China on Thursday, 1 September 2022, strongly denigrated a UN report on Xinjiang that stated that Beijing’s crackdown on ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region may have constituted “serious human rights violations,” including possible crimes against humanity.
Liu Yuyin, spokesperson for the Chinese UN mission to Geneva, termed the alleged ‘assessment’ on Xinjiang as a “farce” and a politically motivated attempt to smear China.
“It is completely a politicised document that disregards facts and reveals explicitly the attempt of some Western countries and anti-China forces to use human rights as a political tool,” Liu said in a statement released by the mission.
China’s ambassador to the United Nations, Zhang Jun, confirmed his country’s objection to the report, according to a video released by the mission on 1 September 2022. “Its purpose definitely is to undermine China’s stability and obstruct China’s development,” he said, demanding of the UN Human Rights Commissioner Michelle Bachelet to “avoid interfering” in China’s internal affairs.
On Wednesday, 31 August 2022, Bachelet said, in the long-awaited report, that China’s “arbitrary and discriminatory detention” of Uyghurs and other Muslims in its Xinjiang region may constitute crimes against humanity. Bachelet released the report just minutes before her four-year term ended on 31 August 2022. Bachelet visited China in May 2022.
The UN Human Rights Office said in the report that “serious human rights violations have been committed” in Xinjiang in view of the government’s application of “counter-terrorism and counter-‘extremism’ strategies”.
It petitioned the Chinese government to act to release all those detained in training centres, prisons or detention facilities forthwith.
“There are credible indications of violations of reproductive rights through the coercive enforcement of family planning policies since 2017,” the office said.
“The extent of arbitrary and discriminatory detention of members of Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim groups … may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity,” the UN office said on its website in a 48-page report.
It also found: “Allegations of patterns of torture or ill-treatment, including forced medical treatment and adverse conditions of detention, are credible, as are allegations of individual incidents of sexual and gender-based violence.”
It added that a lack of government data “makes it difficult to draw conclusions on the full extent of current enforcement of these policies and associated violations of reproductive rights.”
China was already conversant with the report before it was published, and has consistently denied allegations of abuse and maintained that the detention camps were, in fact, a means to fight terrorism and extremism.
China vehemently states that Uyghur militants are fighting a fierce campaign for an independent state. But many have held China culpable of exaggerating the threat of extremism in order to justify its acts of suppression of the Uyghurs. China has put in place a solid disinformation strategy that seeks to repudiate any claims of human rights abuses within its boundaries.
Various human rights groups have been blaming China for perenially abusing the rights of Uyghurs and other minority communities. The Uyghurs are a mainly Muslim ethnic minority, that numbers around 12 million, in China’s northwest province of Xinjiang.
Xinjiang is a mostly desert region and produces about a fifth of the world’s cotton. Human rights groups have alleged that much of that cotton export is harvested by forced labour, and, in 2021, some Western corporations banned Xinjiang cotton from their supply chains.
In December 2020, BBC research exposed that up to half a million people were being forced to pick cotton in Xinjiang. There is evidence that new factories have been built within the grounds of purported `re-education camps’.
Over the past few years, China has incessantly smothered freedom of expression in Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong under the guise of “anti-separatism”, “anti-extremism” and “counter-terrorism”. In Xinjiang, since 2017, an estimated one million or more Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other predominantly Muslim peoples were arbitrarily detained without trial and subjected to political indoctrination and forced cultural assimilation in “transformation-through-education” centres. Despite having initially denied the existence of these camps, authorities later described them as “vocational training” centres or “re-education camps”. Nevertheless, satellite imagery indicated that an increasing number of these camps continued to be built over the years.
Several countries, including the US, UK, Canada and the Netherlands, have held China culpable of committing genocide in Xinjiang. Genocide is defined by international convention as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.
There have been reports that, as well as interning Uyghurs in camps, China is conducting mass sterilisation of Uyghur women to whittle down the native population. China has also been systematically diluting the proportion of Uyghur population in Xinjiang by perpetrating mass migrations of Han Chinese to the province over recent decades. Today, due to these orchestrated mass migrations, the native Uyghur population comprises less than half of the total population of Xinjiang.
The re-education camps itself are aimed at annihilating religious and cultural sentiments. China has also been accused of targeting Muslim clerics and banning religious practices in the region. Chinese authorities have used various pretexts to damage or destroy two-thirds of Xinjiang’s mosques; about half of those have been demolished outright. Important Islamic sacred sites have been destroyed across the region. As part of regional authorities’ intrusive “Becoming Families” surveillance, development, and indoctrination campaign, officials impose themselves for overnight stays at the homes of Turkic Muslims, a practice that authorities say “promote[s] ethnic unity.” In another particularly cruel practice of separation of families, Muslim children, whose parents have been arbitrarily detained, are placed in state institutions such as orphanages and boarding schools, including boarding preschools.
In 2017, according to official statistics, arrests in Xinjiang accounted for nearly 21 percent of all arrests in China, despite people in Xinjiang making up only 1.5 percent of the total population.
China has an indelible insecurity about the dismemberment of itself through ethnic dissent. It has pursued a policy of so-called ethnic blending, in other words forced assimilation, of ethnic minorities. Chinese leaders want to turn China into a cohesive state-race, which means making ethnic minorities like the majority Han peoples. Because of Chinese secrecy and its increasing global might and reach, it has succeeded in obfuscating the extent of its atrocities on its ethnic and religious minorities.
The US has sanctioned officials and blacklisted dozens of Chinese agencies linked to abuses in Xinjiang. In January 2021, it determined that China’s actions constitute genocide and crimes against humanity. The US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, has said “China is committing genocide and crimes against humanity.”
The UK parliament declared, in April 2021, that China was committing a genocide in Xinjiang. A UN human rights committee in 2018 said it had credible reports that China was holding up to a million people in “counter-extremism centres” in Xinjiang.
On the release of the latest UN report on Xinjiang, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said it “deepens and reaffirms our grave concern regarding the ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity” against Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups.
The European Commission, responding to the report, said it strongly condemns human rights violations in China.
Bachelet, who is from Chile, said her report took “considerable work and review” and emerged in the final moments of her tenure because she wanted to deal with input from the Chinese government.
“Dialogue and engagement are about trying to build trust – incrementally – even when it seems unlikely. My own experience in Chile showed me the value of this approach,” she said. “To be perfectly honest, the politicisation of these serious human rights issues by some States did not help,” she added. “They made the task more difficult, they made the engagement more difficult and they made the trust-building and the ability to really have an impact on the ground more difficult.”
Many have previously slammed Bachelet for going soft on China. In the wake of her visit to China in May 2022, more than two hundred Uyghur, human rights and interest groups jointly called for her resignation and several dozen leading scholars excoriated her for “ignor[ing] and even contradict[ing]” academic consensus about violations in the region.
However, on the release of the report, the World Uyghur Congress, an international organisation of exiled Uyghur groups, welcomed it and urged a swift international response.
“Despite the Chinese government’s strenuous denials, the UN has now officially recognised that horrific crimes are occurring,” Uyghur Human Rights Project Executive Director Omer Kanat said.
Dilxat Raxit, also of the World Uyghur Congress, said the report confirmed “solid evidence of atrocities” against Uyghurs, but wished it had gone further.
“I regret that the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights did not characterise these extreme atrocities in China as genocide,” he told Reuters in an email.
But China remains arrantly defiant against the accusations of human rights abuses in the Xinjiang province being leveled against the country. “I wish to point out that the representatives of the United States and Britain in their statements made unfounded accusations against China, which China firmly rejects,” Dai Bing, China’s deputy permanent representative to the United Nations, told the Security Council open debate on strengthening accountability and justice for serious violations of international law, in June 2022.
“As the saying goes, to hide a lie, 1,000 lies are needed,” Xinhua quoted Dai as saying. “Allegations of ‘genocide’ or ‘forced labor’ in Xinjiang are lies of the century, pure and simple.”
Dai claimed that the US and Britain are afraid that their “cooked-up lies” about Xinjiang “are seen through” by the international community.
“However, no amount of lies spread by the United States and Britain can deny the factual reality of Xinjiang, that it enjoys stability and prosperity, and its people are living and working in peace and happiness,” Dai fulminated.
China has for long been efficacious in determining how the UN deliberates allegations of major rights violations against Uyghurs and the country’s other Muslim minorities. It has wielded its economic and political clout to dilute claims made by media reports, academic research and survivor testimony.
At the Human Rights Council, the UN’s foremost rights body, Beijing systematically endeavours to sabotage efforts by countries to call it to account, using relentless lobbying and leverage.
A rotating body of 47 nations elected from each of the world’s regions, the Human Rights Council can come to a consensus or majority vote on resolutions to establish investigative mechanisms like those launched to look into alleged violations in places like Myanmar, Libya and, more recently, Ukraine.
But China-aligned blocs within the council have put paid to efforts by a handful of nations to pull up China. The fact is China has garnered substantial strength within the council to validate its reiteration that: “Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Tibet related issues are China’s internal affairs.”
However, the release of the report notwithstanding, it will be increasingly difficult to set up the mechanism to get China to comply. Beijing, in the past, has displayed utter contempt for international rulings, as it did of the international court (at The Hague)’s verdict on its claims in the South China Sea.
The publishing of the report comes at a sensitive time for Chinese President Xi Jinping and may seem very irksome to him, because he will be seeking a third five-year term in power when the Congress of the ruling Communist Party of China meets in less than two months. Xi, 68, will be completing 10 years in power this year. All his predecessors have retired after two terms.
The report will, nonetheless, corroborate the growing criticism of China’s policies and actions that have increasingly alienated it from the international community in recent times.
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