration has spoken out about it with Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo among the Trump officials who have raised China’s mistreatment of the Muslim Uighur minority, including citing it as a violation of religious freedom in a speech last month.
About Hong Kong, O’Brien declined to say what the US would do if there were a crackdown in Hong Kong that rivals the Tiananmen Square in 1989, where more than 100,000 Americans and more than 300,000 Canadians living there.
“I don’t want to get into tools or what the US might or might not do. But much of the world and many or our allies, and many of the countries represented at this conference, have been willing to forget Tiananmen Square and are heavily engaged in business with China.”
With the US and China engaged in a trade war, O’Brien also hoped that US allies would think deeply before allowing Chinese technology giant Huawei into their next generation of telecommunication networks, citing surveillance concerns.
“What the Chinese are doing makes Facebook and Google look like child’s play as far as collecting information on folks. Once they know the full profile of every man, woman and child in your country, how are they going to use that?” he asked.