Catholic Church in Thailand converts facilities into field hospitals for COVID-19 patients

CNA Staff, Feb 10, 2021 / 03:39 pm (CNA).- Pope Francis has voiced his prayers for the victims of a glacier-caused flash flood in India’s northern Uttarakhand state, as rescuers seek to save workers trapped in underground tunnels.“I express my closenes… […]

Denver, Colo., Mar 1, 2018 / 04:22 pm (CNA).- As North Korea continues to develop its nuclear arsenal, should the United States contemplate a pre-emptive strike?

John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, says the answer is yes. In a Wall Street Journal commentary this week, Bolton argued that because North Korea is working to finalize its ability to strike the U.S. mainland with nuclear warheads, the time to attack the rogue nation is now.
 
North Korea poses an imminent threat, he said, and it is necessary for the United States to “eliminate that threat.”
 
Bolton took up a theory of pre-emptive defense developed by nineteenth-century Secretary of State Daniel Webster. The theory is that pre-emptive strikes are justified when a threat, in the words of Webster, is “instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.”

Bolton argued that in a nuclear age, a volatile enemy’s possession of destructive weapons that can travel great distances in short periods of time requires a new way of thinking about pre-emptive strikes.

“Necessity in the nuclear and ballistic-missile age is simply different than in the age of steam,” he wrote.
 
Bolton is right to argue that nuclear weapons are a significant factor in evaluating military action, but wrong in his conclusion. The threat of nuclear weapons should cause us to act with more caution, not less.
 
The Church has long urged caution when it comes to weapons development. The Second Vatican Council wrote in Gaudium et Spes, “Indeed, if the kind of instruments which can now be found in the armories of the great nations were to be employed to their fullest, an almost total and altogether reciprocal slaughter of each side by the other would follow.”
 
Those words were written in 1965. Today, more than 50 years later, the truth they contain is even more apparent.
 
Rather than striking pre-emptively, Church teaching talks about legitimate military action in self-defense, and only when certain conditions are met. These conditions are outlined in the Catechism: “the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain; all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective; there must be serious prospects of success; the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.”
 
Bolton does not discuss what he means by a pre-emptive strike. But a look at the possibilities suggests that none of them meet the conditions laid out by the Church.
 
U.S. intelligence about North Korea is far from complete. Experts believe the regime has hidden key facilities of which we are not currently aware. As a result, any attempt to completely wipe out Pyongyang’s nuclear capabilities lacks the “serious prospects of success” necessary to meet the Church’s just war criteria.
 
A failed attempt at wiping out North Korea’s nuclear capabilities – or any attempt to carry out a more limited attack on the key known facilities – would result in serious retaliation and likely mass casualties.
 
Bolton is right to be concerned about what comes next with North Korea.

There aren’t easy answers on the Korean Peninsula. There will likely be no democracy uprising in Pyongyang. Dialogue with the country seems to be a fool’s errand, with limited prospects for success.  Preemptively striking an unstable and unpredictable North Korea seems no more likely to succeed.

But more talk costs very little. War with a nuclear power we know very little about might cost a great deal more.

It feels unsatisfying to call for more talk, when talk, thus far, has accomplished nothing. Perhaps a pre-emptive strike might feel more satisfying. But the morality of such a decision should matter more than the temporary satisfaction of having done something.

We need more creativity, more patience, and more prayer for wisdom in North Korea before anyone concludes that war is the necessary path to lasting peace.

Michelle La Rosa is managing editor of Catholic News Agency.

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CNA Staff, Sep 22, 2020 / 12:25 pm (CNA).- The government of China’s Xinjiang autonomous region has acknowledged that birth rates there fell by nearly a third in 2018, much of which it attributed to “better implementation of family planning policy”.

They denied that involuntary contraception or sterilization had taken place.

In 2017 the birth rate in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region was 15.88 per 1,000 people; the next year, it was 10.69 per 1,000.

“In 2018, the number of newborns decreased by approximately 120,000 compared with 2017, of which about 80,000 were because of better implementation of family planning policy in accordance with law, according to estimates by the health and statistics department,” the region’s government said in a Sept. 1 fax to CNN, adding that families were complying voluntarily with the policy.

The television channel said the government attributed the other 40,000 fewer births to increased education and economic development.

In June an AP investigation found a systematic campaign by the Chinese Communist Party of pregnancy checks and forced abortions, sterilizations, and implantations of IUDs on Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang.

“The rights and interests of Uyghur and other ethnic minorities have been fully protected,” Xinjiang’s government told CNN. “The so-called ‘genocide’ is pure nonsense.”

In Xinjiang an estimated 1 million Uyghurs, members of a Muslim ethnoreligious group, have been detained in re-education camps. Inside the camps they are reportedly subjected to forced labor, torture, and political indoctrination. Outside the camps, Uyghurs are monitored by pervasive police forces and facial recognition technology.

A leaked document from a county in Xinjiang details the personal information of some 3,000 Uyghurs. It gives violation of birth control policies as the most common reason for their “re-education”, often alongside other reasons.

The document if believed to have been prepared in May or June 2019. The Karakax List contains information regarding some 3,000 Uyghurs in Karakax County, about 800 miles southwest of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang.

It shows that 484 persons were interned for re-education, only 12 of whom had no recorded reason for their detention. There were eight categories of the reasons for internment.

“No single coding category was dominant, even though violations of birth control policies constituted the most commonly cited reason for re-education, often along with other (typically religion-related) reasons,” Adrian Zenz, a Xinjiang researcher and senior fellow in China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, wrote in a recent paper analyzing the document.

Of the 484 detained persons, 149 had violated birth control policies.

From the late 1970s until 2015, China allowed most couples to have only one child. Since 2015, most couples have been permitted two children.

The Washington Post reported in October 2019 that women in Kazakhstan who say they had been detained in Xinjiang said they were forced to have abortions, had contraceptive devices implanted involuntarily, or were raped.

Other commonly cited reasons for internment in the document were that the persons were untrustworthy (116 persons), religion-related (101), and that they had overseas links (94).

Only 24 had committed a formal crime.

Zenz has also said that sterilizations in Xinjiang rose from fewer than 50 per 100,000 people in 2016, to nearly 250 per 100,000 in 2018.

And in 2018, IUDs were implanted at a rate of nearly 1,000 per 100,000 people in Xinjiang, while the rate for China in the same year was 21 per 100,000.

The birth rate in Xinjiang plunged by 24% in 2019, the AP said, and in certain parts of the region birth rates had fallen by more than 60% from 2015 to 2018.

The region’s government told CNN: “As a part of China, Xinjiang implements family planning policies in accordance with national laws and regulations, and has never formulated and implemented family planning policies for a single ethnic minority.”

Uyghurs make up about 46% of Xinjiang’s population; Han Chinese 39%, Kazakhs 7%, and Huis 5%. A large number of minorities make up the remaining 3%.

The Chinese government has defended its policy of mass detention and re-education as an appropriate measure against terrorism.

The government at one time denied the camps even existed, but has since shifted to defending its actions as a reasonable response to a national security threat.

Government officials from the region said in July 2019 that the area’s re-education camps for Muslims have been successful, with most of those held having been reintegrated into Chinese society.

Uyghurs can be arrested and detained under vague anti-terrorism laws. Violence in the region escalated in the 1990s and again in 2008.

In July the Trump administration put  travel and asset sanctions on several senior officials of the Chinese Communist Party in Xinjiang for their role in the mass internment of Uyghurs.

“The United States will not stand idly by as the CCP carries out human rights abuses targeting Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and members of other minority groups in Xinjiang, to include forced labor, arbitrary mass detention, and forced population control, snd attempts to erase their culture and Muslim faith,” US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced July 9.

The US Commerce Department in October 2019 added 28 Chinese organizations to a blacklist barring them from buying products from US companies, saying they cooperate in the detention and repression of the Uyghurs.

[…]