Sorry, but how is this a genocide, and how so against women only? Don’t women have sons too? What’s happening here is hard-sold sterilisation: the women themselves are presumably not being killed. If it’s sterilisation of women of only a particular race or ethnic background then it’s genocide, but again, not of women only. I don’t doubt that this practice is stupid & wrong, but let’s not call it what it’s not.

Skiamakhos, the headline wasn’t my own, but I do say that it is a ‘campaign of preemptive genocide’.

It aims to destroy the means to conceive for a particular gender, the Genocide Convention defines one form of the act as “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group” .

I would certainly class it as genocide, not exclusively against women perhaps but against entire future generations that are now denied the right to ever exist.

@3

They certainly do.

‘The first stage of emancipation from poverty should always be the emancipation of women, specifically the emancipation from the cultural, often religious notion that women exist simply to be possessed and to spit out babies. The second stage is to increase female opportunities for education and careers, along with changing male attitudes towards the right for women to have such opportunities.”

i COMPLETELY agree. no one has the right to remove women’s autonomy over their bodies. and it has been shown again and again that poverty hits women harder, and that lifting women out of poverty benefits her children and community.

“against entire future generations that are now denied the right to ever exist”

Let’s not open that can of worms, eh?!

It is not “genocide”. Stop misusing that term.

But it is violent oppression.

Forced and coerced sterilisation is dreadful and ought to be opposed.

But some of Adam’s phrases seem nonsensical, distract from the topic, and his use of inappropriate words allows an easy defence or criticism (such as this criticism):

Modern day genocide against women … a campaign of pre-emptive genocide … destroy the means to conceive for a particular gender

@ukliberty as I’ve said the title isn’t my own but I’d defend everything contained in the article as appropriately worded. If you’d like to expand a little more on exactly what you find to be inappropriate or distracting then I’d happily address it but the definition of genocide is quite broad and as far as I can see this certainly falls under that heading.

Also.. I wouldn’t get too hung up on the precise definition of ‘genocide’. I think I use the word once in the whole article.

The mass sterilization of women in Uzbekistan, as reported this weekend by the Associated Press, is a shrieking reminder that the battle for the global liberation of women is being lost.

Really? It’s certainly evidence that the battle hasn’t been won, but is it the case that womens’ rights are generally in decline the world over?

Isn’t it funny how when it comes to crimes comitted against women, the comments become a debate over semantics, statistical flaws, accusations of the author “overstating the case” and thus ‘distracting from the topic’, and the usual troll saying something in favour of the crime.

Words are important, particularly the G-word – it’s what stopped any intervention in Rwanda as the UN refused to call the mass slaughter of Tutsis a genocide (at the time). But I agree with @13 there is an unnecessary focus on semantics and nit-picking here.

What can be done to put pressure on Uzbekhistan?

Aaagh. This is properly evil, and needs more attention. As a basically ignorant Brit, I thought the mad “statues of myself, boiling people in oil” head lunatic of Uzbekistan had been removed; does anyone have any good links (beyond the wiki) to the background to this?

But, all that down, “genocide of women” is a fucking stupid headline, because it’s the one bloody thing that sterilisation couldn’t even possibly achieve – I recognise that’s Sunny’s fault not Adam’s and hence Cabinet-ish-ly mine as editorial board type, but sheesh.

@Planeshift: no. If someone were to write an article about Islamophobia being on the rise in western Europe, and it were to be headlined as “The next Holocaust; Muslims leave Europe now or you’ll be murdered”, then that’d be an appalling show, despite the fact that the article was about a real, worrying thing.

As a basically ignorant Brit, I thought the mad “statues of myself, boiling people in oil” head lunatic of Uzbekistan had been removed;

Wasn’t that Turkmenistan? With Turkmenbashi “father of all Turkmen” having died this year. Uzbekistan is still Islam Karimov – the old Commie head of the USSR Republic.

Adam I apologise for misattributing the title to you. I have no criticism of the article in general but I think that using inappropriate words opens you up to various accusations and defences – as we have seen already. It seems important to be precise, particularly with such a serious topic.

‘Genocide’ seems inappropriate by definition. Here is the definition given by the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

I suppose we could loosely say the Uzbeks are committing genocide against themselves, but I don’t think you can commit genocide against a gender. It doesn’t make sense. Genocide is about trying to get rid of an identifiable ethnic or cultural group – it’s hard enough trying to attribute the crime even when it seems obvious it’s genocide without ‘stretching’ the definition.

And look at the root words: genus, race, tribe etc; cide, (to) kill. Sterilising != killing.

As for “destroy the means to conceive for a particular gender” – well, currently only one gender can conceive AFAIK, so I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here, and it seems unnecessary, even melodramatic.

You don’t need to say these things because the article and topic are strong and horrible enough on their own.

I must stop now because Planeshift thinks I don’t take women seriously…

Wasn’t that Turkmenistan? With Turkmenbashi “father of all Turkmen” having died this year. Uzbekistan is still Islam Karimov – the old Commie head of the USSR Republic.

Karimov & co. are accused of boiling people alive.

18 – oh quite, Karimov is all kinds of unpleasant. But he’s been there since 1991, so no change there.

And look at the root words: genus, race, tribe etc; cide, (to) kill. Sterilising != killing.

Strike that, I started rambling again.

Bring back the preview / edit facility!

18 – oh quite, Karimov is all kinds of unpleasant. But he’s been there since 1991, so no change there.

Sure. It seems like a case of, “he’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard.”

Sunny, please fix the headline, which is off-beam. This is an appalling policy, an outrage and something to vehemently oppose. It’s not genocide though, and discussions about that term deflect from the actual issues.

I agree that use of the word genocide is relativistic hyperbole in regards to eugenic sterilisation policies. There is no need to hype, the policy is bad enough.

But we should not forget that the policy is not alien to the West either.
Social democratic Sweden sterilised its last woman for the “undesirable” and “inferior” racial characteristic of poor eyesight in 1974.
The country’s State Institute for Racial Biology was opened in 1922, it was the world’s first and the model for the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute fur Rassenhygiene in Germany.
It was rebranded the Institute for Medical Genetics in 1958 and it still exists as a department of the University of Uppsala.
Between 1934 and 1974 it had 62,000 women sterilised at a rate of 2,000 a year from 1947 throughout the 50s.
The United States sterilised a similar number of women during the course of the 20th century.
The debate is back today.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/jun/12/barbara-harris-sterilise-drug-addicts-alcoholics
Very unlovely eugenicists, such as Marie Stopes in Britain, a passionate Hitler devotee, have achieved a kind of posthumous rehabilitation – especially via debate around “family planning”, “reproductive rights” and population control. So acceptable is she that a couple of years ago the Royal Mail celebrated her with a special stamp.
John Maynard Keynes was a director of the British Eugenics Society between 1937 and 1944. The society – Beveridge was another luminary – still exists as the Galton Institute.
The linkage between genetics and social problems or inequality has never gone away.

Sorry to err…sound like a dick but why are they doing this? Uzbekistan is quite rich comparatively (and corrupt as all hell so I wouldn’t have thought there was a particular reason for this).

Bruno – Not to mention the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Planned Parenthood, Theodore Roosevelt, Churchill, Bell, Chamberlain, Balfour, Russell, Ellis, Woolf, Shaw and others. Basically, with a few exceptions, if it moved, was intellectual and didn’t give thanks to Mary it supported eugenics. To what extent, however – how coercively – is a crucial point.

BenSix
for sure, it was the ruling class ideology of the day. It was more or less confined to the elites and did not get a strong purchase in working class movements. It lingered long, even after racial ideas were discredited by the Holocaust, and sterilisations continued under Swedish social democrats, for example, far too long.
Your last point is wrong: ideologies that dehumanise and objectify social relations will have an iron tendency to coercion whether or not they take an overtly coercive form. For example, vile but highly influential organisations like the Optimum Population Trust are avowedly non-coercive but should such anti-human and Malthusian ideas become state policy then coercion will just be a matter of time.

Eh?

“Human rights advocates and doctors say autocratic President Islam Karimov this year ramped up a sterilization campaign he initiated in the late 1990s. In a decree issued in February, the Health Ministry ordered all medical facilities to “strengthen control over the medical examination of women of childbearing age.”

The decree also said that “surgical contraception should be provided free of charge” to women who volunteer for the procedure.

It did not specifically mandate sterilizations, but critics allege that doctors have come under direct pressure from the government to perform them: “The order comes from the very top,” said Khaitboy Yakubov, head of the Najot human rights group in Uzbekistan. ”

So, central government decrees a silly target, those further down the bureaucratic chain attempt to meet the target by cutting corners and using whatever pressure they can to achieve said target.

“The sterilization campaign involves thousands of government-employed medical doctors and nurses who urge women of childbearing age, especially those with two or more children, to have hysterectomies or fallopian tube ligations, said Sukhrobjon Ismoilov of the Expert Working Group, an independent think tank based in the capital, Tashkent.

The surgeon in Rakhimbayeva’s case, a burly man in his 40s named Kakhramon Fuzailov, refused to comment on her claims and threatened to turn an AP reporter over to the police for “asking inappropriate questions.”

In 2007, the UN Committee Against Torture reported a “large number” of cases of forced sterilization and removal of reproductive organs in Uzbek women, often after cesarean sections. Some women were abandoned by their husbands as a result, it said. ”

No, I’m not in favour of people being either forced or even pressured into sterilisation either. But this is a problem with centrally set targets that underlings strive to achieve.

So unlike our own dear NHS under Gordo, eh?

Sure, he didn’t mandate an increase in sterilisation rates but he did that 4 hours in A*E which led to people either waiting in ambulances or being inappropriately whisked off to a ward to meet it.

It’s the central planning that’s the problem….

[28] comparing the enforced sterilisation of impoverished women in Uzbekistan with NHS targets (which although far from perfect have led to some benefits) is possibly the most idiotic comment I have heard in a very long time?

@libertyuk
Thanks for the feedback.

[i]As for “destroy the means to conceive for a particular gender” – well, currently only one gender can conceive.[/i]

This is pure semantics..Only one gender can conceive, but I’d say the ‘means to conceive’ comes from both genders. They’re not running round cutting off men’s bollocks are they? It would have the exact same effect, so why are women forced to bear the brunt of retrogressive male authored policy?

I would stand by the term ‘pre-emptive genocide’. (which was my one and only use of the word). but I’d set this aside from genocide itself, rather it’s an act which could be seen to pre-figure genocide.

These sterlizations don’t appear to always be taking the form of just mutilating women who go into surgery for other procedures. Businesses are reportedly being offered financial incentives to employ women that can prove that they are sterile.

The AP article says “Many other women, especially from poor rural areas, say they face coercion from health workers or even potential employers to agree to sterilization.”

The policy seems to be directed towards those who are less capable of sustaining big families and are more open to co-ercion due to their financial needs. i.e those living in poverty. There is the story of a young woman forced to choose between earning a living wage and her ability to conceive for example. She chooses the living wage. The policy certainly represses women, but it sends a message that the state does not want the next generation of poor Uzbeks to come into being at all. This is very close to genocide, if it does not suit the literal definition.

We can quibble all day over whether stopping poor people from having kids comprises ‘cultural genocide’, but really the article was very much about how the acts of the Uzbek state are to be viewed in the context of the global struggle for womens liberation, so I don’t want to get too far off the point.

NB: This mass sterlization is basically a way of killing potential people before their parents have decided on whether or not they are to be brought into existence. This is not comparable to a ‘pro-life’ argument (as was implied above by cjcjc) it is consistently pro-choice. The policy stops women from having any say as to her own uteral output. , just like pro-life legislation also transfers the power over the uterus from the woman to the state.

“The mass sterilization of women in Uzbekistan, as reported this weekend by the Associated Press, is a shrieking reminder that the battle for the global liberation of women is being lost.”
—————————————–
Tim J: “Really? It’s certainly evidence that the battle hasn’t been won, but is it the case that womens’ rights are generally in decline the world over?”

@TimJ
Yes, the battle is being lost. I can’t reliably say that the rights of women are in global decline, but they are certainly not dramatically increasing as needed to reach a full level of equality.

If anyone is interested in the deep history behind such terrible acts, there are many articles posted on this message forum which explain:

http://pub45.bravenet.com/forum/static/show.php?usernum=3788786429&frmid=8261

Sadly, this only scratches the surface of how much proof there is that the world is used like a big chess board by a specific group. The innocent public is even fooled into feeling emotionally moved by seemingly positive events, and cheering for our supposed heroes, while underneath lies a hidden and shameful truth, revealed in coded symbols which are consistent all through history.

This is not some wild conspiracy theory. This is what you’ll find if you read conventional history and literature with an eye to what is behind the surface, literal meaning. This is what they teach Rhodes scholars and anyone else who’s going to be pulling the strings on the world stage.

Good luck,
Susan Maureen Brandt

Planeshift said above: “Isn’t it funny how when it comes to crimes comitted against women, the comments become a debate over semantics, statistical flaws, accusations of the author “overstating the case” and thus ‘distracting from the topic’, and the usual troll saying something in favour of the crime.”

Just wanted to repeat that really.

“This is not some wild conspiracy theory. ”

If I could just congratulate Sunny here? He’s managed to attract a real, honest to goodness, loon.

It’s all about the Atlanteans apparently….

32 – actually, it’s the definition of a conspiracy theory. The question is, are you right?

I suspect the answer to that is a resounding “no”.

But yeah. This isn’t genocide, it’s not really even eugenics (not being directed in any attempt to alter the genetic makeup of the population). It’s just a desperate attempt to reduce the birth rate – which is horrendous enough by itself, and the kind of behaviour the extreme environmentalists would have the entire world do, and the far right would have the rest of the world do so we don’t have to.

As I understand it, the best way to reduce birth rate in any country is to work at getting the women of the country more equal rights – not stealing their wombs. Strong, independent women with careers make poor baby factories.

Semantic quibbles aside, an excellent, informative article – but what to do about it?

Lucy @33

That’s either a comment about how (some) people tend to react to posts about crimes commited against women, or a comment about the tendency for statistical accuracy, correct use of language and hyperbole in posts about crimes commited against women. Or maybe it says something about both.

I reckon there’s quite a lot of complaining about innaccuracy and hyperbole in the comments for many posts

“This effectively amounts to a campaign of pre-emptive genocide”

Whereas 190,000 abortions a year in the UK don’t ?

And as for eugenics – children are routinely killed in the womb for potential birth defects. What do you call that ?

@Laban

I would not compare sterilization to abortion.

Forcibly sterilizing a woman takes away the freedom she has over her own body. If you ban abortion you do exactly the same thing.

Modern day genocide against women

Excellent headline, Sunny, but I don’t think it really does the business.

Can I suggest Paedophile Cameron Sodomised My Ferret

That’ll get the stats up.

39 – I’ve got no problem with what I guess you could call elective eugenics. The poster-children of how to do it right are Crohn’s disease (and a similar kind of scheme, UK-wide, for cystic fibrosis might not be a terrible idea, if I dare say so) and the current genetic counsellor’s position on Down’s syndrome.

In both those poster-children, the people whose bodies it is are given the information and knowledge for them to make an informed choice about what they want their children to be born like. Then they make that choice. If they’re anti-abortionist or don’t care if they end up with a child with a genetically-determined illness – fair play, they’re left alone to get on with it. No community censure, no tax hits, no sekrit hysterectomy.

In 42 postings there has been the usual trolling, whittering semantics, smugness from Tim Worstall, tritely rehashed political posturing and not much else.

I’ll go somewhere else to find out about Uzbekisatan, there are too many trivial-minded self-regarding correspondents on this blog.

“In 42 postings there has been the usual trolling, whittering semantics, smugness from Tim Worstall, tritely rehashed political posturing and not much else.”

Excellent isn’t it? It appears that I am indeed well adjusted to my role in this universe.

late to the discussion but, as provided by ukliberty, one of the definitions of genocide is:

‘Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group’

I would say forced sterilisation is
a) causing serious bodily harm (removing the ability to reproduce)
b) causing serious mental harm (removing the woman’s autonomy over her body)

‘of the group’

women are a group. it isn’t necessarily an ethnic group, but we are a group.

it’s not for nothing that amnesty international called violence against women ‘the greatest human rights violation of our time’.

Thank you for this excellent article and your impressively patient posts, Adam Grace.

This is an outrage. Women being forced to choose between their fertility and making a living is utterly barbaric. As Adam says, it’s extremely telling that men are not being sterilised – not that this would be acceptable, but it really underlines the misogynist mindset behind this policy. Women’s lives and well-being are always fucking expendable, and in that sense, yes, this is a retrograde step for us and it is not an isolated incident. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to say that women’s rights are going backwards.

From the tragic and genocidal (female foeticide in India) to the tragic and heartbreaking (attacks on working women and schoolgirls in Afghanistan) to the relatively trivial but very telling (Gazan women being very recently banned by Hamas from smoking water pipes in beach cafes), there is ample evidence that women’s rights are being eroded in ways that did not happen a few decades ago. Look at pictures of daily life in Palestine in the forties and fifties – the women are bare-headed, in knee-length skirts. Now they are shrouded under hijabs.

It’s such a shame that we have to wade through the kind of crap planestupid was talking about before we can ever get to discussing reasons or solutions for this.

Oh! And as if to prove my point, I head over to PZ Myers’ brilliant Pharyngula blog and the very first post I see is about the NEW practice of *ironing* young girls’ breasts – when I say young, I means girls as young as nine – to stop their pert breasts “enticing men” who will get them pregnant.

Yet another example of women suffering serious injuries (burns and abscesses, in this case) – as a result of male behaviour. Yet another retrograde step for women.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/07/what_fresh_torment_can_we_perp.php