September 27, 2002
Volume 4/ Number 24
Dear Colleague:
One lie has led to another for UNFPA, as it is desperately trying to hide its complicity with forced abortion behind feigned ignorance. We report this week on recent admissions made by UNFPA officials in Beijing that it does not monitor the counties in China where it is active. UNFPA is supposed to be a watchdog, but it has become a lap dog of the officials who implement China’s one-child policy of forced abortion. Chinese officials seek to protect UNFPA so they can hide forced abortion behind a false front of voluntarism.
Steven W. Mosher
President
UNFPA Admits it Has No Way to Monitor China’s Forced Abortion Population Program
WASHINGTON, D.C. (24 Sept. 2002) — The UNFPA has admitted that it does not monitor the 32 counties in China where it operates, and therefore has no way of knowing if coercive abortion is as rampant in its 32 county programs as victims and human rights groups claim.
“We do not monitor every county. We don’t,” Siri Tellier, the head of UNFPA’s China program, said in a recent interview with Knight Ridder. Knight Ridder also reported that UNFPA “has no way to determine whether local officials have abandoned coercive practices.” (See: “Small advocacy group influences American policy,” Knight Ridder, Washington Bureau, Sept. 18, 2002.)
Yet four years ago, when the 32 “model county” program was set up, UNFPA and the Chinese Government assured the U.S. Congress that there would be no coercion; or, in their exact words, they would “not engage in any form of coercion.” UNFPA has in the past also claimed that its China program is one of the most monitored programs in the world.
Also reported by Knight Ridder, Chen Sha, the UNFPA Administrator of Sihui, Guangdong Province, issued similar denials about UNFPA’s support of forced abortion. UNFPA has been denying the existence of a UNFPA representative in Sihui since September 2001, when PRI investigators were shown the office desk of the U.N. representative by Chinese family planning officials in their office.
Further contradicting UNFPA’s false claims, this May the U.S. State Department gathered evidence of “social compensation fees” in this and other UNFPA/Chinese State Family Planning Commission (SFPC) county programs and concluded that the UNFPA is helping China to “more effectively” carry out its program of forced abortion.
In addition, victims of forced abortion in UNFPA’s China program state that abuses of coercive abortion and involuntary sterilization are as bad today as ever in the history of China’s one-child policy. Last September, 2001, PRI investigators were told by victims in Sihui that they must undergo abortion and sterilization or face punishments of crippling fines, imprisonment and destruction of homes. (See: China)
