Not just Iran

 The international community recently commemorated the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide. There, thousands of Muslim women were systematically raped by Bosnian Serb forces, a campaign of genocidal sexual violence designed to terrorize, humiliate, and, as some scholars argue, ethnically erase the Bosniak population. These women buried their sons, husbands, fathers, and brothers, even as the world watched and failed to intervene. Silence wasn’t just complicity, it was policy.

Other examples abound. Take the plight of the Rohingya in Myanmar, one of the most egregious campaigns of ethnic cleansing in recent history. Despite widespread reports of mass rape, forced displacement, and the deliberate targeting of women and children, the crisis never commanded the sustained media attention or policy response it deserved. In 2022, the United States officially recognized the atrocities committed against the Rohingya as genocide. Yet even this designation has not translated into consistent international pressure, accountability, or robust protection for the women still suffering in refugee camps and detention centers.

Another glaring example is the plight of Uyghur women in China. Reports of forced sterilizations, sexual abuse, and mass internment have circulated for years. Chinese government documents from 2019 show that authorities targeted 14–34 percent of married Uyghur women for sterilization in two counties, with rates reaching 80 percent in some rural areas. A fax leaked in September 2020 to CNN from Xinjiang authorities revealed that the region’s birth rate plummeted by 32.7 percent in just one year, falling from 15.88 births per 1,000 people in 2017 to 10.69 in 2018. Though these atrocities are well-documented, they have failed to elicit sustained global condemnation or meaningful sanctions. The world still trades with China and sources goods from factories linked to Uyghur forced labor, remaining complicit even as Muslim women’s bodies are used as tools of political control through policies of coercive birth prevention and systemic abuse.