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French parliament issued a resolution last Thursday denouncing the Chinese “genocide” against its Uyghur population, calling Beijing’s actions “crimes against humanity.”
The move comes before the Beijing Olympics, which many see as a platform for the Chinese government to gloss over allegations of widespread human rights abuses. Olivier Faure, the head of France’s Socialist party, called China a great power and expressed his love for “the Chinese people.”
“But we refuse to submit to propaganda from a regime that is banking on our cowardice and our avarice to perpetrate a genocide in plain sight,” he said.
Double Speak
Ignoring France’s long colonial murderous recent history, on 12 November 2019, we published a story titled, “MALI: FRANCE WANTS ITS COLONY BACK,” that accuses Paris of continuing its colonial strategy by forcibly stealing uranium from Mali and Niger.
These two countries have one of the world’s largest sources of uranium and oil underneath the deserts near their borders. They’ve muscled their way into these countries under the guise of anti-terror operations. (See: “CHAD: MORE AFRICAN WAR DRUMS BEATING,” “LIBYA: NATO POWERS GET OUT THEIR CARVING KNIVES,” and “FRANCE EARMARKS BILLIONS FOR NUCLEAR AND ‘GREEN’ ENERGY; INVESTORS BULLISH ON URANIUM.”
The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights is expected to release new information about the situation in the Xinjiang region in China, the Associated Press reported. The body said it did not have full access to the region, but “identified patterns of arbitrary detention, coercive labor practices and an erosion of social and cultural rights.”
The scars of French colonization run deep in Africa. Last October, French President Emmanuel Macron drew criticism in an interview when he argued that Algeria was a French creation and a “phenomenon worth watching.”
“Was there an Algerian nation before French colonization? That is the question,” he told Le Monde. The comment sparked fury in Algeria and President Abdelmadjid Tebboune withdrew his Algerian envoy to France, who returned on 6 January.
Mdou Moctar, a songwriter from Niger, penned a recent op-ed in The New York Times where he argued that France may be no longer control the country, but its presence is obvious.
“In Niger, we speak French, spend French money, work for French companies and toil in the mines, supplying our nation’s precious materials to France. In some ways, we are a country in name only,” he wrote.
Ramtane Lamamra, Algeria’s foreign minister, said France has to begin to acknowledge its past and “decolonize their own history.”
“They need to free themselves of certain attitudes, certain behaviors, certain visions which are intrinsically linked to the incoherent logic driven by the west’s claimed mission to bring civilization,” he said, according to RFI.