A British Command Center Set Up to Mobilize Europe Against China

An apparatus built up by the British and the Americans since the beginning of 2020 around the phony issue of Beijing’s alleged violations of the rights of the Uighur minority in Xinjiang has been pushing hard to get the Europeans to join their anti- China policy. These are the forces and organizations that are responsible for sabotaging the Comprehensive Agreement on Investments (CAI) negotiated last December between China
and the European Union, whose ratification was suspended on May 20 by the European Parliament. That decision was taken after China had issued counter-sanctions against the EU for the sanctions Brussels adopted on March 22 against China, over the Uighur issue.

China’s counter-sanctions specifically target five members of the European Parliament as well as other national parliamentarians and organizations that are associated with the above-mentioned apparatus. The majority are based in Great Britain.

On the top of the list of organizations is the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), which is co-chaired by Sir Duncan Smith, the former chairman of Britain’s Conservative Party who was also personally sanctioned. Among the British MPs of the IPAC on the list are Tim Loughton and Nusrat Ghani of the Conservative Party, Labour Party peer Baroness Helena Kennedy and crossbench peer Lord David Alton.

In the European Parliament, IPAC members sanctioned include two Germans, Reinhard Butikofer of the Greens (also IPAC co chair) and Michael Gahler of the European People’s Party and Miriam Lexmann, an EPP parliamentarian from Slovakia.

The other organization created in London and sanctioned by China was the Uighur Tribunal and its chairman, the solicitor Sir Geoffrey Nice. It was launched on Sept. 3, 2020, with assistance from the Coalition for Genocide Response, of which Nice, Baroness Kennedy and Lord Alton are also patrons. The Germany academic “Uighur expert” Adrian Zenz, who was also hit by sanctions, is an advisor to the Tribunal.

The Tribunal was initiated at the request of Dolkun Isa, President of the World Uighur Congress, the international umbrella organization for Uighur exiles with headquarters in London and Munich Germany, where Isa has been given asylum. For the years 2016-19, the Congress received at least $1,323,698 from the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Other overlapping Uighur organizations have received similar grants from the NED.

The think-tank put under sanctions was the anglophile Berlin-based Mercator Institute for China Studies in Germany, the largest European institute dedicated to China studies. On its advisory board is Caio Koch-Weser, Chairman of the Board of the European Climate Foundation and senior advisor to Chatham House and James Kynge, the China Editor at the Financial Times. The Institute has a join project with London’s Chatham House called the China Security Project

Print Friendly, PDF & Email