Foreign Policy cont'd
To see firsthand the reality of what people around the world face every day of their lives is life changing. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), “Some 2.2 billion people around the world do not have safely managed drinking water services, 4.2 billion people do not have safely managed sanitation services, and 3 billion lack basic handwashing facilities…Globally, at least 2 billion people use a drinking water source contaminated with feces.”
The U.S. State Department reports that in Saudi Arabia,
Significant human rights issues include: unlawful killings; executions for nonviolent offenses; forced disappearances; torture and cases of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment of prisoners and detainees by government agents; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention; political prisoners or detainees; serious restrictions on free expression, the press, and the internet, including threats of violence or unjustified arrests or prosecutions against journalists, censorship, site blocking, and engaging in harassment and intimidation against Saudi dissidents living abroad; substantial interference with the freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association; severe restrictions of religious freedom; restrictions on freedom of movement; inability of citizens to choose their government peacefully through free and fair elections; violence and discrimination against women, although new women’s rights initiatives were implemented; trafficking in persons; and criminalization of consensual same-sex sexual activity.
The Kingdom has also been incessantly bombing the Houthi rebels in Yemen, which has quickly turned into the largest humanitarian crisis in the entire world. Human Rights Watch reports that “roughly 80 percent of Yemen’s population requires humanitarian aid, including over 12 million children.”
The United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) reports that the number of Yemeni children under the age of 5 who suffer from acute malnutrition could rise to 2.4 million. UNICEF also reveals that 7.8 million of the children have no access to education following Covid-19-related school closures and nearly 10 million do not have adequate access to water and sanitation. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) reports that 50 percent of the children in Yemen are experiencing irreversible stunted growth.
What has happened in Myanmar (Burma) is an absolute abomination. Thousands of Rohingya Muslims have been subjected to a ruthless campaign of murder, arson, human burnings and beatings, gang rape and other mass brutalities — essentially amounting to ethnic cleansing by genocide.
This vicious conflict has forced over 700,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee Myanmar into Bangladesh, causing a massive humanitarian crisis as hundreds of thousands of people, at least half of them children, now live in ill-equipped and tattered refugee camps along the border.
China is just one big human rights catastrophe. The U.S. State Department reports that in China,
Significant human rights issues include: arbitrary or unlawful killings by the government; forced disappearances by the government; torture by the government; harsh and life-threatening prison and detention conditions; arbitrary detention by the government, including the mass detention of more than one million Uyghurs and other members of predominantly Muslim minority groups in extrajudicial internment camps and an additional two million are subjected to ‘re-education’ training; political prisoners; politically motivated reprisal against individuals outside the country; the lack of an independent judiciary and Communist Party control over the judicial and legal system; arbitrary interference with privacy; pervasive and intrusive technical surveillance and monitoring; serious restrictions on free expression, the press, and the internet, including physical attacks on and criminal prosecution of journalists, lawyers, writers, bloggers, dissidents, petitioners, and others as well as their family members, and censorship and site blocking; interference with the rights of peaceful assembly and freedom of association, including overly restrictive laws that apply to foreign and domestic nongovernmental organizations; severe restrictions and suppression of religious freedom; substantial restrictions on freedom of movement; refoulement of asylum seekers to North Korea, where they have a well-founded fear of persecution; the inability of citizens to choose their government; restrictions on political participation; serious acts of corruption; forced sterilization and coerced abortions; forced labor and trafficking in persons; severe restrictions on labor rights, including a ban on workers organizing or joining unions of their own choosing; and child labor.
Then there is this. On November 9th and 10th, 1938 — known as the Kristallnacht (a.k.a. Night of Broken Glass, November Pogrom) — Nazi forces damaged and/or destroyed multiple Jewish hospitals and schools, 267 synagogues, and over 7,000 Jewish businesses. Approximately 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and confined to concentration camps. These horrific acts were the beginning of the nightmare that was the Holocaust.
Today — right this second — another Kristallnacht is underway, and it has been going on for not days, but years. In Xinjiang, an ethnic minority region of China, thousands of Muslim religious sites have been destroyed, over one million Muslim ethnic minorities — including the Uyghurs and Kazakhs, both Turkish ethnic groups — have been detained in camps, and around 500,000 children have been separated from their families.
In Tibet, China has built military style “training centers,” mandating hundreds of thousands of people be trained for what will ultimately be forced labor. These camps also engage in forced assimilation and ideological indoctrination.